Wild New World by Dan Forbes

I read this because it was a "the community reads" book (which in the era of the electronic book means that there are unlimited copies available for a short period of time, so all of us are reading at the same time rather than within the same year). This is what the author calls "Big History", which I never heard before and am not sure that I completely understand, but it is the idea that you go back to the beginning of time and look for patterns and trends that explains or helps to understand what has happened over time--it specifically avoids specialized approaches and instead looks for universal patterns and trends. So, we go back to when tectonic plates were forming North America, then through a brief history of early life on the new continent. The author explains how the Chicxulub asteroid crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, setting the stage for this story by making it possible for mammals to survive, evolve, and spread across the continent and world. Following this, he describes what is known about how humans arrived, and then how the Clovis people spread across North America, hunting and killing animals like mammoths and other large mammals that had not encountered humans before and did not fear them. The result — the Pleistocene extinctions caused by human predation and the beginning of the North American assault on wildlife. The idea is that while we are accelerating the change than humans wreck on the planet and it's other inhabitants, this is consistent with a longstanding pattern, where damage has been pretty reckless and often not in the service of survival, and where we have tried to reverse those trends and what has happened in some of those cases. It is overall pretty bleak and entirely believable.