Extinction Quotes - Page 13

• If Earth ever suffers a runaway greenhouse effect (like what has happened on Venus), then our atmosphere would trap excess amounts of solar energy, the air temperature would rise, and the oceans would swiftly evaporate into the atmosphere as they sustained a rolling boil. This would be bad.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Ocean, Air, Atmosphere

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• Seventy percent of Earth's surface is water and over 99 percent is uninhabited, so you would expect nearly all impactors to hit either the ocean or desolate regions on Earth's surface. So why do movie meteors have such good aim?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Ocean, Water, Earth

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• But to carve the Grand Canyon, Earth required millions of years. To excavate Meteor Crater, the universe, using a sixty-thousand-ton asteroid traveling upward of twenty miles per second, required a fraction of a second. No offense to Grand Canyon lovers, but for my money, Meteor Crater is the most amazing natural landmark in the world.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Years, Twenties, World

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• The number of people in the world engaged in this search for catastrophic impactors totals one or two dozen. How long into the future are you willing to protect Homo sapiens on Earth? Before you answer that question, take a detour to Arizona's Meteor Crater during your next vacation.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Vacation, Two, Numbers

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• Human use of fossil fuels is altering the chemistry of the atmosphere; oceans are polluted and depleted of fish; 80 per cent of Earth's forests are heavily impacted or gone yet their destruction continues. An estimated 50,000 species are driven to extinction each year. We dump millions of tonnes of chemicals, most untested for their biological effects, and many highly toxic, into air, water and soil. We have created an ecological holocaust. Our very health and survival are at stake, yet we act as if we have plenty of time to respond.

  David Suzuki

  Ocean, Air, Years

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• We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity's sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.

  David Foreman

  May, Sake, Global Warming

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• Each time one of the medicine men dies, it's as if a library has burned down.

  Mark Plotkin

  Knowledge, Science, Men

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• We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.

  Rowan Williams

  Eye, Animal, Ecosystems

  Rowan Williams (2012). “Faith in the Public Square”, p.188, A&C Black

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• Our problem with limited resources is not primarily overpopulation; it is greed. Our problem with pollution is not the invention of fluorocarbons or mass transport; it is irresponsibility. The loss of an acre of forest every second, the mass slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the extinction of entire species of plants, insects and animals all over the world is not something that "just happens" because there are more of us human beings. It happens because the race of ruling beings put in charge has almost wholly lost its sense of stewardship. We have turned away from God.

  Winkie Pratney

  Loss, Animal, Race

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• Education is character development, harmonious completion of human personality. But what the state accomplishes in this field is dull drill, extinction of natural feeling, narrowing of the spiritual field of vision, destruction of all the deeper elements of character in man. The state can train subjects...but it can never develop free men who take their affairs into their own hands; for independent thought is the greatest danger that it has to fear.

  Rudolf Rocker

  Spiritual, Character, Independent

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• To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway.

  Jared Diamond

  Events, Normal, Wave

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• Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.

  George Santayana

  Mean, Order, Profound

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• It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.

  Bill Bryson

  Jobs, Animal, Thinking

  "Bill Bryson answers your questions". www.theguardian.com. March 10, 2005.

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• Overpopulation in the United States will become THE single greatest issue facing Americans in the 21st century. We either solve it proactively or nature will solve it brutally for us via water shortages, energy crisis, air pollution, gridlock, species extinction and worse.

  Frosty Wooldridge

  Issues, Air, Water

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• As long as a branch of science offers an abundance of problems, so long it is alive; a lack of problems foreshadows extinction or the cessation of independent development.

  David Hilbert

  Independent, Long, Development

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• Deeper than temperature and the extinction of the polar bear is the idea that we all share this beautiful, ailing planet, Democrats and Republicans alike.

  Sheryl Crow

  Beautiful, Ideas, Temperature

  "On Deception, Spin, and Losing Our Way" by Sheryl Crow, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 4, 2007.

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• If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.

  Lewis Mumford

  Self, Soul, Machines

  Lewis Mumford (1970). “The myth of the machine”

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• There is a beginning and end to all life - and to all human endeavors. Species evolve and die off. Empires rise, then break apart. Businesses grow, then fold. There are no exceptions. I'm OK with all that. Yet it pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the extirpation of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.

  Yvon Chouinard

  Pain, Culture, Plight

  Yvon Chouinard (2016). “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual”, p.16, Penguin

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• Trillions of years into the future, when all stars are gone...all parts of the cosmos will cool to the same temperature as the ever-cooling background. At that time, space travel will no longer provide refuge because even Hell will have frozen over. We may then declare that the universe has died-not with a bang, but with a whimper.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Stars, Years, Space

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• Every good journalist is aware that his trade may one day go the way of phrenology-and, what's more, the population will hardly protest the extinction.

  David Remnick

  One Day, Population, May

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• The humanity and the humility, which are very different than the biological species homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens - very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about "humando," you're talking about that particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis.

  Cornel West

  Humility, Animal, Talking

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.

  Rachel Carson

  War, Animal, Men

  Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.8, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to EMOTIONALLY comprehend the exponential function.

  Edward Teller

  Race, Inability, Function

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• An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.

  Peter Drucker

  Creativity, Innovation, Age

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• I'm quite mad by nature, and it's my craziness that has saved me from extinction.

  Marco Pantani

  Mad, Crazy People, Being Crazy

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