Best Quotes from The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert with Page Numbers

“It is considered a lucky symbol in Panama; its image is (or at least used to be) printed on lottery tickets.”

“A person walking along it would see so many golden frogs sunning themselves on the banks that, as one herpetologist who made the trip many times put it to me, ‘it was insane—absolutely insane.’”

“The biologists had hoped to have a new lab facility constructed in El Valle, but it was not ready in time.”

“We are losing all these amphibians before we even know that they exist.”

“Every one of them has the same value to me as an elephant.”

“Even the regular people in El Valle, they notice it...‘What happened to the frogs? We don’t hear them calling anymore.’”

“The point is to be able to take them back, which every day I see more like a fantasy.”

“Times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs—extinction takes place only very rarely.”

“During a mass extinction, vast swathes of the tree are cut short, as if attacked by crazed, axe-wielding madmen.”

“But this ‘condition of relative safety is punctuated at rare intervals by a vastly higher risk.’”

"Extinction may be the first scientific idea that kids today have to grapple with."

"the idea did not crop up during the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance, when the word 'fossil' was used to refer to anything dug up from the ground."

"The chain of being...was so unbreakable that the idea of extinction could hardly be conceived."

"He could be charming and he could be vicious; he was a visionary and, at the same time, a reactionary."

"What has become of these two enormous animals of which one no longer finds any living traces?"

"If so many lost species have been restored in so little time, how many must be supposed to exist still in the depths of the earth?"

"But what was this primitive earth? And what revolution was able to wipe it out?"

"Life on earth has often been disturbed by terrible events. Living organisms without number have been the victims of these catastrophes."

"The thread of operations is broken. Nature has changed course, and none of the agents she employs today would have been sufficient to produce her former works."

"the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us."

The present is the key to the past.

Given enough time, Lyell argued, repeated quakes could raise an entire mountain chain many thousands of feet high.

I have always thought that the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind.

Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good.

The whole subject of the extinction of species has been involved in the most gratuitous mystery.

Extinction and evolution were to each other the warp and weft of life’s fabric.

The theory of natural selection is grounded on the belief that each new variety, and ultimately each new species, is produced and maintained by having some advantage over those with which it comes into competition.

If this is not cruelty, what is?

Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin.

What was true of evolution should also hold for extinction.

"In science, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart."

"The evidence of the asteroid’s impact lies in a thin layer of clay about halfway up the gorge."

"I wondered what had prompted all that fingering. Was it simple curiosity? A form of geologic rubbernecking? Or was it something more empathetic: the desire to make contact—however attenuated—with a lost world?"

"Just think about it for a moment. Here you have a challenge to a uniformitarian viewpoint that basically every geologist and paleontologist had been trained in, as had their professors and their professors’ professors, all the way back to Lyell."

"The apparent mass extinction is an artifact of statistics and poor understanding of the taxonomy."

"Even if all of these species died out at exactly the same moment, it would appear that the white-circle species had vanished much earlier, simply because its remains are rarer."

"There’s nothing ammonites were doing wrong. Their hatchlings would have been like plankton, which for all of their existence would have been terrific."

"Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow survived the impact. But it does not follow from this that they (or we) are any better adapted."

"In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning: how could a creature be adapted, either well or ill, for conditions it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history?"

"Fossils represent a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect."

"In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty."

"Crisis led to insight, and the old framework gave way to a new one."

"Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world."

"Had the list of survivors been one jot different, then so would the world today."

"Here writ very, very small is the fate of the dinosaurs, the mosasaurs, and the ammonites—a once highly successful form relegated to oblivion."

"Every extinction event appears to be unhappy—and fatally so—in its own way."

"We have already left a record that is now indelible."

"The Anthropocene will be marked by a unique biostratigraphical signal, a product of the current extinction event on the one hand and of the human propensity for redistributing life on the other."

"It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch."

"A single graptolite fossil thus represents a whole community, which drifted or more probably swam along as a single entity."

"If you ask me what’s going to happen in the future, I think the strongest evidence we have is there is going to be a reduction in biodiversity."

"Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming’s 'equally evil twin.'"

"Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time."

"It is the rate of CO2 release that makes the current great experiment so geologically unusual, and quite probably unprecedented in earth history."

"Once unloaded, everything has to be lugged through the narrow streets and up to the local marine biological station, which occupies a steep promontory overlooking the sea."

"This year alone the oceans will absorb two and a half billion tons of carbon, and next year it is expected they will absorb another two and a half billion tons."

"Thanks to all this extra CO2, the pH of the oceans’ surface waters has already dropped, from an average of around 8.2 to an average of around 8.1."

"You know how normally in a polluted harbor you’ve got just a few species that are weedlike and able to cope with massively fluctuating conditions?"

"It took Hall-Spencer two years to get back to Ischia. He did not yet have funding for his project, and so he had trouble getting anyone to take him seriously."

"Any mussel or barnacle or keel worm that can adapt to lower pH in a time frame of centuries presumably already would have done so."

“Corals build the architecture of the ecosystem.”

“If you don’t have a building, where are the tenants going to go?”

“Coral reefs rank high amongst the wonderful objects in the world.”

“It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct.”

“The coming centuries may see more ocean acidification than the past 300 million years.”

“Corals have mastered the alchemy of calcification.”

“Corals engage in vast communal building projects that stretch over generations.”

“The way corals change the world—might be likened to the way that humans do.”

“A few decades ago I, myself, would have thought it ridiculous to imagine that reefs might have a limited lifespan.”

“If current emissions trends continue, all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.”

"Trees are stunning. They are very beautiful. It's true they take a little more appreciation."

"It's kind of like wine; once you start to understand it, it becomes more intriguing."

"In your field of vision is one out of every nine bird species on the planet."

"Organic development and abundance of vitality gradually increase from the poles towards the equator."

"Evolution has had a fair chance in the tropics."

"Daily and hourly, scrutinizing every variation, even the slightest."

"The verdant carpet which a luxuriant Flora spreads over the surface of the earth is not woven equally in all parts."

"We are getting better governance."

"A reserve that’s fixed in place is no stay against loss."

"This is a qualitatively different set of stresses that we are putting on species."

The BDFFP has been called 'the most important ecological experiment ever done.'

With its square, completely unnatural outline, Reserve 1202 represents, increasingly, the shape of the world.

In the face of climatic change, even natural climatic change, human activity has created an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity.

The jungle teems, but in a manner mostly beyond the reach of the human senses.

A natural corollary to high species diversity is low population density, and that’s a recipe for speciation—isolation by distance.

What distinguishes islands—and explains the phenomenon of relaxation—is that recolonization is so difficult, in many cases, effectively impossible.

The process might be compared to a coin toss.

If Cohn-Haft was right, then in its crazy, circus-like complexity the ant-bird-butterfly parade was actually a figure for the Amazon’s stability.

When you find one thing that depends on something else that, in turn, depends on something else, the whole series of interactions depends on constancy.

The whole new layer on top of what I was thinking about in the nineteen-seventies is climate change.

“This may be one of the last opportunities,” he said.

“That’s what makes this so dramatic—it’s breaking the evolutionary chain.”

“It was like the Bush administration. And, like the Bush administration, it just wouldn’t go away.”

“You just can’t keep up with that kind of mortality.”

“Whatever was killing the bats was presumably something they’d never encountered before, since the mortality rate was so high.”

“The movement of species around the world is sometimes compared to Russian roulette.”},{

"Suci did not ovulate," Roth announced to the half-dozen zookeepers who had gathered around to help.

"It’s a very complicated species," she told me once we were back in her office.

"If Dicerorhinus sumatrensis has a future, it’s owing to Roth and the handful of others like her."

"The pattern kept repeating, for a total of five miscarriages."

"In 2007, Andalas was shipped back to Sumatra, to a captive breeding facility in Way Kambas National Park."

"But they have turned out to be pretty much the only Sumatran rhinos born anywhere over the past three decades."

"Humans have brought the species so low that it seems only heroic human efforts can save it."

"We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared."

"It means that the current extinction event began all the way back in the middle of the last ice age."

"It demonstrates, he has written, that humans are capable of driving virtually any large mammal species extinct."

"What drives it? That I would really like to understand. That would be really, really cool to know."

"The same stretch of chromosome 5 from the human, Neanderthal, and chimp genomes."

"If we one day will know that some freak mutation made the human insanity and exploration thing possible, it will be amazing to think that it was this little inversion on this chromosome that made all this happen and changed the whole ecosystem of the planet and made us dominate everything."

"Maybe in the permafrost you could go back five hundred thousand years."

"We never stop."

"Their bad luck was us."

"It means that they are not totally extinct—that they live on a little bit in us."

"We are crazy in some way."

"The capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it."

"One is so tempted to speculate."

"This is our last chance," she remembers thinking. "This is the dodo."

"Does it have to end this way?"

"People have to have hope. I have to have hope. It’s what keeps us going."

"For now, almost all of the species in deep freeze in San Diego still have flesh-and-blood members."

"Wouldn’t it be better, practically and ethically, to focus on what can be done and is being done to save species, rather than to speculate gloomily about a future in which the biosphere is reduced to little plastic vials?"

"The commitment of people like Terri Roth and Barbara Durrant and institutions like the Cincinnati and the San Diego Zoos could be invoked as reason for optimism."

"Our capacity is probably indistinguishable from the qualities that made us human to begin with: our restlessness, our creativity, our ability to cooperate to solve problems and complete complicated tasks."

"As soon as humans started using signs and symbols to represent the natural world, they pushed beyond the limits of that world."

"In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."

"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."