Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes

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

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the processnof doing.

If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.

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

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

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.

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

In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.

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

There's this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It's the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, "Okay, well, that's the norm."

There are a lot of things that we could do to minimize what we're doing, but we're not getting back those frogs that I saw that no longer exist.

We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action, so I'm going to leave it to the reader.

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

Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.

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

You're an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can't anymore, and that's another way we're just changing the surface of the Earth in very dramatic ways.

The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can't find anything like us.

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

Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.

Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that can be looked at to trace matrilineal descent.

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 from one that's based on fossil fuels to one that isn't.

Amphibians—the word comes from the Greek meaning ‘double life.

According to Lamarck, there was a force—the ‘power of life’—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.

The 'incredible frog hotel'—really a local bed and breakfast—...the frogs stay (in their tanks) in a block of rented rooms.

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.