Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes (1961-)

“Certainly humans can be destructive and shortsighted; they can also be forward-thinking and altruistic. Time and time again, people have demonstrated that they care about what Rachel Carson called "the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures," and that they're willing to make sacrifices on those creatures' behalf...John Muir wrote about the damage being done in the mountains of California, and this led to the creation of Yosemite National Park...”

“Certainly humans can be destructive and shortsighted; they can also be forward-thinking and altruistic. Time and time again, people have demonstrated that they care about what Rachel Carson called "the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures," and that they're willing to make sacrifices on those creatures' behalf. Alfred Newton described the slaughter that was occurring along the British coast; the result was the Act for the Preservation of Sea Birds...”

“I also think another thing that can unite people, you know, despite the clips that we just heard, is, you know, we are—we are caring. You know, these are all our fellow creatures on the planet. And the pope, for example, is working on an environmental encyclical, I read, and he has a great quote from just a couple months ago, where he said, “God always forgives. People occasionally forgive. But nature never forgives. You drive a creature extinct, that creature is not coming back." This is, you know, not me; this is the pope. And so, I think that there is a potential—I do think people care. You know, basically, it cuts across a lot of different ideologies and groups about, you know, this planet.”

“Georges Cuvier was a great naturalist from the beginning of the 19th century, so right around 1800, and he was the first person to really say organisms go extinct...And Georges Cuvier came along and said, you know, really, essentially, if they’re out there, we would have seen them. We haven’t seen them: They’re gone. And he posited this whole lost world, which he then proceeded to start to uncover. So a lot of the animal names that we have now—for example, pterodactyl—he came up with. He was the first person to identify a pterodactyl. And his theory was that animals only went extinct in these catastrophic waves—you know, something happened, the planet changed; otherwise, why else would they go extinct? And then a naturalist named Charles Lyell, who was Charles Darwin’s mentor, came along, and he said, “That’s ridiculous. You know, we never see these catastrophes. They don’t happen. Only—the only way the Earth changes is very, very, very gradually, and things go extinct very gradually, and the world changes very gradually.” And that became sort of the doctrine for a very long time, over a hundred years, until the Alvarezes came along and identified an asteroid impact as the event that had done in the dinosaurs—and many other creatures, I should say.”