Kolbert Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

so Durrant stroked the area around his cloaca — Elizabeth Kolbert

What are the Chinese doing, what are we doing, what are - so we need, both the developed world and the developing world, really need to be moving, once again, getting all your arrows in the same direction if you want to have any impact. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

Roth pulled a second glove over the first and grabbed what looked like a video game remote. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

Several decades ago, a detachment of the American right cut itself loose from reason, and it has been drifting along happily ever since. If the birthers are more evidently kooky than the global-warming 'skeptics' or the death-panellers or the supply-siders or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they are, in their fundamental disregard for the facts, actually mainstream. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

The windowless room where the po'ouli cells are kept alive - sort of - is called the Frozen Zoo. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

Parents want their kids' approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents' approval. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

The leaky-replacement hypothesis - assuming for the moment that it's correct - provides the strongest possible evidence for the closeness of Neanderthals and modern humans. The two may or may not have fallen in love; still, they made love. Their hybrid children may or may not have been regarded as monsters; nevertheless someone - perhaps Neanderthals at first, perhaps humans - cared for them. Some of these hybrids survived to have kids of their own, who, in turn, had kids, and so on up to the present day. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. One — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

In a similar vein, Jared Diamond has observed: Personally, I can't fathom why Australia's giants should have survived innumerable droughts in their tens of millions of years of Australian history, and then have chosen to drop dead almost simultaneously (at least on a time scale of millions of years) precisely and just coincidentally when the first humans arrived. — 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 that are crashing. — Elizabeth Kolbert

and handjobs on crows. — Elizabeth Kolbert

The whole new layer on top of what I was thinking about in the nineteen-seventies is climate change," Lovejoy told me. He has written that "in the face of climatic change, even natural climatic change, human activity has created an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity," the result of which could be "one of the greatest biotic crises of all time. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

If you're a conservation biologist in many fields, you're seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they're chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in. — Elizabeth Kolbert

vaccinated every single condor - today there about four hundred — 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 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

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

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

As Rachel Carson once observed, referring to a very different but at the same time profoundly similar problem: "Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

Recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

The retreat of the Arctic sea ice, the warming of the oceans, the rapid shrinking of the glaciers, the redistribution of species, the thawing of the permafrost - these are all new phenomena. It is only in the last five or ten years that global warming has finally emerged from the background "noise" of climate variability. And even so, the changes that can be seen lag behind the changes that have been set in motion. The warming that has been observed so far is probably only about half the amount required to bring the planet back into energy balance. This means that even if carbon dioxide were to remain stable at today's levels, temperatures would still continue to rise, glaciers to melt, and weather patterns to change for decades to come. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

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

Durrant stopped off at a commissary of sorts to pick up a selection of his favorite snacks. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

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

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

higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

having freed ourselves from the constraints of evolution, humans nevertheless remain dependent on the earth's biological and geochemical systems. By disrupting these systems - cutting down tropical rainforests, altering the composition of the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans - we're putting our own survival in danger. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

Such is the economy of nature," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken." When, as President, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come upon live mastodons roaming the region. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

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

One of the reasons that people, many people, many environmentalists are critical of President [Barack] Obama's policies towards global warming is on the one hand he says the right things and he says he's committed to trying to reduce our current emissions. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Then he took me to look at the Maastricht animal, still today one of the world's most famous fossils. (Though the Netherlands has repeatedly asked for it back, the French have held on to it for more than two hundred years.) — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the story that we've been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn't particularly special. What I'm trying to convey my book [The Sixth Extinction] is that we are unusual. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

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

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

within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve. — Elizabeth Kolbert

(One of Crutzen's fellow Nobelists reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife, — Elizabeth Kolbert

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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

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

A single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist. — Elizabeth Kolbert

It was titled "Helping a Species Go Extinct. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

Ocean acidification played a role in at least two of the Big Five extinctions (the end-Permian and the end-Triassic) and quite possibly it was a major factor in a third (the end-Cretaceous). There — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

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

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

It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth's tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confronted with a fluctuating and unpredictable climate, 'the last thing you'd want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it'. It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might actually be induced by a rise in temperatures. The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates and increase cloud cover, leading in the higher latitudes to more persistent accumulations of snow. In fact, global warming could plausibly, if paradoxically, lead to powerful localized cooling in North America and northern Europe. — Bill Bryson

After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multiseason "impact winter. — Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

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

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

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