Themes

"In the 1970s, we started noticing extinctions taking place right before our eyes. Attenborough makes the point that no one wanted animals to become extinct, but that lack of awareness and a focus on personal benefits obscured the unfolding tragedy. Having largely eliminated or isolated ourselves from predators, achieved control over diseases, and mastered food to order, nothing was left to restrict or stop us."

"Humans… have pursued our distinctively destructive path for a sliver of the total biotime in this corner of the galaxy. This most recent reshaping of nature began 3.3 million years ago, when an australopithecine made stone tools to butcher animal carcasses on the shores of the Jade Sea, or Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Weapons came later, with the use of stone-tipped thrusting spears by another hominid in South Africa 500,000 years ago, and the development of the bow and arrow by early humans 71,000 years ago. Projectile weapons, like the bow and arrow, allowed us to kill large animals without being excessively brave. Through a combination of these weapons, coupled with traps and fire, humans saw to the extinction of woolly mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed cats and ground sloths as the ice sheets receded and we pursued the animals to their last redoubts. A South American armadillo-like animal called Glyptodon was another victim of the genocide. This slow-moving vegetarian was as big as a Volkswagen Beetle and served as an easy target for hunters who ate its meat and crawled into its enormous shells for shelter. For many years, biologists argued that climate change was the most important factor in these extinctions, but more and more evidence points to the correspondence between the arrival of humans and the disappearance of large mammals. The case was pretty obvious for the spectacular bird life of islands, with a giant turkey called Sylviornis disappearing from New Caledonia soon after the prehistoric Lapita people arrived in their canoes 3,500 years ago, and the elimination of numerous species of flightless moa when the Maori reached New Zealand around AD 1300. Extinction has been reworking nature from its beginnings, but no animal has come close to having the impact that humans have had. With remarkable speed, our evolution walloped life with the power of the asteroid that obliterated the dinosaurs. The average size of mammals increased steadily throughout the Cenozoic Era that followed the crash of the Chicxulub asteroid in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago. Then, around 100,000 years ago, the big animals began to disappear. The extinctions accelerated 50,000 years ago and the total mass of wild mammals has now plunged to a sixth of its pre-human maximum. According to some models, the domestic cow is on track to become the largest remaining mammal. Scepticism surrounding these doom-laden predictions about the precarious nature of nature is understandable. It takes imagination to escape from the influence of the diminishing expectations of each generation. Nobody has seen a live moa since the fourteenth century and so their absence does not upset New Zealanders today. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died… in 1914, and the most recent sky-darkening mass migrations of these birds took flight in the nineteenth century. We cannot miss something that has never existed for us. We read about extinction as an approaching horror and ecosystem damage as a work in progress rather than a done deal. But the destruction is unabated. Despite the publicity given to deforestation, tropical woodlands continue to disappear at an annual rate of 2.7 million hectares in Brazil, 1.3 million hectares in Indonesia and 0.6 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Turning to the direct effects of climate change, one-third of the world’s coral reefs were damaged by high water temperatures in 2016. More than 90 per cent of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was affected by the process called bleaching, which happens when the dinoflagellate algae abandon their animal partners in the exquisite coral symbiosis. When reefs recover from bleaching, the original animals are replaced by sluggish coral species that support impoverished communities of marine life. This is not a normal phenomenon."

"We are such great innovators that we have devised a way to be so successful that we are eliminating other species by transforming their habitat into ours serving only us and a few (both domesticated and wild) species who can tolerate living with us. By doing so, we are sawing off the limb upon which we are perched because those species support our own existence. Is it really any surprise that we hear constantly about alligator attacks, bear attacks, whale attacks, and shark attacks? Those four links go mainly to fatal attacks and not just injuries sustained by such attacks, but it should be fairly obvious to even the casual observer that we often forget that we don't truly "own" the areas where these creatures live. They live there, too, and we are encroaching upon their habitat. We have created the illusion in our minds that we are "safe" in these areas simply because we have labeled the land "ours." Nature doesn't recognize our labels, unfortunately, and one must be aware of this fact whenever [we enter] areas where wild animals live."

"The most wretched of all current trends is of course the mass extinction of organisms, which has been escalating for decades and is still increasing in magnitude."

"Long before the 20th century, the trajectory was set. Mesopotamia formalized private property and profit. Rome industrialized deforestation, mining, and overfishing. Every civilization reshaped ecosystems to sustain its growth and eventually collapsed when the foundations that supported it were exhausted. Deep time offers an even harder truth: humans began erasing biodiversity more than two million years ago. Civilization didn’t invent destruction; it scaled it. What changed in the last century was the speed, the technology, and the reach of decision-makers who could alter entire biomes with a single signature."

"When we look at the extinction of megafaunal animals in isolation, it ignores the chain reaction that led to the loss of tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands, of soil microorganisms and other tiny creatures."

"Megafaunal extinctions were just one act in the grand drama of the sixth mass extinction, which has been and will continue to include a plethora of plants and animals."

"Around two million years ago, a staggering ninety percent of the mammalian biomass in Africa and Asia was made up of elephants, hippos, and their rhinoceros-like buddies. This impressive lineup included at least nine species of elephants, four species of hippos, two species of rhinos, and a large cousin of the rhino-tapir-horse family known as Ancylotherium. The biggest shake-up in megafaunal species in Africa happened about 1.4 million years ago, roughly 300,000 years after Homo erectus made its debut and Australopithecus had disappeared. Since then, Africa and Asia have continued to experience megafaunal extinction events in fits and starts. Interestingly, during this two-million-year stretch, no large animal species went extinct on continents devoid of hominids, highlighting a unique and telling chapter in the evolutionary tale of the respective regions. The biodiversity of megafaunal species that roamed Europe and North America before humans showed up paints a fascinating picture—species like woolly mammoths, mastodons, and woolly rhinoceroses may have made up about 50% of the mammalian biomass in these regions. While this figure is less than what we saw in the Afroasian region, the megafaunal lineup in Europe and North America included some hefty ungulates that outclassed today’s bison in size. For instance, three species of bison, including the giant bison (Bison latifrons), were larger than the modern bison (Bison bison), but were swept away following the arrival of Homo sapiens. Although primary productivity remained unchanged with the extinction of the largest megafaunal animals, their loss created a vacuum that was quickly filled by a surge in populations of smaller critters, like bison and wildebeest. The absence of very large animals led to noticeably different effects on plants and soils, as more numerous smaller animals took their place. Overlooking the finite nature of the planet's primary productivity and the unique impacts of these smaller, more abundant species has fueled the persistence of [these] ecological myths […]. These misconceptions have led to a mixed bag of largely ineffective conservation efforts—some genuinely well-intentioned and others disingenuous."

"On a finite planet where a great number of organisms share the same space and depend on the same finite products of photosynthesis, the continuous expansion of one species results in the contraction of others. There is nothing more sacred to humans than our pets. While human overpopulation is occasionally mentioned in passing, pets always receive a free pass."

"The numerous insults on the planet that humanity has created over the last 100 thousand years have achieved the capacity to greatly exacerbate any natural or human-caused event. We’re seeing this around the planet with more and more frequency. Global warming didn’t start the wildfires in Spain, Portugal, the United States, Canada, and Australia, but thanks to climate change, instead of inconsequential wildfires, they became roaring infernos. Hurricanes have always happened, but climate change is making their effect much more significant. Most people don’t understand that human population density, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity were the likely drivers of coronavirus becoming a pandemic. A loss in biodiversity usually results in a few species replacing many. These few species tend to be the ones hosting pathogens that can spread to humans and remaining animals. Rather than a loss of biodiversity, the problem is a highly contagious virus and a lack of commitment to wearing masks and social distancing. For most people […] those were wildfire, hurricane, and virus problems. When peering through the small keyhole of their existence, climate change, biodiversity loss, or population density is nowhere in sight."

"For the last 2.6 million years, the planet has experienced severe climatic fluctuations, during which the Earth waxed and waned between frigid ice ages and warm interglacial periods. Until approximately 60,000 years ago, there were few apparent extinctions. Suddenly, hundreds of species of mammals, flightless birds, and reptiles went extinct largely over the course of 50,000 years. These extinctions marked the beginning of a tidal wave of disappearing species that is cresting today. Because large body size is correlated with slow breeding, the largest animals are more susceptible to extinction."

"There are no known complex organisms from other epochs that could throw long-range weapons they had fashioned. It allowed our ancestors to kill animals without touching them or they themselves being touched. To kill something, other organisms must catch them with their feet, claws, or teeth. Spiders could be considered an exception because of catching prey with webs. However, they still must kill their prey manually. The necessity of dispatching prey at close quarters levels the predator-prey playing field. The inability of any other known organism to throw was likely pivotal in providing relatively stable ecosystems for millions of years, before humans developed the throwing ability, only interrupted by geological or astrological events. While at first it was throwing rocks and spears, over the millennia we’ve gradually learned how to separate ourselves further and further from both predators and prey. The first improvement was the atlatl, or woomera, an implement allowing more energy and greater velocity to be applied to the throwing of a spear. The throwing arm together with the atlatl acts to increase the length of a lever. The premise is the same with fishing poles. Although challenging, it is possible to catch fish simply by hand-throwing a fishing line with a lure or bait. Native fishermen have been doing it for decades. However, much more line speed and distance can be attained using a fishing rod because it increases the length of the lever. Or look no further than your local park: ball throwers with those relatively new but already ubiquitous plastic grabbing sticks use the exact same principle for tossing balls for dogs to retrieve. The atlatl is believed to have been in use by early hominids in some parts of the world 30,000 years ago. The next significant step in weaponry was the bow and arrow. The oldest known evidence of arrows comes from the Sibudu Cave in South Africa. The bone-and-stone arrowheads found there are approximately 60,000–70,000 years old. Despite the early time frame, archery doesn’t appear to have been in widespread use until after the planet had lost most of its large mammals. The bow was an important weapon for both hunting and warfare from about 8,000 years ago to the mid-17th century. Bow-and-arrow use was almost certainly contributory to the uptick in animal and bird extinctions during that time frame. More recently, guns, bombs, and weaponized drones kill with limited or no interaction between the aggressor and victim. Humans have essentially turned killing into an enhanced video game."

"We are currently, in a systematic manner, exterminating all non-human living beings."

"We already have a planet -- Earth! Right here! And it's going to be here for at least another twenty years! Fifteen, if you use a plastic straw!"

"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the form of environmental devastation. Of the earth’s estimated 10 million species, 300,000 have vanished in the past fifty years. Each year, 3,000 to 30,000 species become extinct, an all-time high for the last 65 million years. Within one hundred years, between one-third and two-thirds of all birds, animals, plants, and other species will be lost. Nearly 25 percent of the 4,630 known mammal species are now threatened with extinction, along with 34 percent of fish, 25 percent of amphibians, 20 percent of reptiles, and 11 percent of birds. Even more, species are having population declines. Environmental scientists speak of an “omega point” at which the vast interconnected networks of Earth’s ecologies are so weakened that human existence is no longer possible."

"Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing does—but it has the capacity to name things. As with any young species, this one’s position is precarious. Its numbers are small, and its range restricted to a slice of eastern Africa. Slowly its population grows, but quite possibly then it contracts again—some would claim nearly fatally—to just a few thousand pairs. The members of the species are not particularly swift or strong or fertile. They are, however, singularly resourceful. Gradually they push into regions with different climates, different predators, and different prey. None of the usual constraints of habitat or geography seem to check them. They cross rivers, plateaus, mountain ranges. In coastal regions, they gather shellfish; farther inland, they hunt mammals. Everywhere they settle, they adapt and innovate. On reaching Europe, they encounter creatures very much like themselves, but stockier and probably brawnier, who have been living on the continent far longer. They interbreed with these creatures and then, by one means or another, kill them off. The end of this affair will turn out to be exemplary. As the species expands its range, it crosses paths with animals twice, ten, and even twenty times its size: huge cats, towering bears, turtles as big as elephants, sloths that stand fifteen feet tall. These species are more powerful and often fiercer. But they are slow to breed and are wiped out. Although a land animal, our species—ever inventive—crosses the sea. It reaches islands inhabited by evolution’s outliers: birds that lay footlong eggs, pig-sized hippos, giant skinks. Accustomed to isolation, these creatures are ill-equipped to deal with the newcomers or their fellow travelers (mostly rats). Many of them, too, succumb. The process continues, in fits and starts, for thousands of years, until the species, no longer so new, has spread to practically every corner of the globe. At this point, several things happen more or less at once to allow Homo sapiens, as it has come to call itself, to reproduce at an unprecedented rate. In a single century the population doubles; the doubles again, and then again. Vast forests are razed. Humans do this deliberately, in order to feed themselves. Less deliberately, they shift organisms from one continent to another, reassembling the biosphere."

"Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct."

"Humans have caused extinctions since leaving Africa 60,000+ years ago; in the last twelve millennia post-foraging societies have systematically increased their exploitation and control of the Earth. Humans groups rearrange the natural world in their own image, taking the homes and food of other species for their own."

"It's no wonder that we react so nonchalantly to the ever-mounting statistics about the crisis of mass extinction. We have a habit of taking this information with surprising calm. We don't weep. We don't get worked up. Why? Because we see humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of the living community. Those species are out there, in the environment. They aren't in here; they aren't part of us. It is not surprising that we behave this way. After all, this is the core principle of capitalism: that the world is not really alive, and it is certainly not our kin, but rather just stuff to be extracted and discarded – and that includes most of the human beings living here too. From its very first principles, capitalism has set itself at war against life itself."

"A few years ago, virtually no one was talking about this . . . everyone just assumed that the web of life would always be intact. Now the situation is so severe that the United Nations has set up a special task force to monitor it: the (IPBES). In 2019, it published its – a groundbreaking assessment of the planet's living species, drawing on 15,000 studies from around the world and representing the consensus of hundreds of scientists. It found an accelerating rate of global , unprecedented in human history."

"Life may be unique to Earth. Even if single-celled organisms can readily evolve in conditions that exist on millions or billions of other planets, we have no actual evidence that complex, multi-cellular life exists anywhere else in the vastness of space. Bacteria appeared on our planet roughly 3.7 billion years ago; by 2 billion years ago, the tree of life was branching into what would become a stunning web of creatures, huge and tiny. Plants, animals, and fungi proliferated, formed relationships, and produced ecosystems. The result was a planet full of life, and one whose atmosphere, temperature, chemical composition, and weather are all largely shaped by the side effects of the strategies that organisms use to thrive. However, in a matter of mere centuries, we humans are unraveling the web of life and triggering a mass extinction event that is likely to impact virtually all species on the Earth, and to destabilize the fundamental planetary systems upon which we too depend. Mass extinctions have happened before. The web of life is, paradoxically, both resilient and fragile. On five previous occasions (most recently the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 65 million years ago) our world lost up to 95 percent of its species. The current wave of extinctions that’s being triggered by humans is, so far, not on the same scale, but it is proceeding far more rapidly than previous ones. We humans represent a new kind of threat to the rest of life: our development of language, tool-making, and fire-spreading rendered us hyper-effective hunters and foragers. Tens of thousands of years ago, we were already reshaping landscapes and impacting wildlife. Our ability to expand our own habitat has generated unwanted results: some prey animals were hunted to extinction, and in a process of competitive exclusion, humans caused many local extirpations by appropriating the resources of habitats for themselves. These unintended effects then impacted humans themselves, often by compromising their food supply. Therefore, over time, humans who stayed in any given ecosystem long enough to learn its limits embraced cultural traditions to moderate their demands on it. However, since the start of the European conquest of most of the rest of the world, and especially since society’s rapid adoption of fossil fuels starting around 1800, human impact on the biosphere has accelerated at a breathtaking pace. Expanding human populations and associated land use changes, industrial agriculture, industrial forestry, industrial-scale fishing, proliferation of toxic chemicals, and climate change are decimating native species of plants and animals around the world. According to some estimates, populations of many non-domesticated species have declined, on average, by 70 percent, and the pace of species extinctions has quickened to 100 or more times the usual or “background” rate. What will the world come to look like if these trends continue? In one scenario, Earth will have become fully domesticated in a century or two, so that humans and machines control planetary systems (including climate patterns, ocean currents, the water cycle, and the carbon cycle). In this possible case, very little of wild nature will be left. In the far more likely scenario, the unraveling of the web of life and the destabilization of planetary systems will lead to the collapse not just of biodiversity but civilization as well. Is it too late to save biodiversity and the living Earth? … I’ll argue that only a collective effort to put wild nature at the center of our priorities will prevent its devastation and the possible disappearance of our own species, among countless others."

"We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet’s life-forms — an estimated 8,760 species die off per year — because, simply put, there are too many people. Most of these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food and other resources. The , , , , , , and are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth, as E. O. Wilson says, is "the monster on the land." Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster than they did before the arrival of humans. If the current rate of extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms left on the planet, its members scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil fuels and perhaps air until they too disappear. Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the , the age of mammals, and entering the Eremozoic — the era of solitude. As long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland."

"SEVENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HOMO sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction. Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals. In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in the lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of. Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?"

"Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many [if not all] species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid."

"The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark."

"Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology."

"For a long time I would go to bed early."

"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."

"It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer."

"1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."

"It was a dark and stormy night."

"The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east."

"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife."

"She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him."

"The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home."

"When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta."

"Nothing ever begins."

"The primroses were over."

"Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face."

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

"Jasper Maskelyne was drinking a glass of razor blades when the war began."

"The telephone was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse."

"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes...."

"‘He's just a pore lonesome wife-left feller,’ the more understanding said of Fitz Linkhorn, ‘losin' his old lady is what crazied him.’ / ‘That man is so contrary,’ the less understanding said, ‘if you throwed him in the river he'd float upstream.’ / For what had embittered him Fitz had no name."

"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only."

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

"Mrs. Eva Marie Olinski always gave good answers."

"It's hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news."

"I am the vampire Lestat."