Alan Weisman > Quotes

“Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“in the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - our houses.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“All of us humans have myriad other species to thank. Without them, we couldn't exist. It's that simple, and we can't afford to ignore them, anymore than I can afford to neglect my precious wife--nor the sweet mother Earth that births and holds us all.

Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Whether we accept it or not, this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet. It will come about in one of two ways:
Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on civilization's graph - or nature will do it for us, in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, crashing ecosystems, opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources that finally cut us down to size.”
― Alan Weisman, Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

“But the Earth holds ghosts, even of entire nations.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Las dioxinas, sin embargo, fueron involuntarias, ya que se trata de subproductos formados cuando se mezclan hidrocarburos con cloro, con resultados persistentes y desastrosos. Aparte de su papel perturbador de las hormonas en los cambios sexuales, su aplicación más infame antes de que se prohibieran fue en el denominado «agente naranja», un defoliante utilizado para despojar de vegetación selvas vietnamitas enteras a fin de que los insurgentes no tuvieran dónde ocultarse. Entre 1964 y 1971, Estados Unidos roció Vietnam con 45 millones de litros de agente naranja. Cuatro décadas después, las selvas más fuertemente afectadas todavía no han vuelto a crecer. En su lugar abunda ahora una especie herbácea, el cogón, considerada una de las peores malas hierbas de todo el mundo.”
― Alan Weisman, El mundo sin nosotros

“Paranormalists, however, insist that our minds are transmitters that, with special effort, can focus like lasers to communicate across great distances, and even make things happen. That may seem far-fetched, but it's also a definition of prayer.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“La idea de crear una sociedad pacífica por medio de un conflicto armado parecía estar irremediablemente condenada al fracaso por su misma contradicción.”
― Alan Weisman, Un pueblo llamado Gaviotas: El lugar donde se reinventó el mundo

“By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles—nearly the size of Africa. It wasn’t the only one: the planet has six other major tropical oceanic gyres, all of them swirling with ugly debris. It was as if plastic exploded upon the world from a tiny seed after World War II and, like the Big Bang, was still expanding. Even if all production suddenly ceased, an astounding amount of the astoundingly durable stuff was already out there. Plastic debris, Moore believed, was now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. How long would it last? Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization could convert to, lest the world be”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“You understand... just what the Taoists mean when they say that soft is stronger than hard.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“...los PCB eran fluidos que nunca dejaban de lubricar; los PBDE, aislantes que nunca dejaban de evitar que el plástico se derritiera, y el DDT, un pesticida que nunca dejaba de matar. Como tales, ahora resultan difíciles de destruir; algunos, como los PCB, apenas muestran signo alguno de biodegradarse.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“What did this mean for the ocean, the ecosystem, the future? All this plastic had appeared in barely more than 50 years. Would its chemical constituents or additives—for instance, colorants such as metallic copper— concentrate as they ascended the food chain, and alter evolution? Would it last long enough to enter the fossil record? Would geologists millions of years hence find Barbie doll parts embedded in conglomerates formed in seabed depositions? Would they be intact enough to be pieced together like dinosaur bones? Or would they decompose first, expelling hydrocarbons that would seep out of a vast plastic Neptune’s graveyard for eons to come, leaving fossilized imprints of Barbie and Ken hardened in stone for eons beyond?”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Casi el 12 por ciento de la masa continental del planeta está cultivada, mientras que solo el 3 por ciento está ocupado por ciudades grandes o pequeñas. Si incluimos también los pastizales, la cantidad de tierra del planeta dedicada a la producción de alimento humano es más de la tercera parte de su superficie terrestre.”
― Alan Weisman, El mundo sin nosotros

“Este equilibrio entre humanos, flora y fauna empezó a tambalearse cuando los primeros se convirtieron ellos mismos en presa; o, mejor dicho, en mercancía.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“plastic-wrapped evermore?”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian’s Doug Erwin, is that we can’t predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors.

"There will be plenty of surprises. Let’s face it: who would’ve predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn’t exist, no vertebrate biologist would’ve suggested that anything would do that: he’d have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Plastic is still plastic. The material still remains a polymer. Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“In recent years, a green burial movement has protested formaldehyde, which oxidizes to formic acid, the toxic in fire ants and bee stingers, as yet one more poison to leach into water tables: careless people, polluting even from the tomb.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“was a study on fulmar carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of 44 pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds. There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. He devised an aquarium experiment, using bottom-feeding lugworms that live on organic sediments, barnacles that filter organic matter suspended in water, and sand fleas that eat beach detritus. In the experiment, plastic particles and fibers were provided in proportionately bite-size quantities. Each creature promptly ingested them.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Jefferson estaba convencido de que aquellos eran iguales. En 1796 recibió un envío, supuestamente de huesos de mamut, procedente del condado de Greenbriar, en Virginia; pero una enorme garra le alertó de inmediato de que se trataba de otra cosa, posiblemente de una especie de león inmensa. Tras consultar con diversos anatomistas, finalmente lo identificó, y a él se atribuye la primera descripción de un perezoso gigante norteamericano, hoy conocido como Megalonyx jeffersoni.”
― Alan Weisman, El mundo sin nosotros

“With our passing, might some lost contribution of ours leave the planet a bit more impoverished? It is possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Bred to the pavement and steel that became his life's work, he nonetheless marvels at the annual miracle of baby peregrine falcons hatching high atop the George Washington's towers, and at the sheer botanical audacity of grass, weeds, and ailanthus trees that defiantly bloom, far from topsoil, from metal niches suspended high above the water.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“In the days when money was backed by its face value in silver or gold, there were limits to how much wealth could flow around the world. Today, it's virtual money that the bank lends into existence on a computer screen. "And unless the economy continually expands, there is no new flow of money to pay back that money, plus interest." . . . "As it stands now, if banks start loaning money more slowly than they collect debts, the quantity of money in the economy goes down, and it's impossible to pay back debts. So we get defaults on houses . . . our economy plunges into misery and unemployment. Under our current monetary system, the only alternative to that is endless growth. So one absolute thing we have to change is the whole nature of the monetary system. . . . we deny banks the right to create money." . . . There's a challenge with that solution, he admits. "You're trying to take the right to create wealth away from some of the wealthiest people on the planet.”
― Alan Weisman, Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

“Missing, however, are nearly all fauna adapted to us. The seemingly invincible cockroach, a tropical import, long ago froze in unheated apartment buildings. Without garbage, rats starved or became lunch for the raptors nesting in burnt-out skyscrapers.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“The largest, most conspicuous items bobbing in the surf were slowly getting smaller. At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments. “We imagined it was being ground down smaller and smaller, into a kind of powder. And we realized that smaller and smaller could lead to bigger and bigger problems.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Al igual que nuestro pariente el chimpancé, siempre nos hemos matado unos a otros para disputarnos el territorio y las hembras, pero con el advenimiento de la esclavitud nos redujimos a nosotros mismos a algo nuevo: a un cultivo de exportación.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Today’s amount of plastic will take hundreds of thousands of years to consume, but, eventually, it will all biodegrade. Lignin is far more complex, and it biodegrades. It’s just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we are making.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us