The World Without Us Quotes
"When we’re down to eating our ancestors, what is left?"
"Even if we’re not driven to cannibalism, might we, too, face terrible choices as we skulk toward the future?"
"Nature has been through worse losses before, and refilled empty niches."
"With our passing, might some lost contribution of ours leave the planet a bit more impoverished?"
"Seeing elders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here—gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah—should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what’s astonishing is how primally familiar it feels."
"If you want to destroy a barn, cut an eighteen-inch-square hole in the roof. Then stand back."
"In the post-people world, there’s no one left to continually patch New York. The weeds are followed by the city’s most prolific exotic species, the Chinese ailanthus tree."
"The truth is, we don’t know. Any conjecture gets muddled by our obstinate reluctance to accept that the worst might actually occur."
"The more we learn about what we are leaving behind, the more the mystery deepens about why we are drawn to destroy it."
"This time, the fragmentation of Africa’s ecosystem is due not to glaciers, but to ourselves, in our latest evolutionary leap to the status of Force of Nature."
"To stare into the eyes of a chimpanzee in the wild is to glimpse the world had we stayed in the forest."
"Their peaceful nature, predilection for playful sex with multiple partners, and apparent matriarchal social organization have practically become mythologized."
"The very presence of these five in a tree surrounded by grass testifies to the fact that they’ve also inherited the gene of adaptability."
"No intergroup killing has ever been observed."
"In a world without humans, however, if they had to fight it out with chimpanzees, they would be outnumbered."
"The unavoidable comparisons to human aggression and power struggles became his research specialty."
"When people got out of Africa and Asia and reached other parts of the world, all hell broke loose."
"North America would have three times as many animals over one ton as Africa today."
"The best-known extinct colossus, the northern woolly mammoth, was only one of many kinds of Proboscidea."
"Large animals are buffered against temperature by their size."
"Plants, even less mobile than animals, and generally more climate-sensitive, also seem to have survived."
"The fate of sloths would provide what Martin believed was conclusive proof of his theory."
"Some poppy seeds, Uluçan told him, live 1,000 years or more, waiting for fire to clear trees away so they can bloom."
"Murderous, mutual loathing between tribes was no more explicable, or complicated, than the genocidal urges of chimpanzees—a fact of nature that we humans, vainly or disingenuously, pretend our codes of civilization transcend."
"The only consolation, mourns Uluçan, is that this one can’t last."
"Something about these limestone squares lying at the base of skeletal buildings looks familiar."
"Stone buildings will be among the last to disappear when we’re gone."
"But their bones are buried beneath the floor."
"To gaze straight up at it, a gilded sky hovering 185 feet overhead, with no easy sense of why it stays aloft, leaves a beholder half-believing in miracles, and half-dizzy."
"Assuming there is anybody to do the clearing."
"Although mosque domes, like the Hagia Sophia’s, will initially survive, the shaking will have loosened their masonry, and freeze-thaw will work at their mortar until bricks and stones start to fall."
"It was the search for an artificial shellac substitute that one day led chemist Leo Baekeland to mix tarry carbolic acid—phenol—with formaldehyde in his garage in Yonkers, New York."
"Which is more than he can say, unfortunately, for the rest of the city of his birth."
"Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated, every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment."
"The upheavals and pressure will change it into something else."
"It’s just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we are making."
"Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same."
"The deep clays below their perches accumulated back when the Brazos flooded—back before a dozen dams and diversions and a pair of canals siphoned its water to Galveston and Texas City."
"Lower the land, raise the seas, add hurricanes far stronger than midsize, Category 3 Alicia."
"The Woods WHEN WE THINK civilization, we usually picture a city."
"Agriculture let us settle down, and settlement led to urbanity."
"If we suddenly stopped plowing, planting, fertilizing, fumigating, and harvesting."
"The unmortared stone walls built by three centuries of farmers flex as soil swells and shrinks with the seasons."
"In his 1980 book Changes in the Land, geographer William Cronon challenged historians."
"We now know that many of the allegedly pristine landscapes of North and South America were actually artifacts."
"The coast-to-Mississippi treetop traverse would have been possible only for birds."
"Today, less than 1/100 of Britain is original forest."
"Justus von Liebig is remembered as the father of the fertilizer industry."
"To learn which were most effective, in 1843 Lawes began a series of test plots still going today."
"His story began with bones—although first, some would say, came chalk."
"From this pasture experiment, they noticed that although inorganic nitrogen fertilizer makes hay grow waist-high, biodiversity suffers."
"But in a rural landscape rushing to meet the dietary demands of a rapidly growing urban industrial society."
"Yet tucked behind all the gleaming facilities, in a 300-year-old barn with dusty windowpanes, is Rothamsted’s most remarkable legacy."
"By anyone’s estimate, it was the most abundant bird on Earth."
"Their flocks, 300 miles long and numbering in the billions, spanned horizons fore and aft, actually darkening the sky."
"Hours could go by, and it was as though they hadn’t passed at all, because they kept coming."
"The most stunning avicide of all, just a century ago, is still hard to fathom in its enormity."
"Anything we consider limitless probably isn’t."
"Nature did much the same for us in the form of the North American passenger pigeon."
"Larger, far more striking than the ignoble pigeons that soil our sidewalks and statuary, these were dusky blue, rose breasted, and apparently delicious."
"One of the ways we slew them was by cutting their food supply, as we sheared forests from the eastern plains of the United States to plant our own food."
"When it finally became apparent that their unthinkable numbers were actually dropping, a kind of madness drove hunters to slaughter them even faster while they were still there to kill."
"A conservation movement founded by hunters themselves, Ducks Unlimited, has bought millions of acres of marshland to insure that no game species they value will be without places to land and breed."
"Protecting life on the wing became more complicated than simply making game-bird hunting sustainable."
"The Lapland longspur isn’t commonly known to North Americans, because its behavior isn’t quite what we expect from migratory birds."
"They’re pretty little black-faced, finch-sized birds with white half masks and russet patches on their wings and nape, but we mostly see them at a distance."
"In 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported that 77,000 towers were higher than 199 feet, which meant that they were required to have warning lights for aircraft."
"From ornithology labs east and west of the Mississippi, graduate students were sent on grisly night missions to transmitter towers to recover the carcasses of red-eyed vireos, Tennessee warblers, Connecticut warblers, orange-crowned warblers, black-and-white warblers, ovenbirds, wood thrushes, yellow-billed cuckoos… the lists became an increasingly thorough compendium of North American birds, including rare species like the red-cockaded woodpecker."
"The resurgence of bald eagles in North America after DDT was banned bodes hopeful for creatures that cope with residual traces of our better life through chemistry."
"In a world without humans, some semblance of those wayside forests will return within a few decades."
"In separate studies, two U.S federal agencies estimate that 60 to 80 million birds also annually end up in radiator grilles or as smears on windshields of vehicles racing down highways that, just a century ago, were slow wagon trails."
"However, the worst of all man-made menaces to avian life is totally immobile."
"Wisconsin wildlife biologists Stanley Temple and John Coleman never needed to leave their home state to draw global conclusions from their field research during the early 1990s."
"Their subject was an open secret—a topic hushed because few will admit that about one-third of all households, nearly everywhere, harbor one or more serial killers."
"The villain is the purring mascot that lolled regally in Egyptian temples and does the same on our furniture, accepting our affection only when it pleases."
"Domestic cats, Temple and Coleman report, never lost their hunting instincts."
"Like Clovis Blitzkriegers, cats killed not only for sustenance, but also seemingly for the sheer pleasure of it."
"Nationwide, the number likely approaches the billions."
"Long after we’re gone, songbirds must deal with the progeny of these opportunists that trained us to feed and harbor them."
"In South America, very few birds have actually gone extinct."
"When the Americas were joined 3 million years ago, just below the juncture at Panama was mountainous Colombia, poised to be a giant species trap."
"Coca plants—native to the highlands of Peru and Bolivia, but needing chemical help anywhere else—won’t last two seasons in Colombia without men to tend them."
"In a world without people, the red lights will blink off as broadcasts cease; a billion daily cellular conversations will disconnect, and several billion more birds will be alive a year later."
"Civilization is the thin veneer that separates humanity from its basic instincts and the natural world."
"Nature, left to its own devices, paints a landscape far more complex and resilient than any human could design."
"The balance of ecosystems is a delicate dance between species, each playing a vital role in the symphony of life."
"In the absence of humans, the Earth reclaims its spaces, erasing the marks of our presence with patient, relentless growth."
"Every species extinct is a chapter closed in the book of natural history, a loss of potential knowledge forever."
"The genius of evolution lies not in the complexity of what is, but in the simplicity of how it came to be."
"Conservation is not merely a matter of protecting what is, but also a question of preserving what could be."
"The future of life on Earth hinges not on our ability to control nature, but on our willingness to coexist with it."
"Humanity's greatest challenge is not conquering nature, but learning to live within its laws."
"The legacy of our time on Earth will be measured not by our achievements, but by our stewardship of the world's biodiversity."
"The extinction of a single species is a tragedy, a loss that diminishes us all, reducing the richness of life itself."
"polluting the oceans, 113–14, 114–16, 116–18"