“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION,… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“Birds were also hard-hit; perhaps three-quarters of all bird families, perhaps more, went extinct.” — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“During a mass extinction, vast swathes of the tree are cut short, as if attacked by crazed, axe-wielding madmen.” — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
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… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“Darwin’s familiarity with human-caused extinction is also clear from On the Origin of Species. In one of the many passages in which… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“the center of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity, there’s an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“In ordinary times—times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs—extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“Alroy has described the megafauna extinction as a "geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“background extinction.” In ordinary times—times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs—extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation,… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“The Antropocene is usually said to have begun with the industrial revolution, or perhaps even later, with the explosive growth in population… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
You've got to do everything, everything's got to be pointing in the same direction and you've got to really turn this whole economic engine… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are changing the… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive -… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“Crutzen wrote up his idea in a short essay, “Geology of Mankind,” that ran in Nature. “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“Modern humans arrived in Europe around forty thousand years ago, and again and again, the archaeological record shows, as soon as they made their… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
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… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
What are the Chinese doing, what are we doing, what are - so we need, both the developed world and the developing world, really… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
“As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and,… — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
