Chapter 13: The Thing with Feathers

In chapter 13, the final chapter of the book, Elizabeth Kolbert talks about the Endangered Species Act, and everything affected by the enforcement of this act. She states about how the act allows for organizations to take more action and people who may not be able to fully support them but join groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, and others that take their time monitoring the activity in wildlife. There are also research facilities such as the Institute for Conservation Research that take in animals extremely close to extinction and try extremely hard to make sure, trying every breeding method they can use, to make sure these animals don’t go extinct. As the chapter continues, Kolbert adds that (inevitably) we too will have to deal with a coming extinction event and that “we, too, will eventually be undone by our transformation of the ecological landscape” (p. 267). Along with this statement, she shows the theme that environmental problems have a cultural and social context because she gives another possibility on the outcome of our extinction stating that “human ingenuity” could allow us to evade or even alter the effects of the atmosphere as a whole. This influences my vision on the matter on the if we will go extinct due to the amount of effort humanity might issue after seeing the problem first hand, as many outlets informed me, not many people will act on an issue if it doesn’t affect them firsthand. Therefore when it does, it may cause a huge shift in the attention of the human species on whenever they are going to handle the issue or let it morph into something that could possibly change the whole ecology and environments entirely [E].