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.
A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.
The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.
Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is under way. Having discovered subterranean reserves of energy, humans begin to change the composition of the atmosphere.
With the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.
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The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”)
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 than was released in producing it.
Every year more non-indigenous species of mammals, birds, amphibians, turtles, lizards, and snakes are brought into the U.S. than the country has native species of these groups.
Within the next fifty years or so “all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.
We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.
Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized” is how one geologist put it to me.
A single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.
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Powdered horn is snorted like cocaine.)
Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has declined by fifty percent just in the last thirty years.
Assuming that humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the oceans will continue to absorb carbon dioxide and will become increasingly acidified.
The birds do not like this camera,” Sveinsson said. “So they fly over it and shit on it.
Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues.
All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul.
On Easter Island concluded that it wasn’t humans who deforested the landscape; rather, it was the rats
These days every wild place has, to one degree or another, been cut into and cut off.
The crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.
How to perform an ultrasound with one arm up a rhino’s rectum.
As a general rule, the variety of life is most impoverished at the poles and richest at low latitudes.
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.
Some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere.
Coral cover in the Caribbean has in recent decades declined by close to eighty percent.
How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island?
Asian elephants have declined by fifty percent over the last three generations.
Of the world’s eight species of bears, six are categorized either as “vulnerable” to extinction or “endangered.
Don’t step on any dead bats.” It took me a moment to realize he was joking.
