Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes
-
As soon as you acknowledge that we're changing the planet on this scale, that it has very potentially massive repercussions and very damaging repercussions, then the next question is okay, what are we going to do about it?
-
It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world.
-
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.
-
The 'incredible frog hotel'—really a local bed and breakfast—...the frogs stay in their tanks in a block of rented rooms.
-
The Antropocene is usually said to have begun with the industrial revolution, or perhaps even later, with the explosive growth in population that followed World War II. By this account, it's with the introduction of modern technologies—turbines, railroads, chainsaws—that humans became a world-altering force. But the megafauna extinction suggests otherwise. 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 did.
-
Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.
-
A single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.
-
Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.
-
Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is under way. Having discovered subterranean reserves of energy, humans begin to change the composition of the atmosphere.
-
Several decades ago, a detachment of the American right cut itself loose from reason, and it has been drifting along happily ever since. If the birthers are more evidently kooky than the global-warming "skeptics" or the death-panellers or the supply-siders or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they are, in their fundamental disregard for the facts, actually mainstream.
-
Neanderthals were pretty smart, and if we actively killed them off, then probably we did so in the same way that humans kill each other.
-
If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.
-
On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.
-
This particular species, though, had never been seen before; indeed, it was so unusual that an entire genus had to be created to accommodate it. It was named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis—batrachos is Greek for “frog”—or Bd for short.
-
We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action, so I'm going to leave it to the reader.
-
All they had to do was pick off a mammoth or a giant ground sloth every so often, when the opportunity arose, and keep this up for several centuries. This would have been enough to drive the populations of slow-reproducing species first into decline and then, eventually, all the way down to zero.
-
The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can't find anything like us.
-
Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the story that we've been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn't particularly special. What I'm trying to convey in my book The Sixth Extinction is that we are unusual.
-
Having freed ourselves from the constraints of evolution, humans nevertheless remain dependent on the earth’s biological and geochemical systems. By disrupting these systems—cutting down tropical rainforests, altering the composition of the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans—we’re putting our own survival in danger.
-
We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.
-
Asian elephants have declined by fifty percent over the last three generations.