Karen

“A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and will always be.”
― Gary Snyder

“One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and, eventually, new species evolved to take their place. But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid. And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“Declining emissions and rising atmospheric concentrations point to a stubborn fact about carbon dioxide: once it’s in the air, it stays there. How long, exactly, is a complicated question; for all intents and purposes, though, CO2 emissions are cumulative. The comparison that’s often made is to a bathtub. So long as the tap is running, a stoppered tub will continue to fill. Turn the tap down, and the tub will still keep filling, just more slowly. To”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“Humans are producing no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future. At this point it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us — as of this writing nearly eight billion — and we are stepped in so far, return seems impractical.

And so we face a no-analog predicament. If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it's going to be more control. Only now what's go to be managed is not a nature that exists — or is imagined to exist — apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself — not so much the control of nature as the control of the control of nature.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future