[quotes] The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert 2014

 

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul"
- Alexander Pope

"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."

"At the heart of Darwin's theory, as one of his biographers has put it, is 'the denial of humanity's special status.'"

"Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible."

"'It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct.'"

"Virtually every species that's around today can be said to be cold-adapted."

"Lovejoy is the rare sort of person who seems equally comfortable slogging through the forest and testifying in front of Congress."

"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."

"What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, [Quammen] observes, 'is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.'"

"For the same reasons that local diversity has, as a general rule, been increasing, global diversity - the total number of different species that can be found worldwide - has dropped."

"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."

"When he finally came around to the idea that Neanderthals bequeathed some of their genes to modern humans, he told me, 'I thought it was very cool. It means that they are not totally extinct - that they live on a little bit in us.'"

"'It's only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don't see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, madness there.'"

"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."

"in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results."

"in pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."

"Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathway will remain open and which will be forever closed."