For a long time, science has gone in the direction of sort of putting people in their place. We learned that the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth, the Earth revolves around the sun; we learned that we’re just another species, evolved, like all other species, so we’re just another animal, really.

Most of us live in parts of the world where we don’t expect to see much, and we wouldn’t necessarily notice things that are crashing.

As soon as you acknowledge that we’re changing the planet on this scale, that it has very potentially massive repercussions and very damaging repercussions, then the next question is okay, what are we going to do about it?

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the processnof doing.

Of the many species that have existed on earth – estimates run as high as fifty billion – more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.

There are a lot of things that we could do to minimize what we’re doing, but we’re not getting back those frogs that I saw that no longer exist.

You’re an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can’t anymore, and that’s another way we’re just changing the surface of the Earth in very dramatic ways.

There’s this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It’s the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, “Okay, well, that’s the norm.”

As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

I traveled really to amazing places. I went to the Great Barrier Reef, I went to the Amazon, I went to the Andes, to try to bring people stories of sort of what’s going on out in the world and bring this issue alive, in a way, and put it out there.

People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.

If you’re a conservation biologist in many fields, you’re seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they’re chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.

When you drive to the grocery store, your intention is not to change the world, it just happens to have that impact. So we’ve done a lot of things without even realizing it, and yes, just being unusual, as you say, does not put you above, in a sense, any of the other organisms with whom we share this planet.

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct.

People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is based on burning fossil fuels, which is taking CO2 out of the ground and putting it up into the air.

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.