Blog Post #2

I finished Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction as impressed as I was with the first few chapters. Though she ended up covering a few subjects that I was already familiar with (end of megafauna, discovery of neanderthal and other hominid remains, etc.) she managed to continue to engage and offer new perspectives. My plan for this post is to offer a few different options of focus, in a bulleted form, and suggest some pluses and minuses to each (I hope this is kosher with you Romano).

• Investigating the roots of the # of species vs. area relationship. In essence, in ecology, there’s a generalizable rule that the # of species found is proportional to the area tested to some power (i.e., a log-log plot would linearize the data). There are some interesting theories out there, some with regard to thermodynamics, other more ecological accounts, that could make for an interesting expository. Further, explaining where the constants of the proportionalities come from, or what causes them to change in different situations, would be an interesting perspective.
• Symmetry between what’s going on today and the previous 5 “big extinctions.” Though the scientific establishment isn’t sure what caused each of the “Big 5,” we do have some inkling. In many cases causes were similar to the current causes of extinction.
• The compounding nature of our current ecological disaster and the feedback loops that make it worse. Global warming, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, habitat loss, and the threat of invasive species are all major factors, and it would be cool to see how they play off of one another.
• What makes our current situation a “mass extinction?” This would require investigating “background extinction rates” and data from the early 21st century on extinction in order to come up with evidence that leads most people to think of this as the “Sixth Extinction”
• Kolbert speaks to it tangentially, but there are a few factors about our current predicament that make it unique, due to human presence, and that would be an interesting subject. At no other point in Earth’s history has there been an organism that can effect change to the extent that humans can. Yes, it has caused most of our problems, giving this era the name “anthropocene,” but some of the potential solutions, from geoengineering to plans to combat survival are worth talking about. There are also some interesting human perspectives on these said issues.
• My final idea is that I could write about the changing perspectives that humanity has taken over time on the possibilities of extinction and our own ability to change the landscape we live in. The history of science over the last 3 centuries, at which point extinction wasn’t even believed to be possible, to date, when we are knowingly on the verge of a mass extinction, is littered with interesting figures and perspectives that Kolbert’s book only had time to mention.

That’s pretty much what I’ve got right now. I’m going to be mulling these and doing some preliminary research on each over the next two days to make a decision by Wednesday, and then (hopefully) write the expository piece over Thursday.