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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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Elizabeth Kolbert
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
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The Bronx
New York City
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Extinct
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More quotes by Elizabeth Kolbert
People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is based on burning fossil fuels, which is taking CO2 out of the ground and putting it up into the air.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.
Elizabeth Kolbert
We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive - as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would.
Elizabeth Kolbert
I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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
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
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
In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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
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
Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are changing the world very radically, very dramatically. Climate change, which I assume is one of the points you're alluding to, is at the heart of this.
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
Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.
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
