Quotes About Environment

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

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book in your lap.

One weedy species," the pair observed, "has unwittingly achieved the ability to directly affect its own fate and that of most of the other species on this planet.

A paper published in Nature by the former head of the One Tree Island Research Station, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, predicted that if current trends continue, then by around 2050 visitors to the Great Barrier Reef will arrive to find "rapidly eroding rubble banks.

Coral sex is a rare and amazing sight.

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

ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated.

by the end of this century, CO2 levels could reach a level not seen

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.

by a pair of herpetologists. It was titled "Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

Marine ecosystems effectively collapsed

Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.

Ocean acidification played a role in at least two of the Big Five extinctions (the end-Permian and the end-Triassic) and quite possibly it was a major factor in a third (the end-Cretaceous).

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.

To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity

One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it's changing in ways that create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing so.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.

By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens—in most cases hundreds—of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed.

The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.")

I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.

If warming were held to a minimum, the team estimated that between 22 and 31 percent of the species would be "committed to extinction" by 2050. If warming were to reach what was at that point considered a likely maximum—a figure that now looks too low—by the middle of this century, between 38 and 52 percent of the species would be fated to disappear.

In a similar vein, Jared Diamond has observed: "Personally, I can't fathom why Australia's giants should have survived innumerable droughts in their tens of millions of years of Australian history, and then have chosen to drop dead almost simultaneously (at least on a time scale of millions of years) precisely and just coincidentally when the first humans arrived.

If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.