Quotes from Tatiana Schlossberg

And since plastic does not naturally degrade, the billions of tons sitting in landfills, floating in the oceans or piling up on city streets will provide a marker if later civilizations ever want to classify our era.

I think people who speak and write about climate change and environmental degradation need to convey how interesting and important this topic is, because I'm not sure people will feel empowered to help if they don't feel engaged and called to action.

Cargo shipping, cruising, mining, oil drilling, fishing - all these industrial activities could expand to the Arctic, one of the last remaining wild places, and with potentially devastating consequences.

Polyester, one of the most common fibers, is a plastic derived from crude oil. The long fibers that make up polyester thread are woven together to make fabric. Extracting the oil and melting the plastic require energy.

Santa Clara County has 23 active Superfund sites, more than any other county in the United States. All of them were designated as such in the mid to late 1980s, and most were contaminated by toxic chemicals involved in making computer parts. Completely cleaning up these chemicals may be impossible.

The world's oceans are littered with trillions of pieces of plastic - bottles, bags, toys, fishing nets and more, mostly in tiny particles - and now this seaborne junk is making its way into the Arctic.

Computers and cellphones - which require semiconductors and microchips to work - have become so essential to life all over the world that it's easy to ignore the problems with building them.

I'm a journalist, not an advocate, so I approached researching and writing the book the same way that I do any other reporting. But when you're writing for yourself, you have a little more room to say what you think.

Coal ash, the hazardous byproduct of burning coal to produce power, is a particularly insidious legacy of the nation's dependence on coal.

Scientists have suggested that some whale deaths could be a result of marine noise, often a result of military activity, offshore drilling or exploration, which can disorient the animals and send them in the wrong direction, possibly toward beaches where they get stuck instead of into the deeper ocean.

The Google Quad Campus looks way too nice to sit on top of an active Superfund site: There are matching bikes, a pool with primary-colored umbrellas, and a contained universe that looks more like a college or a park than a satellite campus of one of the biggest companies in the world.

Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions - the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.

Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you've generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.

The ocean is loud: Ship propellers, sonar, oil and gas drilling and other industrial work make sounds, even if, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, no one can hear it.

When you buy carbon offsets, you pay to take planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in exchange for the greenhouse gases you put in. For example, you can put money toward replanting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Health care in the United States is responsible for a tremendous amount of waste and a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions. For every hospital bed, the American health care system produces about 30 pounds of waste every day; over all, it accounts for about 10 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions.

Coal ash gets far less attention than toxic and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, but it has created environmental and health problems - every major river in the Southeast has at least one coal ash pond - and continuing legal troubles and large cleanup costs for the authority and other utilities.

If you live in Minneapolis, there's a 95 percent chance you live within a 10-minute walk to a park.

Coal is used to generate power almost everywhere, but problems associated with coal ash and coal ash slurry disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities, experts say.

Environmental advocates say that changing how much power computers and monitors use in idle mode can cut greenhouse gas emissions without requiring consumers to change their behavior.

As a nation, we spent eight billion hours sitting in our cars, waiting for lights to change, for the driver ahead to sneak into that parking spot, for an accident to be cleared.

The coronavirus pandemic and fears about its spread have brought to a screeching halt years of efforts to get Americans to do one small thing: bring their own bags to the grocery store and stop using plastic ones.

I was really surprised to learn that there is no food date label standardization, which contributes significantly to why we waste so much food, which generates methane emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas, in landfill, and means that we are using lots of land, water, fertilizer and energy to produce food that no one eats.

Knowing how much carbon dioxide the ocean is storing is crucial to modeling future climate changes, and given the prevalence of these creatures around the world and how much water they can filter, it is likely a significant amount.