Quotes from Elizabeth Kolbert

Time and time again, people have demonstrated that they care about what Rachel Carson called "the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures," and that they're willing to make sacrifices on those creatures' behalf.

the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.

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 Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than a hundred thousand years and during that period they had no more impact on their surroundings than any other large vertebrate. There is every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and the wooly rhinos. 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.

Modern humans arrived in Europe around forty thousand years ago, and again and again, the archaeological record shows, as soon as they made their way to a region where Neanderthals were living, the Neanderthals in that region disappeared.

Occasionally, a truck rumbled by, loaded down with logs. The butterflies couldn't scatter fast enough, so the road was littered with severed wings.

it has since been reduced to around five thousand animals.

KINOHI'S tragicomic sex life provides more evidence—if any more was needed—of how seriously humans take extinction. Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes that we're willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos and handjobs on crows.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul.

Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity's transformation of the ecological landscape.

Wilson has observed, "We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything." Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: "we are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it.. We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children... Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something.

Wouldn't it be better, practically and ethically, to focus on what can be done and is being done to save species, rather than to speculate gloomily about a future in which the biosphere is reduced to little plastic vials?

Such is the economy of nature," he wrote, "that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.

The desolate post-impact sea has been dubbed the "Strangelove ocean.")

According to Lamarck, there was a force—the 'power of life'—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

The record from the Vostok core shows that CO2 levels and temperatures have varied in tandem. Current CO2 levels are unprecedented in the last 420,000 years. Credit: J.R. Petit et al, Nature, vol. 399 (1999).

The birds do not like this camera," Sveinsson said. "So they fly over it and shit on it.

If Wake and Vredenburg were correct, then those of us alive today not only are witnessing one of the rarest events in life's history, we are also causing it.

It was titled "Helping a Species Go Extinct.

Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of all those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly.

powdered horn is snorted like cocaine.)

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.

During a mass extinction, vast swathes of the tree are cut short, as if attacked by crazed, axe-wielding madmen.