Quotes About Impact

The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than a hundred thousand years and during that period they had no more impact on their surroundings than any other large vertebrate. 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 wooly 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.

Occasionally, a truck rumbled by, loaded down with logs. The butterflies couldn't scatter fast enough, so the road was littered with severed wings.

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

The desolate post-impact sea has been dubbed the "Strangelove ocean.")

It was titled "Helping a Species Go Extinct.

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.

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.

Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species." As Walter Alvarez put it to me, "We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, shows an angry-looking tyrannosaurus reacting with horror to the impact.)

We live in a world," he has said, "where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.

number of chimpanzees in the wild has dropped to perhaps half of what it was fifty years ago

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.

a third of them to be in danger of extinction, largely as a result of rising ocean temperatures.

Birds were also hard-hit; perhaps three-quarters of all bird families, perhaps more, went extinct.

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.

Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons.

the asteroid blasted into the air more than fifty times its own mass in pulverized rock.

it's estimated the population has shrunk by sixty percent just in the last two decades.

Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons

To paraphrase J. R. McNeill paraphrasing Marx, "Men make their own climate, but they do not make it just as they please.

generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet.

higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years.