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 KolbertWe'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 KolbertWhen you drive to the grocery store, your intention is not to change the world, it just happens to have that impact. So we've done a lot of things without even realizing it, and yes, just being unusual, as you say, does not put you above, in a sense, any of the other organisms with whom we share this planet.
Elizabeth KolbertI don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.
Elizabeth KolbertThere 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 KolbertZalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of manโthe sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factoriesโwill be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.
Elizabeth Kolbert