Chris D. Thomas > Quotes

“With this increased diversity at the base of the food chain, there are increased opportunities for insects and fungi and bacteria that did not initially accompany the plants to spread around the world.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“The success of Asian and North American trees is partly down to the absence of similar European evergreens, which died out during the ice ages.”
― Chris D. Thomas

“Foreign species are acting like any other species: a few have major impacts, but most don’t. Because a large majority of them have such limited impacts, the importation of lots of new species almost always increases the numbers of species in any given location, just as we saw in the forests and waters of Lake Maggiore. When lots of new arrivals establish breeding populations, hardly any ‘natives’ die out as a consequence.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“So, we are still at plus two species: Oxford ragwort and Yorkwort. And it did not stop there: Oxford ragwort’s tour of Britain has been extensive, hybridizing with common groundsel elsewhere, often spawning a plant called Senecio baxteri. Because thirty-chromosome baxteri is sterile, that doesn’t count as a new species. However, a few individual baxteri plants must, by chance, have experienced a developmental ‘error’ somewhere in North Wales, and a fertile sixty-chromosome version was born. Hence Senecio cambrensis, Welsh groundsel, arrived on the scene4–speciation in an instant. Species number three. The same thing happened in Edinburgh, but they were very like cambrensis and died out again, so perhaps we should not add the Edinburgh hybrids to the credits.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“This is not a one-off. Over 375 species of New World rats and mice evolved after they colonized South America, and rodents have evolved into over 130 species in Australia and New Guinea just a few million years after their first ancestors (presumably) rafted over on floating vegetation from Indonesia. And about eighty species of lupin plants evolved in the Andes in the last one and a half million years, after they invaded from North America. It would take only a modest 5 per cent of the world’s species to repeat the white-eye, rodent and lupin’s feats (say, generating twenty new species in different geographic locations in a million years) to double the total number of species on our planet.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“Jens-Christian Svenning, a tall, crazy-golf-playing scientist from Aarhus University in Denmark, worked out that as many as thirty-one genera of trees that were native to Europe between 5.3 and 2.6 million years ago have since become extinct, whereas thirty-five have survived in the region. If you had taken a grand tour of Europe 3 million years ago, you would have encountered double the diversity of native trees.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“Rearrangement followed by rearrangement is the norm. That is how species survive climate change. They move around. This is true even of species that are today confined to shrinking distributions in isolated mountains. They have survived because they have been able to move, even if that has only been up and down the same mountain. The greatest risk they face in the future is the possibility that they may not be able to move again.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“We have converted a third of the world’s vegetation to produce our food, leaving a diminishing space for wild plants and animals.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“We are acting as a global glue, bringing together previously isolated biological worlds into one ‘virtual continent,’ a New Pangea. In so doing, we are initiating a modern retelling of what has always been key to the story of life on Earth – the successful succeed. This is seen most keenly on remote islands, where introduced rats, cats, dogs, stoats and human apes have ousted tame, flightless and disease-prone birds and walking bats that have been isolated for millions of years. The continental carnivores and diseases have won, as we will discover in New Zealand and elsewhere. However, most new species that arrive do not displace any others, the consequence of which is that these islands now contain far more species than they used to. The same is true of our continents – the diversity of forest trees and shrubs is increasing in the Alps of southern Europe, for example, because many more immigrant species have established new populations than native species have disappeared. This is the norm –immigration usually increases the diversity of the recipient region.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“Any attempt by humans to keep things just as they are is utterly pointless.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“The default stance of conservation is to keep things as unchanged as possible or, alternatively, to return conditions to what they used to be, or somehow to make the Earth ‘more natural’ (which can usually be interpreted as meaning ‘with reduced human impact’). Not only are these untenable aspirations while the world’s human population continues to grow and each of us consumes more resources, but hold-the-line strategies implicitly dismiss as undesirable the continuing biological gains of the human epoch. Where is the logic in this? Attempting to prevent the establishment of ‘alien’ arrivals and to kill ‘impure’ new hybrids so as to maintain our ecosystems and species in some idealized state is not possible, nor is it obvious that the past state of the world is objectively preferable to the new state that is coming into existence.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“New lineages of reef-diving mammal might be born.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“Distant parts of the same continent can also be connected, isolated and then connected again. Asia and Europe form a single landmass, Eurasia, but the oak trees and beech trees that grow in eastern Asia and in Europe are not the same as one another. A single species of beech tree forms cathedral-like forests carpeted in golden autumnal leaves in Europe, but different beech species grow in China and elsewhere in eastern Asia, some with trunks that soar towards the canopy, while others branch close to the ground and jostle for space with bamboo thickets on mountain slopes. The climate of central Asia is too harsh, and these trees survive best in the more moderate oceanic regions that exist towards each end of the Eurasian landmass. Isolated, they have become separate species. European oaks also differ from those in eastern Asia, as though the two regions were giant islands separated by the frigid aridity of the continent’s centre. North American beeches and oaks differ again from those in Europe and Asia. Perhaps 55 million years ago, a new kind of tree evolved: the first oak. It originated, spread, colonized different continents, evolved into different species in different regions and climates, and at least some of them came back together again; acting like a giant, slow-acting global archipelago.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction