A Quote by Graciela Chichilnisky

We are in the midst of the 6th largest extinction event in the history of the plant and the first caused by human action. — © Graciela Chichilnisky
We are in the midst of the 6th largest extinction event in the history of the plant and the first caused by human action.
We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.
Many scientists would argue that we are now in what is called Extinction, and it's caused by this perfect extinction storm: climate change, habitat loss, pollution, unsustainable exploitation of species and habitat resources, and of course, human population explosion. All of these factors work together and conspire to drive a species to extinction on our planet, every half an hour.
It's disappointing that President Obama - who ran for office in 2008 saying he was going to be a fiscally responsible president - has caused the largest deficits and the largest debt in American history.
Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.
In recent years, our planet has been warming at an alarming rate and seen record-breaking temperatures. We are now witnessing the sixth mass extinction event in the earth's geologic history. Our sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, threatening our largest cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.
The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.
When I introduced my economic plan for the first time, people had mixed views because it's the largest cut in the history of Israeli budgets. We have a big deficit caused by the fact that the former government took upon itself too many obligations.
China's rise is really a kind of a world historical event. This is the largest country in the world. It has caused a wholesale substantial contraction of U.S. manufacturing employment.
As many glaciers are melting and icy tundras are decaying, there's an unprecedented amount of woolly mammoth material that's becoming dislodged from the ice. Not just mammoth, but all kinds of fossils from the past. What occurred to me was, had anyone tried to pinpoint the first case of human-induced extinction? What was the first time we as species pushed another one to oblivion? I would argue that's probably going to be one of the defining moral problems of the century, human-induced extinction. And I really wanted to know, when did we first cross that barrier?
Humanity is creating an extinction event that will make every war ever fought a footnote to history. We belong to the only generation in history that can turn this around - we're one step away from greatness or the biggest disaster since the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs.
If you're deeply engaged in an event, you're part of it. But if you're outside of it, disinterested, you are the regard that registers history. And that disinterestedness is different from objectivity. The objective view sees only the event, while the disinterested one participates as well as views by creating that link to history. It's a type of viewing that's both inside and out of the event, that brings to the viewing the capacity for human emotion, for compassion, but holds it openly. And objectivity excludes the human element, and is therefore not a point of view open to humans.
I've accepted the fact that there's a beginning and end to everything. All species are born, evolve, and then die off. We're going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what - we're large mammals!
In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.
The density of human population combined with the development of powerful and largely unconstrained technology has given us the problems of the anthropocene and the serious possibility of self-caused extinction.
We are killing life on Earth, we're in the sixth mass extinction event and it's possible that human beings will go extinct. We're in a culture that doesn't want you to think about that.
It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's.
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