Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes
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Once the Funk Island birds had been salted, plucked, and deep-fried into oblivion, there was only one sizable colony of great auks left in the world, on an island called the Geirfuglasker, or great auk skerry, which lay about fifty kilometres off southwestern Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. Much to the auk’s misfortune, a volcanic eruption destroyed the Geirfuglasker in 1830. This left the birds one solitary refuge, a speck of an island known as Eldey. By this point, the great auk was facing a new threat: its own rarity. Skins and eggs were avidly sought by gentlemen, like Count Raben, who wanted to fill out their collections. It was in the service of such enthusiasts that the very last known pair of auks was killed on Eldey in 1844.
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The permafrost is still warmest at the very bottom, but instead of being coldest at the top, it is coldest somewhere in the middle, and warmer again toward the surface. This is a sign—and an unambiguous one—that the climate is heating up.
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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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Among the many lessons that merge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
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Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.
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Amphibians—the word comes from the Greek meaning ‘double life.'
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In fact, the American Mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.
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No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet.
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For a long time, science has gone in the direction of sort of putting people in their place. We learned that the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, the Earth revolves around the sun; we learned that we're just another species, evolved, like all other species, so we're just another animal, really.
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Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized - is how one geologist put it to me.
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These days every wild place has, to one degree or another, been cut into and cut off.
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I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have been implicated in autism changed pretty significantly between the time Neanderthal line and human line split.
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Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.
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All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul.
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It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world.
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Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.
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I like to think or say, some madness there.
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Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues.
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Roth pulled a second glove over the first and grabbed what looked like a video game remote.
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We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive - as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would.
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People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is based on burning fossil fuels, which is taking CO2 out of the ground and putting it up into the air.
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Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.
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The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.
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By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens—in most cases hundreds—of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed.