Elizabeth Kolbert quotes

Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist and author, renowned for her work on environmental issues, particularly climate change. Her books and articles have brought critical attention to the dangers facing the planet. She has received major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for her impactful reporting. Here are 32 of her quotes:

People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.

Elizabeth Kolbert

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the processnof doing.

Elizabeth Kolbert

It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world.

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 its bones and reassemble its genome.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

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

As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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 today amounts to little more than a rounding error.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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

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

No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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

Most of the world's major waterways have been diverted or dammed or otherwise manipulated - in the United States, only two per cent of rivers run unimpeded - and people now use half the world's readily accessible freshwater runoff.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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

Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection. A lack of discipline is apparent these days in just about every aspect of American society. Why? This should be is a much larger question, one to ponder as we take out the garbage and tie our kids' shoes.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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

Parents want their kids' approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents' approval.

Elizabeth Kolbert

The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can't find anything like us.

Elizabeth Kolbert