Airbus Lecture

Living through the Sixth Extinction

A mass extinction event 65 million years ago killed off the dinosaurs, along with three quarters of the species on earth. Today, the natural world and the environment are changing so rapidly that scientists fear another extinction event is already underway. In this talk, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert—author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, recipient of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction—probes this unsettling idea, asking what the possibility of extinction means for both humans and the millions of other species who share the planet, and, more pressingly, what can be done now to reduce the human and industrial impact on the natural world.