Elizabeth Kolbert famous quotes

03-28-2025

What's the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?
-- Elizabeth Kolbert

#Waiting #Use #Enough
People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert

#People #Focus #Too Late
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

#Loss #Sharks #Lakes
[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

#Age #Movement #Information
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

#Cutting #Fundamentals #Facts
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.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert

#Running #Errors #Light
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

#Running #Two #Rivers
Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, itâ€™s not clear that he ever really did.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert

#Nice #Men #Might
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.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert

#Essence #Climate #May
In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert

#Humanity #Extinction #Pushing
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 manâ€”the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factoriesâ€”will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert

#Distance #Men #Museums
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

#Years #Two #World
It doesnâ€™t much matter whether people care or donâ€™t care. What matters is that people change the world.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert

#What Matters #People #World
Parents want their kidsâ€™ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parentsâ€™ approval.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert

#Children #Kids #Past
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

#Kids #Shoes #Ties
Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apartâ€”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

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

#Children #Thinking #Two

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