The sixth extinction: naming time in a new way

Similar to ‘the Anthropocene’, ‘the sixth extinction’ combines geological and historical time, presenting humans as geological agents. With its dramatic connotations, the concept highlights the size of environmental problems, but also invokes a replacement of human history with species history, implying that a mass extinction is inherent to the human species as such. Thus, ‘the sixth extinction’ risks depoliticising the complex environmental problem of species extinction by representing it as one large-scale event. The chapter explores the concept ‘the sixth extinction’ as a temporal marker, in order to discuss how concepts from the geological sciences influence popular understandings of environmental problems.