The Sixth Extinction

To annotate The Sixth Extinction, a book by Elizabeth Kolbert, I have been using an excellent tool called "Kami". Kami allows you to edit and annotate pdfs and I highly recommend it! A small sample of my annotations are below, but to view the whole think click on the photo.

The picture below shows my very first "Sketchnote", which is exactly what it sounds like: notes in picture form. The picture shows some of my key take aways from the first two chapters we read. Just to sum it up, basically tons of carbon dioxide is being polluted into the air, which then makes its way into the ocean. Its presence in the ocean lowers the pH levels within the water, and effectively changes the chemical composition. These drastic changes are predicted to lower biodiversity within the next few decades, as well as kill of one of the most important organisms to the planet: coral.

The next chapter, called "The Forest and The Trees" transitioned into discussing global warming and its effects on organisms if they cannot mobilize. Several species have a very limited tolerance in terms of temperature, thus they need to be able to move to find climates that suit them once the heat increases. The Sketch note is shown below for this chapter.

As we continued to the next few chapters, the theme continued with humans ruining biodiversity. This is partially in the building humans perform all across the globe. Roads and cities split vast forests into fragments, making them figurative islands. As seen in the past chapters, migration is crucial for species to survive climate change, yet creating these islands prevents that from occurring. Trees cannot move through a city like they can move up a mountain, just like how trees cannot make it to mainland from an island. Additionally, a "reverse Pangaea" or "new Pangaea" is occurring with the spread of species. Rather than dividing various species to separate parts of the globe, humans are exchanging them throughout the world, and effectively making every continent contain nonnative specimen, This too causes biodiversity to dissipate. Kilbert continues 

Kilbert moves onto a slightly different topic in this next section, discussing the past rather than the future. She brings up the question of how massive animals such as mammoths, gigantic sloths, saber-toothed cats, and others disappeared from the planet. There are two predominate theories: global warming and humans. 

The conclusion of The Sixth Extinction focused on the species most similar to humans. Neanderthals and Denisovans were species that were very similar to primitive humans, that existed millions of years ago. Humans mated with each at a point in time, but eventually both of humanity's "sisters" went extinct, and the blame has been thrust on humans. Presently, many species of apes are endangered and again humans are to blame. Humans continue to lead species to extinction, including their closest relatives. Kolbert considered in the conclusion of the book whether or not humans would survive the issues they are creating, and there were two different theories. The first was that humanity was killing itself by creating all these problems, but there was another more optimistic one as well. Humans are problem solvers, and many scientists have hope that we can create solutions to the environmental issues they have created.