Elizabeth Kolbert

I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

There's this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It's the idea that every generation takes…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

[On the birther movement:] Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

For a long time, science has gone in the direction of sort of putting people in their place. We learned that the…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Such is the economy of nature," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

One of the reasons that people, many people, many environmentalists are critical of President [Barack] Obama's policies towards global warming is on…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Neanderthals were pretty smart, and if we actively killed them off, then probably we did so in the same way that humans…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Trees are obviously a lot less mobile than, say, trogons—tropical birds common in Manú—or even ticks. But in a cloud forest, trees…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“A recent study of common frogs living near Ithaca, New York, for example, found that four out of six species were calling—which…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“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

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or leveling forests is, in the…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

There are a lot of things that we could do to minimize what we're doing, but we're not getting back those frogs…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

When you drive to the grocery store, your intention is not to change the world, it just happens to have that impact.…

— Elizabeth Kolbert