Quotes About Impact

Just for fun, have a look at Miami. The nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists calculates that by 2060, a staggering 58.5% of Miami's inhabitable land will be underwater. By 2100, it'll be more like 94%. Miami is going away.

For example, if you click Washington, DC, you learn that by 2080 it will feel like today's Greenwood, Mississippi, which is 9.8° hotter and 75% wetter than today's DC. And if you click Jacksonville, Florida, you discover that it will feel like the southern tip of Mexico—practically Belize.

There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.

Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?

Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out.

As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we're getting their diseases.

Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years.

Later in conversation he corrected himself: It was in fact 1.1 million pigs. The difference might seem like just a rounding error, he told me, but if you ever had to kill an "extra" hundred thousand pigs and dispose of their bodies in bulldozed pits, you'd remember the difference as significant.

Ningún otro primate ha tenido nunca el peso que ponemos sobre el planeta en semejante grado. En términos ecológicos, somos casi una paradoja; gran tamaño y vida prolongada, pero abundantes hasta lo grotesco. Somos una plaga.

Wilson came up with this: "When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land.

Even the influenza virus of 1918–1919, having killed up to 50 million people around the world, remained a ghostly cipher, unseen and unidentified at the time.

From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

Another way to comprehend it is this: From the time of our beginning as a species (about 200,000 years ago) until the year 1804, human population rose to a billion; between 1804 and 1927, it rose by another billion; we reached 3 billion in 1960; and each net addition of a billion people, since then, has taken only about thirteen years. In October 2011, we came to the 7-billion mark

One: Mankind's activities are causing the disintegration (a word chosen carefully) of natural ecosystems at a cataclysmic rate.

landscapes that formerly supported wild herbivores, are just another form of human impact. They're a proxy measure of our appetites, and we are hungry. We are prodigious, we are unprecedented. We are phenomenal. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.

Trophic cascades, as defined by Diamond in his "Rosetta Stone" paper, are the secondary effects that can ramify from level to level in consequence of a single extinction.

two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These

the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

We should recognize that they reflect things that we're doing, not just things that are happening to us. We should understand that, although some of the human-caused factors may seem virtually inexorable, others are within our control.

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

10. Both the North Tower and the South Tower collapsed just as their respective fires were dying down, even though this meant that the South Tower, which had been hit second, collapsed first.

Most of the major events of human history gradually lose their meaning: wars that seemed at the time all

We are all connected in ways we cannot even begin to fathom. Our lives unfold through each other and within each other. What one suffers, we all feel. What one does changes others forever.

The dead forever change the living.