Anthropogenic Impact Quotes

Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least.

We may well blow each other up with atomic weapons before we wipe out all species of life including our own with more gradual means.

It's man's impact on our world that appeals to me more than just nature running wild.

The construction of permanent sea walls can be taken up only in places where there is sea erosion due to heavy anthropogenic pressures. The locations for such non-living barriers should be determined on the basis of a carefully conducted erosion-vulnerability analysis.

I don't know if human activity is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face, we have in a sense taken over nature.

There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.

We find ourselves heading fully into an era of mass extinction.

There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.

Over the last several decades, human activity have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago.

When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.

Humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of people are trying to make us believe, for the following reason: I believe the climate is changing because there's never been a moment where the climate is not changing.

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

There's eco-pragmatism, where you recognize, 'Yeah, we live on a planet that's permanently altered by humanity, and rather than seek to return to or preserve pure wilderness, we recognize that's an illusion, and we proceed under the new knowledge that we live, in fact, in a human-dominated planet.'

We are the only species systematically destroying its own habitat.

From year to year, environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives, but from evolutionary or geological perspectives, what is happening is explosive change.

In the past few decades, Earth's natural systems have endured more pressure than in all preceding human history.

We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

In view of the immense power of natural weather and climate fluctuations and the great buffering capacity of the Earth, especially the ocean, it is easy to be skeptical about whether small anthropogenic changes of atmospheric composition can have important practical impacts.

Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?