"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 1, p. 8.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Environmental_degradation
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Environmental degradation
19 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Environmental degradation →
Related Quotes
"All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and…"
"Environmental and are at root social crises. They are caused by profound problems in the social world, by elites, and…"
"The growth and progress upon which we looked back with such pride had committed mankind to living on a scale that exc…"
"Our way of walking on the Earth has a great influence on animals and plants. We have killed so many animals and plant…"
"Using science, technology, and cheap energy, we expanded farmlands, chain-sawed forests, exploited fisheries, mined m…"
"In the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene…. Pollution …"
"Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry with global instability, deplet…"
"We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it.…"
"The Industrial Revolution still cannot be considered an unqualified success, for all the comfort and convenience enjo…"
"The human predicament was exceptional in that, empowered by a planetary larder of fossil fuels, they developed a glob…"