Rohit Gupta

“CURRENTLY, about fifty million square miles of land on the planet are ice-free, and this is the baseline that’s generally used for calculating human impacts. According to a recent study published by the Geological Society of America, people have “directly transformed” more than half of this land—roughly twenty-seven million square miles—mostly by converting it to cropland and pasture, but also by building cities and shopping malls and reservoirs, and by logging and mining and quarrying.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“What I’ve been trying to do is trace an extinction event—call it the Holocene extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction, or, if you prefer the sound of it, the Sixth Extinction—and to place this event in the broader context of life’s history. That history is neither strictly uniformitarian nor catastrophist; rather, it is a hybrid of the two. What this history reveals, in its ups and its downs, is that life is extremely resilient but not infinitely so. There have been very long uneventful stretches and very, very occasionally “revolutions on the surface of the earth.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“Someday we may consider it unethical not to use germline editing to alleviate human suffering.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

“There’s one last way we can cut down on emissions from the food we eat: by wasting less of it. In Europe, industrialized parts of Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, more than 20 percent of food is simply thrown away, allowed to rot, or otherwise wasted. In the United States, it’s 40 percent. That’s bad for people who don’t have enough to eat, bad for the economy, and bad for the climate. When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need