Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes
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The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.
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A few years ago, in an essay in Nature, the Nobel Prize–winning Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen coined a term. No longer, he wrote, should we think of ourselves as living in the Holocene. Instead, an epoch unlike any of those which preceded it had begun. This new age was defined by one creature—man—who had become so dominant that he was capable of altering the planet on a geological scale. Crutzen dubbed this age the “Anthropocene.”
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When you drive to the grocery store, your intention is not to change the world, it just happens to have that impact. So we've done a lot of things without even realizing it, and yes, just being unusual, as you say, does not put you above, in a sense, any of the other organisms with whom we share this planet.
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The end-Permian extinction also seems to have been triggered by a change in the climate. But in this case, the change went in the opposite direction. Right at the time of extinction, 252 million years ago, there was a massive release of carbon into the air—so massive that geologists have a hard time even imagining where all the carbon could have come from. Temperatures soared—the seas warmed by as much as eighteen degrees—and the chemistry of the oceans went haywire, as if in an out-of-control aquarium. The water became acidified, and the amount of dissolved oxygen dropped so low that many organisms probably, in effect, suffocated.
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Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate. But extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels. It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys. If you know how to look, you can probably find signs of the current extinction event in your own backyard.
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It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.
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I traveled really to amazing places. I went to the Great Barrier Reef, I went to the Amazon, I went to the Andes, to try to bring people stories of sort of what's going on out in the world and bring this issue alive, in a way, and put it out there.
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I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.
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Wood storks cool off by defecating on their own legs.
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Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy.
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Until recently, when both of them went extinct, there were two species of frogs, known as gastric-brooding frogs, that carried their eggs in their stomachs and gave birth to little froglets through their mouths.
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The paper concluded that if current emissions trends continue, within the next fifty years or so “all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.”
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Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.
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There are a lot of things that we could do to minimize what we're doing, but we're not getting back those frogs that I saw that no longer exist.
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Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are changing the world very radically, very dramatically. Climate change, which I assume is one of the points you're alluding to, is at the heart of this.
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Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct.
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On the birther movement: Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never mattered less.
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Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that can be looked at to trace matrilineal descent.
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If you're a conservation biologist in many fields, you're seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they're chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.
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As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.
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That a molecule of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels will, in the course of its lifetime in the atmosphere, trap a hundred thousand times more heat than was released in producing it.
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Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.
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You're an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can't anymore, and that's another way we're just changing the surface of the Earth in very dramatic ways.
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Amphibians—the word comes from the Greek meaning ‘double life.'