In beginning to read Elizabeth Kolbert's Under A White Sky the epigraph struck me as symptomatic of the human mindset relative to the environmental predicament we've gotten ourselves into.

“Sometimes he runs his hammer along the walls, as though to give the signal to the great waiting machinery of rescue to swing into operation. It will not happen exactly in this way—the rescue will begin in its own time, irrespective of the hammer—but it remains something, something palpable and graspable, a token, something one can kiss, as one cannot kiss rescue." ~ Franz Kafka

Keeping in mind that the biodiversity we evolved with is imperative to maintain a biosphere necessary for human existence, the current ratio of people and their domesticated animals to all wild mammals is exceeding twenty-two to one.

Cellular homeostasis to ecological homeostasis are the means by which the natural world develops and maintains productive ecosystems. The greater and more accelerated environmental changes are, the more severe the consequences existing life forms will suffer.

“Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.” ~ Elizabeth Kolbert