David Quammen Quote
When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land. Wilson meant wild animals. He omitted consideration of livestock, such as the domestic cow ( Bos taurus ), of which the present global population is about 1.3 billion. We are therefore only five times as numerous as our cattle (and probably less massive in total, since they’re each considerably bigger than a human). But of course they wouldn’t exist in such excess without us. A trillion pounds of cows, fattening in feedlots and grazing on landscapes that formerly supported wild herbivores, are just another form of human impact. They’re a proxy measure of our appetites, and we are hungry. We are prodigious, we are unprecedented. We are phenomenal. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.
When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land. Wilson meant wild animals. He omitted consideration of livestock, such as the domestic cow ( Bos taurus ), of which the present global population is about 1.3 billion. We are therefore only five times as numerous as our cattle (and probably less massive in total, since they’re each considerably bigger than a human). But of course they wouldn’t exist in such excess without us. A trillion pounds of cows, fattening in feedlots and grazing on landscapes that formerly supported wild herbivores, are just another form of human impact. They’re a proxy measure of our appetites, and we are hungry. We are prodigious, we are unprecedented. We are phenomenal. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.
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About David Quammen
A collection of Quammen's drafts, research, and correspondence is housed in Texas Tech University's Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. The collection consists of approximately 63 boxes of publicly available literary production, artifacts, maps, and other papers dated from 1856–2014.