Famous Quotes & Sayings

Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Elizabeth Kolbert.

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Famous Quotes By Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes 1962434

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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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 to little more than a rounding error.
more than a rounding error. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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There is every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and the woolly rhinos. 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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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If warming were held to a minimum, the team estimated that between 22 and 31 percent of the species would be "committed to extinction" by 2050. If warming were to reach what was at that point considered a likely maximum - a figure that now looks too low - by the middle of this century, between 38 and 52 percent of the species would be fated to disappear. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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

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Amphibians - the word comes from the Greek meaning 'double life. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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As soon as you acknowledge that we're changing the planet on this scale, that it has very potentially massive repercussions and very damaging repercussions, then the next question is okay, what are we going to do about it? — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Number of chimpanzees in the wild has dropped to perhaps half of what it was fifty years ago, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Living in four parks in the state of Assam. A hundred years ago, in Africa, the population of black rhinos approached a million; it has since been reduced to around five thousand animals. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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By the end of this century, CO2 levels could reach a level not seen — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.) — Elizabeth Kolbert

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By a pair of herpetologists. It was titled Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction? — Elizabeth Kolbert

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It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Given a shave and a new suit, the pair wrote, a Neanderthal probably would attract no more attention on a New York City subway than some of its other denizens. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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It's owing to Roth and the handful of others like her who know — Elizabeth Kolbert

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With the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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background extinction." In ordinary times - times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs - extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what's known as the background extinction rate. This rate varies from one group of organisms to another; often it's expressed in terms of extinctions per million species-years. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Marine ecosystems effectively collapsed, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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

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It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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A webcam that Iceland's environmental agency had set up. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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It's absolutely obvious that global warming has started," France's president, Jacques Chirac, said after attending the 2004 summit of leaders of the world's major industrial powers - the Group of 8. "And so we have to act responsibly, and, if we do nothing, we would bear a heavy responsibility. I had the chance to talk to the United States president about this. To tell you that I convinced him would be a total exaggeration, as you can imagine. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized is how one geologist put it to me. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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at the time of my visit he still had failed to — Elizabeth Kolbert

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The planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. 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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Once unloaded, everything has to be lugged through — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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

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At the heart of Darwin's theory, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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stored inside of them, in frigid clouds of nitrogen, are cell lines representing nearly a thousand species. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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

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The center of the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Biodiversity, there's an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is arranged around a central plaque that notes there have been five major extinction events since complex animals evolved, over five hundred million years ago. According to the plaque, "Global climate change and other causes, probably including collisions between earth and extraterrestrial objects," were responsible for these events. It goes on to observe: "Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity's transformation of the ecological landscape. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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As with any young species, this one's position is precarious. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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

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The first view I got of Suci was her prodigious backside. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Creep, clobber, squawk. Repeat. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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If there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? 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 process of doing. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, shows an angry-looking tyrannosaurus reacting with horror to the impact.) — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as "substantial biodiversity losses" that occur rapidly and are "global in extent. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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

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Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection. A lack of discipline is apparent these days in just about every aspect of American society. Why? This should be is a much larger question, one to ponder as we take out the garbage and tie our kids' shoes. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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The birds do not like this camera," Sveinsson said. "So they fly over it and shit on it. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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(Rhino horns, which are made of keratin, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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When you drive to the grocery store, your intention is not to change the world, it just happens to have that impact. So we've done a lot of things without even realizing it, and yes, just being unusual, as you say, does not put you above, in a sense, any of the other organisms with whom we share this planet. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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On our way over to see the bird, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has declined by fifty percent just in the last thirty years. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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At the Biesbosch nature center, I met up with a water-ministry official named Eelke Turkstra. Turkstra runs a program called Ruimte voor de Rivier (Room for the River), and these days his job consists not in building dikes, but in dismantling them. He explained to me that the Dutch were already seeing more rainfall than they used to. Where once the water ministry had planned on peak flows in the Rhine of no more than fifteen thousand cubic meters per second, recently it had been forced to raise that to sixteen thousand cubic meters per second and was already anticipating having to deal with eighteen thousand cubic meters per second. Rising sea levels, meanwhile, were likely to further compound the problem by impeding the flow of the river to the ocean. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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have become even more sought-after as a high-end party "drug"; at clubs in southeast Asia, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world's most endangered class of animals; it's been calculated that the group's extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of all those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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Since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Useful mnemonic for remembering the geologic periods of the last half-billion years is: Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak (Cambrian-Ordovician-Silurian-Devonian-Carboniferous-Permian-Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous). The mnemonic unfortunately runs out before the most recent periods: the Paleogene, the Neogene, and the current Quaternary. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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I traveled really to amazing places. I went to the Great Barrier Reef, I went to the Amazon, I went to the Andes, to try to bring people stories of sort of what's going on out in the world and bring this issue alive, in a way, and put it out there. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Lyell became something of a celebrity - the Steven Pinker of his generation - and — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather grim," he told me a few hours after I had arrived at One Tree. We were sitting at a beat-up picnic table, looking out over the heartbreaking blue of the Coral Sea. The island's large and boisterous population of terns was screaming in the background. Caldeira paused: "I mean, they're looking grim already. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Armadillos that, in some cases, grew to be as large as Fiat 500s. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but one weedy species. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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

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If EVACC is a sort of ark, Griffith becomes its Noah, though one on extended duty, since already he's been at things a good deal longer than forty days. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Other calculations of his show that to keep pace with the present rate of temperature change, plants and animals would have to migrate poleward by thirty feet a day, and that a molecule of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels will, in the course of its lifetime in the atmosphere, trap a hundred thousand times more heat — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. - JORGE LUIS BORGES — Elizabeth Kolbert

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After each outing, I spent hours looking through a huge volume called The Fishes of the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. Among the fish that I think I may have spotted were: tiger sharks, lemon sharks, gray reef sharks, blue-spine unicorn fish, yellow boxfish, spotted boxfish, conspicuous angelfish, Barrier Reef anemonefish, Barrier Reef chromis, minifin parrotfish, Pacific longnose parrotfish, somber sweetlips, fourspot herring, yellowfin tuna, common dolphinfish, deceiver fangblenny, yellow spotted sawtail, barred rabbitfish, blunt-headed wrasse, and striped cleaner wrasse. Reefs are — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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

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He called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning 'wing-fingered. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Suci, a Sumatran rhino, lives at the Cincinnati Zoo, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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

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

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I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have been implicated in autism changed pretty significantly between the time Neanderthal line and human line split. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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we're willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos — Elizabeth Kolbert

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According to Lamarck, there was a force - the 'power of life' - that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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A hundred years ago, in Africa, the population of black rhinos approached a million; — Elizabeth Kolbert

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How to perform an ultrasound with one arm up a rhino's rectum. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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Eating Animals closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer's point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer's credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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vaccinated every single condor - today there about four hundred — Elizabeth Kolbert

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9Among the many lessons that merge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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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 random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant. — Elizabeth Kolbert