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 KolbertWe have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive - as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would.
Elizabeth KolbertNeanderthals 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 KolbertIf 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 KolbertEven very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the story that we've been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn't particularly special. What I'm trying to convey in my book [The Sixth Extinction] is that we are unusual.
Elizabeth Kolbert