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Chapter Five Keypoints: Kolbert

Alexandra's picture
  • When humans try to process disruptive information, "their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework" 
  • Paradigm Shifts 

Examples in chapter 

1. Ordovician extinction, first of the mass extinctions, was caused by plants

2. Rats "deforested the landscape"

 

Humans need to recognize there is an issue and that we have a large impact. 

    • Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet
    • Most of the world's major rivers have been dammed or diverted
    • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen that is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems
    • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans' coastal waters
    • Humans use more than half of the world's readily accessible fresh water runoff

Other Influences

  • Climate change
  • Geologic traces
  • Nuclear fallout
  • River diversion 
  • Monoculture farming
  • Acidificaiton 

 

We are in the "Anthropocene" 

"We can stop it"