„Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Zitate von Elizabeth Kolbert
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Elizabeth Kolbert
Geburtstag:1961
Elizabeth Kolbert ist eine US-amerikanische Journalistin und Autorin von Artikeln und Büchern zur Umweltproblematik.
Zitate 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 that he ever really did.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„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“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„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.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.” A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„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.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„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.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„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.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it’s changing in ways that create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing so.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„From the standpoint of the world’s biota, global travel represents a radically new phenomenon and, at the same time, a replay of the very old. The drifting apart of the continents that Wegener deduced from the fossil record is now being reversed—another way in which humans are running geologic history backward and at high speed. Think of it as a souped-up version of plate tectonics, minus the plates. 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.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
„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.“
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
