Peter Brannen > Quotes

“When you put a log on the fire, the light and heat you see is, in a literal sense, the decades of sunshine that tree basked in over its lifetime.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“It’s] pretty clear that times of high carbon dioxide—and especially times when carbon dioxide levels rapidly rose—coincided with the mass extinctions,” writes University of Washington paleontologist and End-Permian mass extinction expert Peter Ward. “Here is the driver of extinction.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“While the Texas oil economy relies on the truth of geology, many of its inhabitants remain stubbornly resistant to its charms.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“The notion of the noble savage living in harmony with Nature should be dispatched to the realm of mythology where it belongs. Human beings have never lived in harmony with nature.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“It stands to reason that, until very recently, all vertebrate life on the planet was wildlife. But astoundingly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land animals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass. This Frankenstein biosphere is due both to the explosion of industrial agriculture and to a hollowing out of wildlife itself, which has decreased in abundance by as much as 50 percent since 1970. This cull is from both direct hunting and global-scale habitat destruction: almost half of the earth’s land has been converted to farmland.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“If we just did one thing, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but we’re doing everything simultaneously as hard and fast as we possibly can.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“Clearly the story of planet Earth is not the story of Homo sapiens. Almost all of that walk would be through a forbidding landscape with no complex life on it whatsoever. Not in the deep sea, not atop the mountains, not in the tropics, nor on the endless barren granite interiors of the continents.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“I think all you can say,” Saltzman said, “is that when there are severe, rapid changes in the carbon cycle, it doesn’t end well.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“We take for granted the shape of our world and the position of the continents— the familiar geography that seems as eternal as the order of the planets. But this arrangement is temporary: it isn't how the planet has been and it isn't how it will be.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World

“Though plant and animal life on land might strike us as the default setting for Earth, it was revolutionary for a planet whose continents had been barren for more than 4,000 million years.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“Today humans emit a staggering 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year, perhaps the fastest rate of any period in the last 300 million years of earth history—a period that, you’ll note, includes the End-Permian mass extinction.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“But our current experiment—quickly injecting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—has in fact been run many times before in the geological past, and it never ends well.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“humans—the ultimate invasive species.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“The modern combination of habitat destruction coupled with species introductions is, therefore, likely to result in total biodiversity loss that may be even greater than that experienced during the [End-Permian mass extinction].” The full terrifying weight of this statement will become apparent after the next chapter.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“As should be clear by now, perhaps no national project has had more of an incidentally beneficial effect on science than the Interstate Highway System has had on geology. In”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“[It’s] pretty clear that times of high carbon dioxide—and especially times when carbon dioxide levels rapidly rose—coincided with the mass extinctions,” writes University of Washington paleontologist and End-Permian mass extinction expert Peter Ward. “Here is the driver of extinction.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“The last time it was four degrees warmer, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher than it is today.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World

“That our age is thought to be less epic than those worlds on offer at natural history museums is only an illusion.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“Well, the rate at which we’re injecting CO2 into the atmosphere today, according to our best estimates, is ten times faster than it was during the End-Permian. And rates matter. So today we’re creating a very difficult environment for life to adapt, and we’re imposing that change maybe ten times faster than the worst events in Earth’s history.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“The epitaph for humanity does not yet have to include the tragic indictment of having engineered the sixth major mass extinction in earth history. In a world sometimes short on it, this is good news.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“foundational Buddhist concept of anicca—the impermanence of all things.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“It stands to reason that, until very recently, all vertebrate life on the planet was wildlife. But astoundingly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land mammals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“It is culture that enables us to adapt to the environment as it changes on the fly, rather than being compelled to wait around for the hammerblows of natural selection to painfully correct us.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“not far from the lonely telegraph station that picked up the last distress signals of the HMS Titanic, is still more fossil graffiti left on old ocean rocks by these pseudo-creatures—hieroglyphic echoes of life in the perpetual midnight of the ancient deep.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“Each year fishing trawlers plow an area of seafloor twice the size of the continental United States, obliterating the benthos. Gardens of corals and sponges hosting colorful sea life are reduced to furrowed, lifeless plains.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“The decisions made in the next few years by the energy industry and the governments that regulate them will leave a record in the rocks that will last for hundreds of millions of years.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World

“Just as deer will never evolve to outrun hunters' bullets, mass extinctions surpass the evolutionary potential of their victims.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World

“Estimates of our future survival and of the future habitability of the planet are therefore biased by the fact that we're here to ask the question in the first place.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World

“Basically every species on earth and certainly almost every animal died,” he said. “And I think it was probably on the day of the impact.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“In fact, if the Soviet Union and the United States both decided to unleash their entire nuclear arsenals developed over the entire course of the Cold War, in a single location, the Chicxulub impact would still be 100,000 times more powerful.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions