It's absolutely, extremely, utterly, incredibly important for the general reader to remember that the real story of science is written in the language of mathematics.

When authors put the story of scientific disciplines like physics, or chemistry or even biology into words and stories, they are translating something hard and complex and precise into a soft, fuzzy medium.

It's analogous to knitting a replica of Michelangelo's David. Even if you are a genius knitter, the end result will only be (at best) a flabby simulacrum of the authentic object.

If you experienced the knitted David (let's call him Dave) you would have a general, vague sense of what the real David was like. But you would be a long way away from really understanding the awe inspiring experience of the real deal.

Let's take the analogy one step further. Imagine you're an alien, and you discovered the knitted Dave. But you had never seen the real David sculpture, or (more importantly) an actual human specimen.

How much would you really understand about people, based on you're observations of the knitted Dave.

You would have a very general sense. Enough to pick a hominid out of a crowd of donkeys. But that's about it. Better than nothing, but far from expertise.

I love evolutionary biology and ecology and sociology. But I'm not trained in any of these disciplines. My understanding of them is via popularizations like this.

Even within my discipline of clinical psychology, I'm barely educated. But outside of my discipline, I am essentially an enthusiastic dilettante.

That's not a dis. That's just another way of saying, I haven't spent 4 years of undergraduate training to prepare for another 4 years of doctoral training to prepare for another 3-5 years of post doctoral training to prepare for another 10-20 years of professional research in any of those fields.

Humans specialize. None of us could possibly be specialists in more than one or maybe two of these domains. There just isn't enough time in a human life span.

I have a laypersons education of ecology and biology. That's nothing to scoff at. It took (literally) hundreds of hours of hard work, reading a bunch of books, taking classes, talking to experts etc. to gain my laypersons understanding of evolutionary biology.

But honestly, I wouldn't know an actual darwinian algorithm from a hole in the ground, let alone be able to accurately interpret the findings of the mathematical models experts develop and use to understand complex systems like species population dynamics and ecosystems.

So I have to rely on experts and science journalists to tell me the story in English. I need these dedicated, talented individuals to "knit me a Dave".

That's exactly what Elizabeth Kolbert did. She knitted us a Dave. The Sixth Extinction is a soft, cuddly, children's storybook version of the hard, awful reality the actual experts in the field of biology and ecology are bearing witness to.

If she had delivered us a harder version. It would have been (a) unintelligible to us mere mortals, and (b) so unspeakably awful, that most of us would have never, ever willingly subjected ourselves to this horrible, terrifying (much more than inconvenient) truth.

Even the "soft" Dave version is pretty fucking tragic and demoralizing. If I were to give you a quick sketch analogy of what the knitted Dave of mass extinction looks like.

Imagine a plush toy bat (flying mammal), stuffed with dead, decomposing frogs, with an invasive fungus choking his nostrils, literally starving to death, drooling acrid barren sea water and sputtering a creepy recorded (five nights at Freddie's) robot voice looping the phrase, "we're all going to die a horrible, slow death, we're all going to suffocate in a giant cesspool of our own feces, and it's way too late to do anything about it".

Not exactly Tickle Me Elmo, but still, a very soft version of the reality.

One can only imagine the horror that experts feel when they see entire species evaporate, or when they crunch the numbers and the results look like an ASCII skull and bones.

You can imagine these nerdy bookworm types, realizing the awful reality and trying desperately to communicate the immense gravity of the situation to the stoners, jocks and rednecks who used to beat and torture them in high school, only to receive responses like "The Bible says we can despoil the earth however we see fit" or "it's only a theory" or "not all scientists agree" or "it was cold for a few days this summer, so that proves global warming is a scam".

Even the most charismatic of the nerds, Think Neil Degrassi Tyson, Carl Sagan or Al Gore still only managed to capture the hearts and minds of "egg head PBS types", even when they limit their messages to what can be communicated via entertaining, schticky soundbites, Hollywood style computer animated visualizations and 30 minute PowerPoint slideshows.

The Sixth Extinction goes at explaining the issue of the ecological disaster we currently find ourselves in by giving a brief history of the previous five mass extinction events that science has identified.

Apparently global species population and diversity levels expand and contract regularly, but have dropped to next to nothing for various reasons thorough out the history of life on earth.

The previous 5 mass extinction events are:

1: the Cretaceous–Paleogene (or K–Pg) extinction event (occurring about 66 Ma) in which about 17% of all families, 50% of all genera and 75% of all species became extinct.

2: the Triassic–Jurassic extinction (occurring about 201.3 Ma) in which about 23% of all families, 48% of all genera (20% of marine families and 55% of marine genera) and 70% to 75% of all species went extinct.

3: the Permian-Triassic transition. (occurring about 252 Ma). Earth's largest extinction killed 57% of all families, 83% of all genera and 90% to 96% of all species (53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera, about 96% of all marine species and an estimated 70% of land species, including insects).

4: the Devonian Period (occurring 375–360 Ma), a prolonged series of extinctions eliminated about 19% of all families, 50% of all genera and 70% of all species.

5: the Ordovician–Silurian extinction (occurring 450–440 Ma) killed off 27% of all families, 57% of all genera and 60% to 70% of all species.

At one point, around 70,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens almost went extinct. About 90% of us died. We got down to an estimated 40 breeding pairs. That's really close to extinction. But we showed em our bounce back stuff and boy look at us now!

Now we're officially in the Holocene period (and have been for more than 10,000 years), but many scientists are pushing the point that we have officially exited the Holocene and entered an altogether new epoch that they are calling the Anthropocene.

They argue that humans are having such a pronounced impact on the enviornment that we should be the titular species of this particular cene (hence the Anthro at the beginning of the word).

They also argue that there is a new mass extinction event currently under way that may be the worst one yet. They are calling it the....

You guessed it....

6: the Anthropocene extinction.

That's awesome right?

It's exciting to be a part of history.

Even if it's potentially the end of it.

Bad Boundaries:
One of the salient points in the book is that global climate instability is not the only source of extinction.

Another big problem happens when an ecosystems square footage is reduced or its boundaries are violated.

Obviously deforestation is a huge problem. By making the rain forests land coverage smaller, it shrinks the biodiversity exponentially (there's that math stuff again). Apparently there's a formula for it that calculates the extinction rates as you down scale an environment. It's like the E=Mc2 of the apocalypse.

But globalization is also a huge problem in that it introduces invasive species like rats into sensitive environments. Apparently rats have been hitching rides on boats for as long as people of been sailing.

Invasive species can literally crash an ecology.

In the book, Kolbert discusses a species of gray snake that was introduced to an island echo system that basically ate everything. It reduced to a tropical island full of pretty birds, lizards and bugs to pretty much just only snakes.

Kolbert makes the gorgeous point that it's easy to vilify the little grey snake. But the snake isn't mean or immoral, it's amoral, meaning it's It's simply doing what it's hardwired to do. It's just trying to survive and reproduce.

The Ultimate Invasive Species:
In case you're wondering where this is going, the ultimate invasive species is us. Humans go just about everywhere And everywhere that humans go, almost everything else dies.

It's not that were mean or immoral, were actually amoral in the same way the grey snake is. We're simply doing we're all hardwired to do. Survive and reproduce (with obvious exceptions, but not enough to make a critical difference).

We like to hold ourselves to moral standards, and vilify some bad guys e.g. Dick Cheney (I'm not saying he's not, but just hear me out).

The fact of the matter is, the Anthropocene extinction isn't happening because we're immoral. It's happening because we're amoral.

It may seem like I'm splitting hairs but the distinction is important.

Perhaps viewing ourselves as moral, and holding ourselves and others to standards of morality is part of the problem. Perhaps framing this ecological crisis as a moral issue is creating a fatal blind spot.

Perhaps experimental psychology can be of assistance in explaining my point.

Don't Diss Me:
Cognitive dissonance is the very reliably observed psychological phenomena, whereby people (including you me and everybody we know) confabulate anxiety reducing fictions when confronted with our own amoral behavior.

So in other words, when people realize that their behavior is incongruent with their values, they feel bad, but rather than change the behavior, they make up a story (no matter how absurd) that relieves them of the pain of their own hypocrisy.

For example, consider a situation in which someone who places a value on being environmentally responsible just purchased a cool new chick magnet car that he later discovers is a gas guzzler.

The conflict:
It is important for the man to be (at least viewed as) a good steward of the environment. But he is now driving a babe getting machine that also happens to double as an earth warmer.

As you can imagine, he's feeling rather conflicted about now. Drive a Prius and die a childless and alone, or drive the Maserati and repopulate Brentwood.

In order to reduce the dissonance between his values and his behavior, he can (a) utilize public transportation more frequently (which is probably not going to happen, maybe in Seattle, not in L.A.), or he could (b) sell the car and purchase another one that gets better gas mileage (which, again, not hugely probable), or he could (c) convince himself that maybe all the global warming stuff is a little overblown, and one little Maserati aint gona kill nobody (which is a whole lot easier than option (a) or (b), and therefore pretty fucking likely).

I know what you're thinking, "other people do that, but I don't do that". But you do, we all do, we just don't realize it.

That's why they call it a blind spot.

It sounds far fetched but cognitive dissonance has been observed in tightly controlled experiments again and again. Everyone does it. Even (no particularly) if you're a trained mental health professional,

So maybe if we stop viewing the ecology issue moralistically, and start viewing it more pragmatically, than perhaps we can all stop pointing fingers and except the fact that we're all totally fucked and were going to die and there's noting we can do about it.

No no. Of course there's something we can do about it. But we really need to accept that it's happening. Accept that were all complicit (even if you recycle), and then....I actually don't know what. But something I hope.

Additionally, all of us regular people need to trust the experts. We may get a cold day in August and think we're all good. But that's not how this shit works. You have to do math and stuff. And odds are great that you don't. So trust the people that do and just do what they tell you. Even if you love Jesus. Which you probably don't if you're still reading this.

Lastly, it occurred to me that I'm not going to face the worst of this, and my kid won't either, but her kids (should she ignore reason and reproduce) will.

I'll just be honest here. Part of me has a hard time worrying past next week. And that same part of me kind of thinks, what ever, I'll be dead by then, and I know I'm not alone in this particular brand of denial.

Cognitive dissonance ladies and gentlemen, don't let it win.