Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and eventually, new species evolved to take their place. But for whatever reason--call it biophilia, call it care for God's creation, call it heart stopping fear--people are reluctant to be the asteroid. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

2. Responding to Brand, Wilson has observed, "We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything"Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: "We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it... We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

3. The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what's the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn't going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which often enough is nothing. This is the situation of the Devil's Hole pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish, and the Pahrump poolfish, of the northern quoll, the Campbell Island teal, and the Tristan albatross. Stick to a strict interpretation of the natural and these--along with thousands of other species--are goners. The issue at this point, is not whether we're going to alter nature, but to what end?"We are as gods and might as well get good at it," Stewart Brand, editor of the Who Earth Catalog, famously wrote in its first issue, published in 1968. Recently, in response to the whole-earth transformation that's under way, Brand has sharpened his statement: "We are as gods and we have to get good at it. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

4. 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. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

5. We got to talking about climate history and human history. In Steffensen's view, these amounted to more or less the same thing. "If you look at the output of ice cores, it has really changes the picture of the world, our view of past climates and of human evolution," he told me. "Why did human beings not make civilization fifty thousand years ago?""You know that they had just as big brains as we have today," he went on. "When you put climate in a framework, you can say, well it was an ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginnings of a culture, they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial--ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think if the climate was stable fifty thousand years ago, it would have started then. But they had no chance. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future