Quotes from 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.

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.

Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error. more than a rounding error.

The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what's the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn't going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.

Declining emissions and rising atmospheric concentrations point to a stubborn fact about carbon dioxide: once it's in the air, it stays there. How long, exactly, is a complicated question; for all intents and purposes, though, CO2 emissions are cumulative. The comparison that's often made is to a bathtub. So long as the tap is running, a stoppered tub will continue to fill. Turn the tap down, and the tub will still keep filling, just more slowly. To

We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

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.

Other calculations of his show that to keep pace with the present rate of temperature change, plants and animals would have to migrate poleward by thirty feet a day, and that a molecule of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels will, in the course of its lifetime in the atmosphere, trap a hundred thousand times more heat

It's absolutely obvious that global warming has started," France's president, Jacques Chirac, said after attending the 2004 summit of leaders of the world's major industrial powers—the Group of 8. "And so we have to act responsibly, and, if we do nothing, we would bear a heavy responsibility. I had the chance to talk to the United States president about this. To tell you that I convinced him would be a total exaggeration, as you can imagine.

Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.

These days every wild place has, to one degree or another, been cut into and cut off.

As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? 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 process of doing.

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.

a single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.

Of the world's eight species of bears, six are categorized either as "vulnerable" to extinction or "endangered.

Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world's major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans' coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world's readily accessible fresh water runoff.

Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow survived the impact. But it does not follow from this that they (or we) are any better adapted. In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning: how could a creature be adapted, either well or ill, for conditions it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history?

Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world's most endangered class of animals; it's been calculated that the group's extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.

As a general rule, the variety of life is most impoverished at the poles and richest at low latitudes.

Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field's worth of land.

Unfortunately, the biggest tipping point, the one at which the ecosystem starts to crash, is mean pH 7.8, which is what we're expecting to happen by 2100," Hall-Spencer tells me, in his understated British manner. "So that is rather alarming.

The bird that is shot is a parent," he observed in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "We take advantage of its most sacred instincts to waylay it, and in depriving the parent of life, we doom the helpless offspring to the most miserable of deaths, that by hunger. If this is not cruelty, what is?

Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on the shit of birds that evolved to follow ants.

When all of these were considered together, a pattern emerged: mass extinctions seemed to take place at regular intervals of roughly twenty-six million years.