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. — Elizabeth Kolbert Copy Share Image
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… — 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
