Ivy Shih > Quotes

“Since the Industrial Revolution, we have scattered soot across the planet and relentlessly stirred in radioactive elements, inconceivable mounds of plastic, pesticides, excess nitrogen and phosphorus, billions of skeletons from livestock, and enough concrete to spread a kilogram over every square metre of the Earth. Each year mining shifts three times more rock and dirt than all the world’s rivers, and humans are reconfiguring the course of evolution as we rearrange species across continents and eliminate many more.”
― Ivy Shih, The Best Australian Science Writing 2022

“Imagine one sheet of toilet paper is 100 years. If there are 200 sheets in a roll, then a single roll represents 20,000 years. A hundred of those and you’ve jumped back two million years, to when our genus Homo split off from our other hominid ancestors. ‘Then you can go back and you can keep on playing,’ he says. ‘Once you’ve got a whole building full of toilet papers [30,000 rolls], you’re back in the Precambrian.”
― Ivy Shih, The Best Australian Science Writing 2022

“feels and smells as if it could have toppled a year ago. Yet when this tree last stood upright and felt the sunlight on its leaves, Neanderthals and Denisovans still walked the Earth. Homo sapiens – still many millennia away from reaching New Zealand – had only recently colonised Europe and begun to make art.”
― Ivy Shih, The Best Australian Science Writing 2022

“During a six-week period, on 1024 occasions that bettongs, bilbies, birds, lizards, people and vehicles passed in front of them, the sensors did not fire – but they did so on 33 feral cats that crossed their paths. As many as 160 Felixers are now deployed across reserves and ecologically important sites across Australia and have so far successfully targeted more than 500”
― Ivy Shih, The Best Australian Science Writing 2022

“Over the following centuries, ice sheets rapidly expanded across North America, while Australia shifted to a more arid climate, its inland lakes drying up. Cooper suggests those changes are what drove the extinction of numerous species of Australian megafauna – like the giant, wombat-like diprotodon – more than 10 000 years after modern humans arrived on the continent. The implication is that humans alone weren’t responsible for the extinctions: they had only to stake out diminishing waterholes to finish off the ill-fated animals.”
― Ivy Shih, The Best Australian Science Writing 2022