Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes
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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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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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All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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?
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If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes.
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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.
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On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.
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Most of us live in parts of the world where we don't expect to see much, and we wouldn't necessarily notice things that are crashing.
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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.
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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.
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A single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.
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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.
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Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.
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People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.
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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.
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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.
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What are the Chinese doing, what are we doing, what are - so we need, both the developed world and the developing world, really need to be moving, once again, getting all your arrows in the same direction if you want to have any impact.
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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.
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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 processnof doing.