Books like The next species by Michael Tennesen

Explore how human activity reshapes Earth’s ecosystems, leaving a legacy of environmental change and potential decline.

With human populations growing, we're having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. "Urban ecologists" study how our manmade environments are changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. Schilthuizen takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be. He shows how the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving.

John Leslie examines the risks of human extinction in his nonfiction study of scientific, medical and technological threats, arguing that our youth and the Doomsday Argument heighten the danger.

There have been five great extinctions in the long history of life on earth, the most recent 65 million years ago, when all dinosaur species perished in an astonishingly brief period of time. Each of these great extinctions was unimaginably catastrophic - at least 65 percent of all species living vanished in a geological instant; in the Permian extinction, nearly 95 percent of all species were obliterated. The agency for these extinctions, the why, is hotly debated - sudden climate change, asteroids, evolutionary inadequacy - but the patterns are remarkably consistent. Now, as Leakey and Lewin show with inarguable logic based on irrefutable scientific evidence, the sixth great extinction is underway. And this time the cause is beyond dispute: By the lowest estimate, thirty thousand species are wiped out by human agency every year - a rate that matches the patterns of the other five great extinctions with frightening exactitude. As the authors show, such dramatic and overwhelming extinction threatens the entire complex fabric of life on earth, including the species at fault, Homo sapiens. Unless we come to realize the devastating consequence of our rapacious behavior, we will follow the mastodon, the great auk, the carrier pigeon, and our other victims into the oblivion of extinction.

Chris D. Thomas shows how many species are thriving amid human impact, challenging the idea that we are the sole destroyers of nature.