Taft’s first Sustainability Week featured a Morning Meeting talk with Elizabeth Kolbert, author of 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Kolbert’s talk was akin to a walk through the scientific history of biological extinctions, with particular focus on the current wave of loss, driven largely by human impact. Noting that “extinction is a concept we all take for granted,” Kolbert observes, “We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.”
Kolbert introduced students to a variety of creatures, each emblematic of an “unnatural” change in our world, driven by man; her talk ended with Toughie. The world’s last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog, Toughie was discovered a decade ago in central Panama. To protect him from the fungal disease killing his species, Toughie was collected and moved to the Atlanta Botanical Garden in 2006. Toughie died in captivity last week.
“The last known surviving member of this species died about three days ago," said Kolbert. "That’s another illustration of a creature that we know has gone extinct in our lifetime; we should not see that. So I leave you with this question: What are we going to do about this?"
A multi-award winning author and journalist, Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History was a New York Times 2014 Top Ten Best Book of the Year, is number one on the Guardian’s list of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of all time, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in the General Nonfiction category, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle awards for the best books of 2014. Prior to joining the staff of The New Yorker, Kolbert was a political reporter for The New York Times.