"The Sixth Extinction" Chapter 1- Matthew Batista

Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of The Sixth Extinction, starts the novel off by trying to make the reader understand the phenomenon that she believes we are undergoing: “The Sixth Extinction.” Kolbert starts chapter 1 in El Valle, Panama, where she depicts a descriptive visual of El Valle. The crucial takeaway from this description is the goldenfrog. Kolbert explains, “The golden frog, which is taxicab yellow with dark brown splotches, is endemic to the area around El Valle”(4). The golden frog is vital to the chapter because various areas have animals as their symbols or icon. For instance, the bald eagle is the emblem of The United States of America and it symbolizes freedom. Now to fast forward, Kolbert begins to talk about the frogs that began to disappear in El Valle. “In 2004, little corpses began showing up...”(5) and scientist realized the danger that the golden frog was in. Relapsing to the idea of animals being symbols, the author puts such great emphasis on the golden frog because these animals were very important to El Valle. Imagine if the American bald eagle went extinct. The symbol of freedom would decimate and all the shirts with bald eagles would mean nothing. 

As the crisis continued the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center or EVACC, began to stack their facility with tanks to house various species of frogs. The director of EVACC, Edgardo Griffith, stated, “Every one of them has the same value to me as an elephant”(10). This quote caught my attention immediately. The bigger the animals is the more emphasis you put on the animal. This makes a lot of sense for most people. However, a frog has the same impact as an elephant in their respective environment. Now if elephants began to go extinct at the same pace that the frogs did in El Valle we would hear about it. It would have a huge headline title on the front page of most news outlets. If we all had a similar way of thinking to Griffith we wouldn’t care about the size of the animal but we would stress the importance of all animals. The culprit for the frog's extinctions turned out to be the chytrid fungus named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or “Bd” for short(13). This directly relates to the AP Environmental Science theme: “Humans alter natural systems.” Naturally, the fungus wouldn’t have spread on its own; however, because of industrialization and the use of ships the fungus can spread. It’s a sad image to think that these frogs have to stay in glass cages for the rest of their lives because humans have pushed endangering fungus across continents. Frogs aren’t the only animals that suffer from human activity. Many aquatic species suffer because of human pollution. Over the summer, I went to Cancun and got the opportunity to work with dolphins. The dolphin that I hung out with was named Atlantis and I learned that these intelligent creatures are being killed because of plastic and other human products. Working with Atlantis has helped me realize how important understanding human activity and its effects on the environment is.