Anyone else find equating pets and animals with humans to be rather strange?

[G_j]

71. rosy glasses you got there

Cataclysm Has Arrived: Man’s Inhumanity to Nature
‘The Sixth Extinction,’ on Endangered and Departed Species

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/books/the-sixth-extinction-on-endangered-and-departed-species.html?_r=0

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Today’s deadly change agent, Ms. Kolbert observes, is man himself. And by the end of this book, she’s left us with a harrowing appreciation of the ways in which human beings have been altering the planet: hunting to death big mammals (like the mammoth or giant sloth or, more recently, elephants and big cats); introducing alien (sometimes invasive) species to regions where they disrupt a delicate ecological balance; and altering the geologic surface of the earth (damming major rivers, mowing down forests and cutting up habitats in ways that impede migration).

Most significant, she says, has been mankind’s effect on the atmosphere. By one estimate cited by Ms. Kolbert, the combination of fossil fuel use and deforestation has caused the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air to rise “by 40 percent over the last two centuries,” while making the concentration of methane (“an even more potent greenhouse gas”) more than double.

Over the years, Ms. Kolbert writes, “a number of different names have been suggested for the new age that humans have ushered in”: including the “Catastrophozoic era,” the “Homogenocene,” the “Myxocene” (from the Greek word for “slime”) and the “Anthropocene.”

Human-driven change is happening faster than ever — “warming today is taking place at least 10 times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation,” she writes — and its fallout looks to be devastating. “It is estimated,” Ms. Kolbert says, “that one third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys.”

Ms. Kolbert shows in these pages that she can write with elegiac poetry about the vanishing creatures of this planet, but the real power of her book resides in the hard science and historical context she delivers here, documenting the mounting losses that human beings are leaving in their wake.
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THE SIXTH EXTINCTION
An Unnatural History