“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,
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity,” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it’s changing in ways that create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing so.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“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.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.” A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species—the Neanderthals and the Denisovans—many generations ago, we’re now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we’re done, it’s quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“with the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“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.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“If climate change drove the megafauna extinct, then this presents yet another reason to worry about what we are doing to global temperatures. If, on the other hand, people were to blame—and it seems increasingly likely that they were—then the import is almost more disturbing. It would mean that the current extinction event began all the way back in the middle of the last ice age. It would mean that man was a killer—to use the term of art an “overkiller”—pretty much right from the start.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
“The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”)” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“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.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human—some of my best friends are humans!—I will say that it is not, in the end, what’s most worth attending to. 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. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity,” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it’s changing in ways that create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing so.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“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.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.” A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species—the Neanderthals and the Denisovans—many generations ago, we’re now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we’re done, it’s quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“with the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“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.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“If climate change drove the megafauna extinct, then this presents yet another reason to worry about what we are doing to global temperatures. If, on the other hand, people were to blame—and it seems increasingly likely that they were—then the import is almost more disturbing. It would mean that the current extinction event began all the way back in the middle of the last ice age. It would mean that man was a killer—to use the term of art an “overkiller”—pretty much right from the start.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
“The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”)” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“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.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human—some of my best friends are humans!—I will say that it is not, in the end, what’s most worth attending to. 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. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
