Quotes About Survival

It demonstrates, he has written, that humans "are capable of driving virtually any large mammal species extinct, even though they are also capable of going to great lengths to guarantee that they do not.

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.

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species's success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled "global change" that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth's history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.

When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda.

Creep, clobber, squawk. Repeat.

it has since been reduced to around five thousand animals.

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

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.

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.

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

If evolution works the way it usually does," Silman said, "then the extinction scenario—we don't call it extinction, we talk about it as 'biotic attrition,' a nice euphemism—well, it starts to look apocalyptic.

At the heart of Darwin's theory

According to an English seaman named Aaron Thomas, who sailed to Newfoundland on the HMS Boston: If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leisure.

On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.

The author David Quammen cautions that while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it's just amoral and in the wrong place. 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.

ICH BIN STOLZ, EIN NEANDERTHALER ZU SEIN

The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have -or have not- inherited the earth.

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

All they had to do was pick off a mammoth or a giant ground sloth every so often, when the opportunity arose, and keep this up for several centuries. This would have been enough to drive the populations of slow-reproducing species first into decline and then, eventually, all the way down to zero.

When a mass extinction occurs, it takes out the weak and also lays low the strong.

The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.

The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.