The human seizure of planet Earth Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth Anthony Barnosky (University of California Press, Oakland, CA; 2014) ISBN: 9780520274372

Planet Earth is facing one of its most dramatic biodiversity crises, and we humans are behind it. Two hundred thousand years ago, somewhere in Africa, a new form of life arose — Homo sapiens sapiens. Approximately one hundred thousand years later, we left Africa, spreading across the continents to dominate and transform all ecosystems. Only now are we starting to understand our impact in the Biosphere, and to realize how our own future heavily depends on the fragile health of the planet. Species are disappearing worldwide, and in the last 500 years more than 320 verteberate species went extinct, including iconic examples such as the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger or the Steller’s sea cow. Moreover, many populations of species are already in severe decline, both vertebrate and invertebrate species. On the shoulders of Anthony Barnosky, readers will witness the past and the current transformation of the natural world triggering, in his own words, the Sixth Mass Extinction, and how to prevent it. This paperback edition of Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth summarizes evidence, arising from a variety of research disciplines — from paleontology to economics — about the human appropriation of ecosystems worldwide, its causes and consequences. This is, in other words, the tale of the human seizure of planet Earth. Scientists nowadays try to anticipate the future of biological diversity and how its loss will affect human societies. More than 120 years ago, HG Wells envisioned time traveling in his famous novel The Book review