Latest Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive - as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Art, Animal, Kind

  "Pulitzer Winner Elizabeth Kolbert on Mass Extinctions - and Our Own Eventual One". Interview With Benjy Hansen-Bundy, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2014.

• Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct. It depends what "eventually" means. But the idea that were going to be around for the rest of global history...I don't think there's any scientist who would suggest that is true. It could be millions of years from now. We may leave descendants that are humanlike.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Mean, Thinking, People

  "Pulitzer Winner Elizabeth Kolbert on Mass Extinctions - and Our Own Eventual One". Interview With Benjy Hansen-Bundy, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2014.

• Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  People, Disease, Planets

  Source: www.pbs.org

• You're an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can't anymore, and that's another way we're just changing the surface of the Earth in very dramatic ways.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Moving, Animal, Earth

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Country, Giving, Climate

  Source: www.pbs.org

• You've got to do everything, everything's got to be pointing in the same direction and you've got to really turn this whole economic engine from one that's based on fossil fuels to one that isn't.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Fuel, Fossils, Economic

  Source: www.pbs.org

• What are the Chinese doing, what are we doing, what are - so we need, both the developed world and the developing world, really need to be moving, once again, getting all your arrows in the same direction if you want to have any impact.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Moving, Arrows, Impact

  Source: www.pbs.org

• One of the reasons that people, many people, many environmentalists are critical of President [Barack] Obama's policies towards global warming is on the one hand he says the right things and he says he's committed to trying to reduce our current emissions.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Hands, People, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

• People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is based on burning fossil fuels, which is taking CO2 out of the ground and putting it up into the air.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Air, People, Needs

  Source: www.pbs.org

• There are a lot of things that we could do to minimize what we're doing, but we're not getting back those frogs that I saw that no longer exist.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Frogs, Saws

  Source: www.pbs.org

• For a long time, science has gone in the direction of sort of putting people in their place. We learned that the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, the Earth revolves around the sun; we learned that we're just another species, evolved, like all other species, so we're just another animal, really.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Animal, Long, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• When you drive to the grocery store, your intention is not to change the world, it just happens to have that impact. So we've done a lot of things without even realizing it, and yes, just being unusual, as you say, does not put you above, in a sense, any of the other organisms with whom we share this planet.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Impact, Doe, Done

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I traveled really to amazing places. I went to the Great Barrier Reef, I went to the Amazon, I went to the Andes, to try to bring people stories of sort of what's going on out in the world and bring this issue alive, in a way, and put it out there.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Issues, People, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

• As soon as you acknowledge that we're changing the planet on this scale, that it has very potentially massive repercussions and very damaging repercussions, then the next question is okay, what are we going to do about it?

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Next, Scales, Planets

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are changing the world very radically, very dramatically. Climate change, which I assume is one of the points you're alluding to, is at the heart of this.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Heart, Climate, Example

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Neanderthals were pretty smart, and if we actively killed them off, then probably we did so in the same way that humans kill each other.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Smart, Neanderthals, Way

  "Ask the Author Live: Elizabeth Kolbert on Neanderthals". The New Yorker interview, www.newyorker.com. August 12, 2011.

• I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Thinking, Humans, Havens

  "Ask the Author Live: Elizabeth Kolbert on Neanderthals". The New Yorker interview, www.newyorker.com. August 12, 2011.

• It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Native American, Mean, Dna

  "Ask the Author Live: Elizabeth Kolbert on Neanderthals". The New Yorker interview, www.newyorker.com. August 12, 2011.

• Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that can be looked at to trace matrilineal descent.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Mother, Children, Dna

  "Ask the Author Live: Elizabeth Kolbert on Neanderthals". The New Yorker interview, www.newyorker.com. August 12, 2011.

• I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have been implicated in autism changed pretty significantly between the time Neanderthal line and human line split.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Mean, Autism, Neanderthals

  "Ask the Author Live: Elizabeth Kolbert on Neanderthals". The New Yorker interview, www.newyorker.com. August 12, 2011.

• We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action, so I'm going to leave it to the reader.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Talking, Action, Kind

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  People, Records, Fossils

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Watches, Extinction, Serious

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Most of us live in parts of the world where we don't expect to see much, and we wouldn't necessarily notice things that are crashing.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  World

  "Pulitzer Winner Elizabeth Kolbert on Mass Extinctions - and Our Own Eventual One". Interview with Benjy Hansen-Bundy, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2014.

• There's this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It's the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, "Okay, well, that's the norm."

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Ideas, Guy, Generations

  "Pulitzer Winner Elizabeth Kolbert on Mass Extinctions - and Our Own Eventual One". Interview with Benjy Hansen-Bundy, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2014.