Green Group discussion

I saw Ms. Kolbert interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and heard her interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR ( In The World's 'Sixth Extinction,' Are Humans The Asteroid? ). This is the stuff that keeps me awake at night. Haven't read the book yet, but it's on my to-read list.

Has anyone started or finished reading this yet? What do you think?

Although I haven't read the book, I certainly agree with the premise.

Loren Eiseley said we are planet eaters.

My better half actually bought this for me as a present the other day. I'll post with an update once I've finished it!

I'm glad you are going to read it. I have ordered it from Amazon.com and expect it to arrive any day now. I look forward to reading your thoughts on it.

Just finished it last night. Very well written, well researched, and sobering. I got a kick out of the description by some scientists characterizing humanity as a "weedy species" or as the most impactful invasive species in history. Anyone reading this book will have difficulty denying that human beings (whether through climate change or other mechanisms, such as habitat destruction or plain old predation) are changing global ecosystems in dramatic and dangerous ways. Ms. Kolbert makes it clear that it's hard to predict exactly where the trends will lead... but it's painfully evident that complacency is not an option!

I highly recommend this one!!!

I saw her speak on Book TV. What a fascinating person. In spite of her efforts to paint a possible way out of all this, I remain skeptical. If you can locate the episode, I recommend watching all of it.

I found this great quote today. It is so prescient.

Mr Escot, who was somewhat younger than Mr Foster, but rather more pale and saturnine in his aspect, here took up the thread of the discourse, observing, that the proposition just advanced seemed to him perfectly contrary to the true state of the case: "for," said he, "these improvements, as you call them, appear to me only so many links in the great chain of corruption, which will soon fetter the whole human race in irreparable slavery and incurable wretchedness: your improvements proceed in a simple ratio, while the factitious wants and unnatural appetites they engender proceed in a compound one; and thus one generation acquires fifty wants, and fifty means of supplying them are invented, which each in its turn engenders two new ones; so that the next generation has a hundred, the next two hundred, the next four hundred, till every human being becomes such a helpless compound of perverted inclinations, that he is altogether at the mercy of external circumstances, loses all independence and singleness of character, and degenerates so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other expectation, than that the whole species must at length be exterminated by its own infinite imbecility and vileness."

--Thomas Love Peacock in Headlong Hall (published in 1837)

Added. Will seek it out. Thanks.