After I’m done reading the two books staring at me now (Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors and Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body), I’m going to crack open Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, which, I have a feeling, doesn’t end happily. We’re probably drawn to the steady stream of post-apocalyptic cultural works for numerous psychological reasons, but we might also realize on a subconscious level that humans are evolving straight into an endgame. From a smart interview with Kolbert conducted by Andrew Anthony of the Guardian:

“The Guardian:

The irony of the previous catastrophes is that we wouldn’t be here without them…

Elizabeth Kolbert:

Yes, there’s a consensus that the dinosaurs were doing just fine 66m years ago and presumably could have done fine for another 66m years, had their way of life not been up-ended by an asteroid impact. Life on this planet is contingent. There’s no grand plan for it. We are also contingent. Yet although we are absolutely part of this long history, we turn out to be extremely unusual. And what we’re doing is quite possibly unprecedented.

The Guardian:

Reading your book, one wonders if it might not be good for the rest of the planet if we died out?

Elizabeth Kolbert:

A few species would be worse off if we weren’t here but probably most would be better off. That’s sounds like a radical or misanthropic thing to say but I think it’s evidently true.

The Guardian:

It seems that from the moment we arrived we’ve been busy wiping out species.

Elizabeth Kolbert:

There is incontrovertible evidence that when people reached Australia, 50,000 years ago, they precipitated the extinction of many species. Giant marsupials, giant tortoises, a huge bird – all were gone within a couple of thousand years of people arriving.”