Even 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.

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.

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.

We 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.

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?

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."

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.