To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens without good reason . . . then it's a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before.

Heatstroke is an important and useful addition to the library on climate change, bringing insights from deep-time ecological research to help illuminate the dire forecasts of which we're already so aware.

Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

If you're Maasai Mara National Park in Kenya, if you're in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, you don't get out of your vehicle and go walking around amid the lions and the leopards. You stay in your Land Rover. You stay in your safari van, and you look out the windows or you look out the pop top at these animals. I know by experience how badly that can work out if you violate those guidelines.

The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.