Back in 2008, Henry Porter listed in the Observer some of the words that had been dropped from the then current edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, among them catkin, minnow, acorn, buttercup, heron, porpoise, raven, blackberry and conker. Springing up in their place were the likes of celebrity, tolerant, citizenship, conflict, bungee jumping, committee, allergic, biodegradable, emotion and endangered.

These kinds of subtle shifts in the cultural landscape are, in Melanie Challenger's estimation, symptomatic of a growing and dangerous disassociation from nature that is directly responsible for the post-industrial rash of extinctions that have afflicted our planet. In this wide-ranging and often beautiful book, she sets off on a series of peregrinations through abandoned or imperilled places, from the relics of tin mining in Cornwall to the depopulated islands of Tierra del Fuego. "My chief interest," she writes, "was in gathering a history of how we had become so destructive to the natural world and its inhabitants."

The very notion of extinction  that species could be created and then disappear  remained unguessed at until the late 18th century, when the first geologists began to gather evidence of the multitude of strange life forms that had once inhabited the Earth. From bottle-shaped chitinozoa to the strange swimming wolves that seem to have been the earliest ancestor of the whale, the history of the world is filled with discards, experiments that overspecialised or failed to adapt to shifting conditions. But while these distant reaches of time serve to contextualise Challenger's argument, her interest is focused on more recent events, and in particular on what it means to be the species that drives other species out of existence.

Though she maintains a surprisingly dispassionate tone, this is not an account that paints humanity in an especially flattering light. From the horrors of the whaling industry to the melting icecaps of the Arctic, greed and the desire to be independent of nature seem to have outweighed any sense of the wisdom of conserving non-renewable resources, in itself a disturbingly neutral phrase for the lovely diversity of creatures that have disappeared on our watch. Nor is it just other species that are the victims of our rapacious knack for living. As she travels the globe, Challenger charts lost languages, skills and tribes, a melancholy litany of squandered diversity.

The word melancholy is significant. It is Challenger's belief that there are emotional responses to extinction, a kind of grief she characterises as nostalgia, and that such responses "might prove essential to fostering a more favourable approach to nature". Her starting place is a personal confession: that she is almost wholly ignorant of the natural world. Shacked up in a cabin in west Penwith, she lacks the language to identify most of the plants and animals around her. In Richard Mabey's fine phrase, what she sees is little more than a "generalised green blur".

While this impoverishment of knowledge is undoubtedly a common experience in our technologised century, it's by no means as universal as Challenger makes out, and her insistence that it's shared by her entire generation sits uneasily with the massive resurgence of interest in and writing about nature of the past decade. Her habit of categorising feelings of affection or pleasure in the non-human world as automatically nostalgic is likewise problematic, since it risks a kind of fetishising of nature as vulnerable and delicate, a way of thinking that Mabey himself has done much to challenge.

Despite a barrage of classical sources, among them Aristotle, Darwin, Rousseau and Shelley, there's a strange absence of contemporary voices here. Among those who might have enriched and complicated Challenger's arguments are the ecofeminist theorists and Bruce Chatwin, who wrote about Tierra del Fuego in In Patagonia, and pondered lifelong questions of savagery, nature and culture.

That said, Challenger is an exquisite writer. An award-winning poet, she's capable of astonishing flourishes of phrase, and though sometimes she skates through her vast array of subjects too swiftly to do them justice, when she stops and looks the results are almost always beguiling: sea "livid with kelp"; a snowstorm that rushes "like a million migrating souls" through a ship's beams.

By the book's end, her personal quest has taken her to a houseboat, moored in Cambridgeshire's Wicken Fen. Mortified by her own ignorance, she has begun to learn the names of wild plants, and the closing image shows her making the acquaintance of a common species: love-in-idleness. At that moment, her nostalgia seems abruptly to clear and she becomes caught up in the immediacy of an authentic encounter with nature.

Earlier, writing about an Inuit hunter, she noted sadly: "He wasn't yet detached from his native country in a way that might allow him to view it in a purposeless way, like a sightseer." Now, at last, she seems to realise that detachment is a matter of choice, and connection can always be recovered; it is, one might say, our native gift. It's to be hoped that this beautiful, troubling book will encourage more people to regain their interest in the outside world: the planet we both belong to and seem curiously driven to destroy.

Olivia Laing's To the River is published by Canongate

Recently, an influential group of geologists called for the recognition of a new era: the Anthropocene, to acknowledge the impact of humans on the planet. It would be evidenced by radioactive material from atomic bomb tests, plastics pollution, increased carbon dioxide levels and human-induced mass extinctions.

Of the extinctions, most will be of tiny creatures, many as yet unknown. A report in August put the number of our fellow species at 8.7 million, many of which will be gone before even being recorded. This kind of extinction is final, and terrible to contemplate. It's especially poignant if the species is large and familiar: the blue whale, say, or the albatross. When individuals die, what consoles us is the continuity of others. Extinction extinguishes continuity.

These are therefore both exciting and appalling times, if we accept that responsibility for the planet's welfare is devolving to us. It requires a shift in our understanding of ourselves, and requires us to investigate and understand our calamitous way of going about things. It's easier to look the other way, so Melanie Challenger is to be congratulated for taking it on. That said, there are surprisingly few animals in her book.

Divided into three "peregrinations", it opens in Cornwall, where the author has rented a cabin the better to consider these things. In West Penwith "the whole landscape expressed the once intimate but now almost entirely broken relationship of the inhabitants to the natural world". Here, as elsewhere on the planet, it's the demise of human economic activities which catches her attention. She's especially interested in industrial archaeology, and the affecting ruins of the Ding Dong tin mine are close by. You might argue that to call such relics evidence of "extinction" is a category mistake  they're evidence of human continuity and change  but I think the point she is interested in, and returns to all over the globe, is human rapacity. The industrial/technological era, the era in which we have become most "estranged from nature", has enabled us to pursue resources to extinction, or at least to economic unviability. Of course, this has happened before in human history, but now we know we're doing it.

This is valuable, but Challenger has a magpie mind. Along with the tin mines and Cornish moors, she lights upon her grandmother's house in Suffolk, flint weapons, jaw-bones found in Chinese caves, Roman occupation, types of Cornish fishing boat, grief, graves and wildflowers, among much else. A great number of people are name-checked. Although one can almost see the connections, it does become confusing.

Where industrial processes and extinction of species collided most spectacularly was in the case of 20th-century whaling; although happily, and despite our worst excesses, the great whales are not extinct. The book's second peregrination is to the Antarctic  Challenger had the great good fortune to travel there with the British Antarctic Survey. Here again it is the industrial relics which attract her attention. Few people will be fortunate enough to visit these places, and when Challenger does so, her writing is very effective. We are taken to the disused whaling station at Grytviken, where huge tanks and boilers lie rusting in the snow, but after only a few paragraphs we're swept away by digressions into Elgar, then to meet a first world war veteran who fought at Passchendaele, then to Marinetti and futurism, Nazi industrialisation, and so on, before being allowed back to the Antarctic. We can see the connection, but the tumult is too great.

The third journey takes us to the other pole, from Whitby via New York, north to Baffin Island, where Challenger finds Inuit people in full possession of the facts about their own lives; they know their traditional close-to-nature ways took a massive knock, that alcohol and violence are serious problems, that mineral extraction, not the land, will be their future, at least in the short term.

Challenger's privilege is great, her courage exemplary, and no one could doubt her passion. This book is an urgent attempt to understand how we got into this mess, and how we might go forward, knowing that we are capable of causing, and of feeling, great loss. Assiduous editing might have helped, because while Challenger has a good eye and a nice turn of phrase, there is a piling up of references that seems born more of anxiety than erudition.

She occasionally confesses to her own fear in a world of losses. Walking through the Antarctic snow, well aware she could not survive there without modern technological back-up, she laments having no landscape to which she is "truly native". Maybe she should choose one, slow down, and start to observe.

Kathleen Jamie's Findings is published by Sort of Books.