“ Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other cr… Elizabeth Kolbert
“ In a similar vein, Jared Diamond has observed: Personally, I can’t fathom why Australia’s giants should have survived innumerable droughts in their tens of millions of years of Australian history, and… Elizabeth Kolbert
“ The author David Quammen cautions that while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it’s just amoral and in the wrong place. What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he o… Elizabeth Kolbert
“ Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life to… Elizabeth Kolbert
“ The National Academy of Sciences undertook its first major study of global warming in 1979. At that point, climate modeling was still in its infancy, and only a few groups, one led by Syukuro Manabe a… Elizabeth Kolbert
“ Trees are obviously a lot less mobile than, say, trogons—tropical birds common in Manú—or even ticks. But in a cloud forest, trees structure the ecosystem, much as corals structure a reef. Certain typ… Elizabeth Kolbert
“ The 'incredible frog hotel'—really a local bed and breakfast—...the frogs stay (in their tanks) in a block of rented rooms. Elizabeth Kolbert
“ Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up it… Elizabeth Kolbert
“ According to Lamarck, there was a force—the ‘power of life’—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex. Elizabeth Kolbert
“ In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one. Elizabeth Kolbert
“ Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions… Elizabeth Kolbert
“ Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did. Elizabeth Kolbert
