Alan Weisman

"Outside of , they were reputed to be bigger than anyone else in , with diversified investments in marijuana, cocaine, and Mexican brown heroin. Fleets of matching new began zooming around . The became one of the city's more prominent employers.** (200 pages; with photographs by Jay Dusard)"

"A generation ago, humans eluded ; with luck, we'll continue to dodge that and other mass terrors. But now we often find ourselves asking whether inadvertently we've poisoned or parboiled the planet, ourselves included. We've also used and abused water and soil so there's a lot less of each, and trampled thousands of species that probably aren't coming back. Our world, some respected voices warn, could one day degenerate into something resembling a vacant lot, where crows and rats scuttle among weeds, preying on each other. If it comes to that, at what point would things have gone so far that, for all our vaunted superior intelligence, we're not among the hardy survivors? The truth is, we don't know."

"The nature part of human nature is to make copies of ourselves — as it is with any other ."

"We’re facing some questions in this century that are existential in their nature. One is, have we inadvertently pushed so many other fellow species off this planet, species that we coevolved with, that we depend upon for our food and for all kinds of other things that they do, filtering the air, filtering the water? Have we pushed so many of them off that we have started a cascade that is ultimately leading to a that’s going to include ourselves? Second, the climate. We have lived in balance through most of the history of our species with this very thin layer of air that surrounds the planet. But then we jet-propelled our society because we discovered how to tap the energy that nature didn’t need for its own cycle, the excess carbon it had buried away. We’ve dug it all up, and we’ve burned it, and we’ve created these marvels, including the internet that you and I are speaking to each other with right now. In the process, however, we packed the atmosphere with some invisible gases that [hold heat]. We’re basically baking ourselves right now because we have created the . Are we going to be able to stop that process in time? We’re exceeding limits that scientists have warned us we should learn to live within."