Top 100 Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If Wake and Vredenburg were correct, then those of us alive today not only are witnessing one of the rarest events in life’s history, we are also causing it.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

52. “Other calculations of his show that to keep pace with the present rate of temperature change, plants and animals would have to migrate poleward by thirty feet a day, and that a molecule of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels will, in the course of its lifetime in the atmosphere, trap a hundred thousand times more heat.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

53. “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

54. “Frogs had ruined his marriage.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

55. “Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

56. “The way corals change the world – with huge construction projects spanning multiple generations – might be likened to the way that humans do, with this crucial difference. Instead of displacing other creatures, corals support them.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

57. “Such is the economy of nature,” he wrote, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

58. “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

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

60. “In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

61. “The bird that is shot is a parent,” he observed in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. “We take advantage of its most sacred instincts to waylay it, and in depriving the parent of life, we doom the helpless offspring to the most miserable of deaths, that by hunger. If this is not cruelty, what is?”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

62. “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

63. “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

64. “We can’t say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

65. “I like to think or say, some madness there.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

66. “The paper concluded that if current emissions trends continue, within the next fifty years or so “all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

67. “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

68. “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

69. “Until recently, when both of them went extinct, there were two species of frogs, known as gastric-brooding frogs, that carried their eggs in their stomachs and gave birth to little froglets through their mouths.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— Elizabeth Kolbert

71. “In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

72. “I don’t think there are too many places left that humans haven’t pretty thoroughly explored.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

73. “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

74. “Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

75. “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

76. “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

77. “Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

78. “Darwin’s theory about how species originated doubled as a theory of how they vanished. Extinction and evolution were to each other the warp and weft of life’s fabric, or, if you prefer, two sides of the same coin. “The appearance of new forms and the disappearance of old forms” were, Darwin wrote, “bound together.” Driving both was the “struggle for existence,” which rewarded the fit and eliminated the less so.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

79. “It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

80. “It was titled “Helping a Species Go Extinct.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

81. “Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized” is how one geologist put it to me.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

82. “Amphibians – the word comes from the Greek meaning ’double life.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

83. “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

84. “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

85. “Of the world’s eight species of bears, six are categorized either as “vulnerable” to extinction or “endangered.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

86. “Declining emissions and rising atmospheric concentrations point to a stubborn fact about carbon dioxide: once it’s in the air, it stays there. How long, exactly, is a complicated question; for all intents and purposes, though, CO2 emissions are cumulative. The comparison that’s often made is to a bathtub. So long as the tap is running, a stoppered tub will continue to fill. Turn the tap down, and the tub will still keep filling, just more slowly. To.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

87. “If you count people as an invasive species – the science writer Alan Burdick has called Homo sapiens “arguably the most successful invader in biological history” – the process goes back a hundred and twenty thousand years or so, to the period when modern humans first migrated out of Africa.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

88. “As a general rule, the variety of life is most impoverished at the poles and richest at low latitudes.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

89. “These days every wild place has, to one degree or another, been cut into and cut off.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

90. “According to Lamarck, there was a force – the ‘power of life’ – that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

91. “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

92. “Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of all those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

93. “Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication – these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

94. “Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity’s transformation of the ecological landscape.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

95. “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

96. “Researchers now believe it won’t last out the Anthropocene. “It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

97. “Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

98. “Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

99. “When all of these were considered together, a pattern emerged: mass extinctions seemed to take place at regular intervals of roughly twenty-six million years.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

100. “The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than a hundred thousand years and during that period they had no more impact on their surroundings than any other large vertebrate. 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 wooly 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