The human legacy—one of the world’s six greatest catastrophes

I was watching with interest the other night Jon Stewart’s interview of Elizabeth Kolbert, author of a new book, The Sixth Great Extinction.

There have been five great extinction events in the 550-million year history of multi-celled life on Earth, events in which abnormally
large numbers of species die out simultaneously or within a limited time frame. The last, and best known, was the