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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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
There's this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It's the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, "Okay, well, that's the norm."
Elizabeth Kolbert -
All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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A single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.
Elizabeth Kolbert -
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.
Elizabeth Kolbert