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We have converted huge swaths of land and ocean into human habitats where we live and grow food and harvest energy. But there's been a sea change in the past century.

Annalee Newitz

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Annalee Newitz
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 9
Blogger
Journalist
Novelist
Irvine
California
Past
Ocean
Change
Grow
Live
Huge
Swaths
Human
Century
Habitats
Humans
Food
Habitat
Land
Converted
Grows
Harvest
Energy
Sea

More quotes by Annalee Newitz

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In terms of fiction, there are a number of writers who are thinking about the future of the environment whose work complements mine. Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 is a great example, as is Tobias Buckell's novel Arctic Rising.
Annalee Newitz
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Humans are a great survivor species but our survival will be pretty grim if all of the plants and animals we depend on die out. That's why any human survival strategy has to include a plan to maintain our environment roughly in the state that it's in now.
Annalee Newitz
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Part of what I wanted to do in my book was point out that we have almost reached the point where we can prevent a mass extinction with the science and technology we have today. We can build carbon neutral cities.
Annalee Newitz
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It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.
Annalee Newitz
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To be fair, if we are having a mass extinction, we're in the early stages of it. I think it's knowing facts like that which has made me less fearful about the future. Mass extinction is a long, complicated process that we are just now beginning to understand - and likewise, we are just beginning to understand how we might prevent one.
Annalee Newitz
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One reason that we're so adaptable is that humans are excellent tool users and homebuilders. When our environment doesn't provide us with something that we need, we try to make it ourselves out of whatever is available, whether that's rock or wood or ore or DNA.
Annalee Newitz
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That said, a lot of people buy products with green in the brand name, but make no attempt to understand what it would really take to live sustainably. I think one of the most pernicious examples of magical environmental thinking is the anti-GMO movement.
Annalee Newitz
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Obviously it depends on how you define a word like evolution, because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.
Annalee Newitz
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We are headed to a radically new Earth, at least from our perspective. But from the planet's perspective, this is nothing new. As the geologist Peter Ward is fond of pointing out, we are actually heading back to a time kind of like the Miocene. The Miocene ended about 5.5 million years ago, and it was the last time that the planet had no icecaps.
Annalee Newitz
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Even though I now know that it's likely the Earth will suffer through mega-volcanoes or meteor strikes that could take out millions or billions of people, I feel less anxious about it because I actually understand what the threats are. There's nothing like researching something exhaustively to make it less terrifying.
Annalee Newitz
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Survivor species tend to have huge populations, so they can afford to lose many individuals and still survive as a species. They also tend to be small. If you're small, you need less food - which is great in a situation where famine is everywhere.
Annalee Newitz
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The fact that we have been able to perturb the carbon cycle with our industrial revolution is evidence of how vulnerable we are - because when we destroy our environments, we destroy our food and energy supplies. In short, we destroy ourselves.
Annalee Newitz
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Everything I had read in the fields of fiction and science led me to a single, dark conclusion. Humans are screwed, and so is our planet.
Annalee Newitz
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I think small animals can escape from many kinds of natural disaster more easily. There are just more places for them to hide, and more ways for them to find safe habitats. So this means that rats are set up to rule the Earth, but most of us already knew that. Now you know why.
Annalee Newitz
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I try to be realistic and pragmatic. I have a lot of hope for humanity as a species, but obviously as individuals we can be extremely flawed. We may have to go through some very terrible times in the near future, even if we ultimately survive as Homo sapiens.
Annalee Newitz
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I think it's the process of demystification, and realizing that we are not talking about some supernatural nightmare - we're talking about a natural process that the planet has gone through before, and which animals have survived before.
Annalee Newitz
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Sometimes it's hard to take everyday concerns seriously when you think about vanished ecosystems that existed 300 million years ago and were eradicated by giant explosions. My goals haven't changed, because my goal has always been to save the world!
Annalee Newitz
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In fact, the early demographer Thomas Malthus believes that the only way the human population would ever check itself was by running headlong into a disaster, like a pandemic or famine. Sometimes we get so frustrated with the slowness of human political processes that we wish a giant flaming rock would solve the problem for us.
Annalee Newitz
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I would want us to start our quest to survive mass extinction by rethinking how we build cities. Cities should be commonplaces of production, rather than consumption - they should be producing food, and fuel.
Annalee Newitz
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It's only a slight exaggeration to say we haven't progressed much beyond the invention of agriculture when it comes to our view of the natural world.
Annalee Newitz