The previous five mass extinctions were caused by asteroids and volcanic eruptions. Elizabeth Kolbert describes what the sixth one looks like from the inside.

The biodiversity crisis had been tracked by researchers for decades, but it existed in the public conversation as a background concern — serious, acknowledged, consistently deprioritised. By travelling to the sites where extinction is actively happening — the reefs, the rainforests, the mountain ranges where species ranges are shifting faster than evolution can follow — and writing about them with the clarity and urgency of a journalist rather than the caution of an academic, Elizabeth Kolbert made the crisis feel present. The great auk, the Panamanian golden frog, the Sumatran rhino: these are not statistics. They are endings, and Kolbert renders them as such.

The book arrived at a moment when climate change was beginning to dominate the environmental conversation, and it performed an essential corrective: reminding readers that carbon emissions and biodiversity loss are related crises but not identical ones, and that solving the first without addressing the second leaves half the problem untouched.

The wave of scientific, policy, and public attention to biodiversity that followed — including the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreed in 2022 — was shaped in part by the cultural ground The Sixth Extinction helped prepare.