Quotes from Elizabeth Kolbert

A bright yellow frog smoking a cigarette through a holder.

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.

This particular species, though, had never been seen before; indeed, it was so unusual that an entire genus had to be created to accommodate it. It was named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis—batrachos is Greek for "frog"—or Bd for short.

The Great Barrier Reef extends, discontinuously, for more than fifteen hundred miles, and in some places it is five hundred feet thick. By the scale of reefs, the pyramids at Giza are kiddie blocks. The way corals

Instead, they divide the world up into "anthromes." There is an "urban" anthrome that stretches over five hundred thousand square miles, an "irrigated cropland" anthrome (a million square miles), and a "populated forest" (four and a half million square miles). Ellis and Ramankutty count a total of eighteen "anthromes," which together extend over thirty-nine million square miles.

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.

ante el cambio climático, aunque fuera un cambio climático natural, la actividad humana ha creado una carrera de obstáculos para la dispersión de la biodiversidad

ISLANDS are worlds in miniature or, as the writer David Quammen observed, "almost a caricature of nature's full complexity." By this account, One Tree is a caricature of a caricature.

We've got to hope that somehow it's all going to come together," Paul Crump, a herpetologist from the Houston Zoo who was directing the stalled waterfall project, told me. "We've got to hope that something will happen, and we'll be able to piece it all together, and it will all be as it once was, which now that I say it out loud sounds kind of stupid.

a third of them to be in danger of extinction, largely as a result of rising ocean temperatures.

Birds were also hard-hit; perhaps three-quarters of all bird families, perhaps more, went extinct.

Lowland gorillas have declined even faster;

and handjobs on crows.

A hundred starlings let loose in Central Park have by now multiplied to more than two hundred million.

on top of a twelve-thousand-foot-high mountain, where, in fact, there were no trees—just scrub and, somewhat incongruously, a dozen or so cows, eyeing us suspiciously.

if other institutions try to use it, they

Alroy has described the megafauna extinction as a "geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed it.

What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, "is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

Wood storks cool off by defecating on their own legs. (In

Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons.

If Dicerorhinus sumatrensis has a future

are advised they are breaking the law.

the asteroid blasted into the air more than fifty times its own mass in pulverized rock.

amphibian fossils are so rare.