A Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

Stephen Jay Gould

Quote Topics

Caught Caught Up Distant Futures Mass Mass Extinction May Power Species Threaten Unpleasant Up

Quote Author

Stephen Jay Gould
American - Scientist
September 10, 1941 - May 20, 2002

With respect to phenomena like mass extinction, somebody might say why worry about it because in a geological perspective mass extinctions aren't so bad, they wipe out some things and then 10 million years down the road we get new and interesting objects.But I tell you mass extinctions are really awful for folks caught in the midst of them.

Richard Lewontin

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.

Cameron Russell

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

P. D. James

Power over seems to be driving our very young species into a ditch because it's from an old competitive, "there may not be enough" kind of framework of scarcity. Power with is thinking abundantly as opposed to fearfully. Power with is hopefully where we're going - and where we need to go as a species in order to survive.

Peter Buffett

The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other worldwide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.

James Howard Kunstler

Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.

Stephen Jay Gould

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.

Alvin Toffler

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.

Jared Diamond

The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.

E. O. Wilson

The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know you're using it.

Sam Smith

Often extinctions in the ocean occur at the same time as those on land. Then again, the ice age extinctions lost many big animals, but not many sea faring ones.

Robert T. Bakker

The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs.

Rebecca Solnit

People seem to get caught up in jargon like they get caught up in ashrams and power structures and they never become free. They become masters of jargon and power structures.

Frederick Lenz

There is one living organism, called a tardigrade, that has survived the five great mass extinctions on Earth, and it can survive in vacuums in space and boiling hot water and freezing subzero temperatures.

Alycia Debnam Carey

If we don't cut carbon's money pipeline, we will pay for their gasoline with floods, droughts, fires, super storms, drowned cities, mass extinctions, wars, and collapsing civilizations.