Top 100 Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

2. “What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “If you’re a conservation biologist in many fields, you’re seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they’re chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “At the heart of Darwin’s theory, as one of his biographers has put it, is “the denial of humanity’s special status.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

12. “I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

13. “It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

14. “It may be said that 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; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

15. “One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species – the Neanderthals and the Denisovans – many generations ago, we’re now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we’re done, it’s quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

16. “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

17. “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

18. “The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but “one weedy species.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

19. “By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens – in most cases hundreds – of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

20. “With 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. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

21. “One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it’s changing in ways that create barriers – roads, clear-cuts, cities – that prevent them from doing so.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

22. “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 observes, “is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

23. “LIKE the Jews, the corals of the Great Barrier Reef observe a lunar calendar.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

24. “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

25. “The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what’s the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn’t going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Don’t step on any dead bats.” It took me a moment to realize he was joking.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

29. “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 creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

30. “By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent – what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

31. “How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island?”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

32. “One biographer summed up Lyell’s influence on Darwin as follows: “Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin.” Darwin himself, after publishing his account of the voyage of the Beagle and also a volume on coral reefs, wrote, “I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brains.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

33. “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

34. “In fact, the American Mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

35. “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

36. “If warming were held to a minimum, the team estimated that between 22 and 31 percent of the species would be “committed to extinction” by 2050. If warming were to reach what was at that point considered a likely maximum – a figure that now looks too low – by the middle of this century, between 38 and 52 percent of the species would be fated to disappear.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

37. “Alroy has described the megafauna extinction as a “geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed it.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

38. “We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

39. “If climate change drove the megafauna extinct, then this presents yet another reason to worry about what we are doing to global temperatures. If, on the other hand, people were to blame – and it seems increasingly likely that they were – then the import is almost more disturbing. It would mean that the current extinction event began all the way back in the middle of the last ice age. It would mean that man was a killer – to use the term of art an “overkiller” – pretty much right from the start.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

40. “With 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.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

41. “WHY is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

42. “Asian elephants have declined by fifty percent over the last three generations.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

43. “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

44. “Unfortunately, the biggest tipping point, the one at which the ecosystem starts to crash, is mean pH 7.8, which is what we’re expecting to happen by 2100,” Hall-Spencer tells me, in his understated British manner. “So that is rather alarming.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

45. “There is every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and the woolly rhinos. With 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.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

46. “If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

47. “Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather grim,” he told me a few hours after I had arrived at One Tree. We were sitting at a beat-up picnic table, looking out over the heartbreaking blue of the Coral Sea. The island’s large and boisterous population of terns was screaming in the background. Caldeira paused: “I mean, they’re looking grim already.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

48. “The whole new layer on top of what I was thinking about in the nineteen-seventies is climate change,” Lovejoy told me. He has written that “in the face of climatic change, even natural climatic change, human activity has created an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity,” the result of which could be “one of the greatest biotic crises of all time.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

49. “Assuming that humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the oceans will continue to absorb carbon dioxide and will become increasingly acidified.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

50. “Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert