Quotes from Elizabeth Kolbert

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 woolly 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. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.

Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming's "equally evil twin.

As Rachel Carson once observed, referring to a very different but at the same time profoundly similar problem: "Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.

at the time of my visit he still had failed to

it revealed how people process disruptive information. Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework:

Chicxulub crater.

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.

Later, as his [Cuvier's] list of extinct species grew, his position changed. There had, he decided, been multiple cataclysms. "Life on earth has often been disturbed by terrible events," he wrote. "Living organisms without number have been victims of these catastrophes.

One of Crutzen's fellow Nobelists reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife

As the tiny heart in the tiny egg pulsated away, I was reminded of the first sonogram images of my own children and of another line from Abbey: "All living things on earth are kindred.

Among the many lessons that merge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

The teeth had roots the length of a human hand, and each one weighed nearly ten pounds.

After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multiseason "impact winter.

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago.

los neandertales siguieron el destino del Megatherium, el mastodonte americano, y de tantos otros desafortunados miembros de la megafauna. En otras palabras, tal como me lo expresó un investigador, «su mala suerte fuimos nosotros».

Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

After one of my falls, Bednarski pointed out to me a tarantula the size of my fist sitting on the next tree over.

It's just absolute hubris and so arrogant to think that we can survive without everything else. We come from this planet." --- Paul Hardisty, head of the Institute that runs SeaSim in Australia

If we one day will know that some freak mutation made the human insanity and exploration thing possible, it will be amazing to think that it was this little inversion on this chromosome that made all this happen and changed the whole ecosystem of the planet and made us dominate everything," he said at one point. At another, he said, "We are crazy in some way. What drives it? That I would really like to understand. That would be really, really cool to know." *

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. —E. O. WILSON

On the other hand, the climate record shows that it would be a mistake to assume that change, when it comes, will come gradually. Perovich offered a comparison that he had heard from a glaciologist friend. The friend likened the climate system to a rowboat: "You can tip and then you'll just go back. You can tip it and just go back. And then you tip it and you get to the other stable state, which is upside down.

It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing

No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before