Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes

With great trepidation, Buffon allowed that this last species [the American mastodon]- "the largest of them all" - seemed to have disappeared. It was, he proposed, the only land animal ever to have done so. ...

In 1781, Thomas Jefferson was drawn into the controvery.... [He believed] it was still out there somewhere. If it could not be found in Virginia, it was roaming those parts of the continent that "remain in their aboriginal stated, unexplored and undisturbed. When, as president, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come upon live [American mastodon] roaming its forests.

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.

It was titled "Helping a Species Go Extinct.

we're willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos

If there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that.

You're an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can't anymore, and that's another way we're just changing the surface of the Earth in very dramatic ways.

A single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.

The leaky-replacement hypothesis - assuming for the moment that it's correct - provides the strongest possible evidence for the closeness of Neanderthals and modern humans. The two may or may not have fallen in love; still, they made love. Their hybrid children may or may not have been regarded as monsters; nevertheless someone - perhaps Neanderthals at first, perhaps humans - cared for them. Some of these hybrids survived to have kids of their own, who, in turn, had kids, and so on up to the present day. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. One

Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the story that we've been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn't particularly special. What I'm trying to convey my book [The Sixth Extinction] is that we are unusual.

stored inside of them, in frigid clouds of nitrogen, are cell lines representing nearly a thousand species.

What are the Chinese doing, what are we doing, what are - so we need, both the developed world and the developing world, really need to be moving, once again, getting all your arrows in the same direction if you want to have any impact.

The windowless room where the po`ouli cells are kept alive - sort of - is called the Frozen Zoo.

It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys,

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,

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

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

Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.

How to perform an ultrasound with one arm up a rhino's rectum.

For a long time, science has gone in the direction of sort of putting people in their place. We learned that the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, the Earth revolves around the sun; we learned that we're just another species, evolved, like all other species, so we're just another animal, really.

(One of Crutzen's fellow Nobelists reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife,

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.

No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet.

Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more contradictions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. 'In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty,' Kuhn wrote. But then, finally, someone came along who was willing to call a red spade a red spade. Crisis led to insight, and the old framework gave way to a new one. This is how great scientific discoveries or, to use the term Kuhn made so popular, 'paradigm shifts' took place.

At the heart of Darwin's theory,

Given a shave and a new suit, the pair wrote, a Neanderthal probably would attract no more attention on a New York City subway than some of its other denizens.

9Among the many lessons that merge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Useful mnemonic for remembering the geologic periods of the last half-billion years is: Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak (Cambrian-Ordovician-Silurian-Devonian-Carboniferous-Permian-Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous). The mnemonic unfortunately runs out before the most recent periods: the Paleogene, the Neogene, and the current Quaternary.

I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.

If climate change drove the megafauna extinct, then this presents yet another reason to worry about what we are doing to global temperatures. If, on the other hand, people were to blame - and it seems increasingly likely that they were - then the import is almost more disturbing. It would mean that the current extinction event began all the way back in the middle of the last ice age. It would mean that man was a killer - to use the term of art an "overkiller" - pretty much right from the start.

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.

Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are changing the world very radically, very dramatically. Climate change, which I assume is one of the points you're alluding to, is at the heart of this.

Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on the shit of birds that evolved to follow ants.

At 378 parts per million, current CO2 levels are unprecedented in recent geological history. (The previous high, of 299 parts per million, was reached around 325,000 years ago). It is believed that the last time carbon dioxide levels were comparable to today's was three and a half million years ago, during what is known as the mid-Pliocene warm period, and it is likely that they have not been much higher since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. In the Eocene, crocodiles roamed Colorado and sea levels were nearly three hundred feet higher than they are today. A scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put it to me - only half-jokingly - this way: It's true that we've had higher CO2 levels before. But, then, of course, we also had dinosaurs.

The record from the Vostok core shows that CO2 levels and temperatures have varied in tandem. Current CO2 levels are unprecedented in the last 420,000 years. Credit: J.R. Petit et al, Nature, vol. 399 (1999).

If EVACC is a sort of ark, Griffith becomes its Noah, though one on extended duty, since already he's been at things a good deal longer than forty days.

Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that can be looked at to trace matrilineal descent.

background extinction." In ordinary times - times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs - extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what's known as the background extinction rate. This rate varies from one group of organisms to another; often it's expressed in terms of extinctions per million species-years.

Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.

having freed ourselves from the constraints of evolution, humans nevertheless remain dependent on the earth's biological and geochemical systems. By disrupting these systems - cutting down tropical rainforests, altering the composition of the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans - we're putting our own survival in danger.

Such is the economy of nature," Thomas Jefferson 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." When, as President, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come upon live mastodons roaming the region.

Since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.

Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world's most endangered class of animals; it's been calculated that the group's extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.

Durrant stopped off at a commissary of sorts to pick up a selection of his favorite snacks.

After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multiseason "impact winter.

One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species - the Neanderthals and the Denisovans - many generations ago, we're now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we're done, it's quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us.

It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit,

Suci, a Sumatran rhino, lives at the Cincinnati Zoo,

The center of the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Biodiversity, there's an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is arranged around a central plaque that notes there have been five major extinction events since complex animals evolved, over five hundred million years ago. According to the plaque, "Global climate change and other causes, probably including collisions between earth and extraterrestrial objects," were responsible for these events. It goes on to observe: "Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity's transformation of the ecological landscape.

In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.

Once unloaded, everything has to be lugged through

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

Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 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. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis - many plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels - and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous.

Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures

As soon as you acknowledge that we're changing the planet on this scale, that it has very potentially massive repercussions and very damaging repercussions, then the next question is okay, what are we going to do about it?

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

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

some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

have become even more sought-after as a high-end party "drug"; at clubs in southeast Asia,

Most of us live in parts of the world where we don't expect to see much, and we wouldn't necessarily notice things that are crashing.

With the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.

Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather grim," he told me a few hours after I had arrived at One Tree. We were sitting at a beat-up picnic table, looking out over the heartbreaking blue of the Coral Sea. The island's large and boisterous population of terns was screaming in the background. Caldeira paused: "I mean, they're looking grim already.

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.

at the time of my visit he still had failed to

and handjobs on crows.

Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. - JORGE LUIS BORGES

Her ruddy brown skin had the texture of pebbled linoleum.

Most of the world's major waterways have been diverted or dammed or otherwise manipulated - in the United States, only two per cent of rivers run unimpeded - and people now use half the world's readily accessible freshwater runoff.

Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has declined by fifty percent just in the last thirty years.

There's this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It's the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, "Okay, well, that's the norm."

A hundred years ago, in Africa, the population of black rhinos approached a million;

As with any young species, this one's position is precarious.

We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.

vaccinated every single condor - today there about four hundred

Of the many species that have existed on earth
estimates run as high as fifty billion
more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.
more than a rounding error.

Creep, clobber, squawk. Repeat.

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. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.

He called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning 'wing-fingered.

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.

Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct.

As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world.

The birds do not like this camera," Sveinsson said. "So they fly over it and shit on it.

Then he took me to look at the Maastricht animal, still today one of the world's most famous fossils. (Though the Netherlands has repeatedly asked for it back, the French have held on to it for more than two hundred years.)

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

Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection. A lack of discipline is apparent these days in just about every aspect of American society. Why? This should be is a much larger question, one to ponder as we take out the garbage and tie our kids' shoes.

Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.

It's owing to Roth and the handful of others like her who know

It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.

Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes

In fact, the American Mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

According to Lamarck, there was a force - the 'power of life' - that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare.

We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action, so I'm going to leave it to the reader.

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

so Durrant stroked the area around his cloaca

Recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million.

If you're a conservation biologist in many fields, you're seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they're chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.

By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent - what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology.

Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.

within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.