Kate Bernheimer Quotes

Thinking about the new epoch - often called the Anthropocene, or the age of humanity - challenges us to look at ourselves in the mirror of deep time, measured not in centuries or even in millennia, but over millions and billions of years.

If you represent the Earth's lifetime by a single year, say from January when it was made to December, the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in June - a tiny fraction of the year. But even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective, our century is very, very special: the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet.

What I'm interested in is the conversations going on about the Anthropocene and what it means to view ourselves as a part of Earth's geological history.

Climate change is real. Climate change is being substantially increased by humans and the carbon we put into the atmosphere. And it appears to be speeding up. If science has made any mistakes, science has been underestimating it.

The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 changed my life completely, turning me into an activist. From the air, you see things you can't see from the ground - you really understand the impact of man, even in a place you know well. My work is meant to convince people we can no longer live like this.

Over most of history, threats have come from nature - disease, earthquakes, floods, and so forth. But the worst now come from us. We've entered a geological era called the anthropocene. This started, perhaps, with the invention of thermonuclear weapons.

If we each take responsibility in shifting our own behavior, we can trigger the type of change that is necessary to achieve sustainability for our race or this planet. We change our planet, our environment, our humanity every day, every year, every decade, and every millennia.

Human beings are definitely changing the planet, but how much impact they are having on climate, I don't know and I don't care.

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

I believe the earth's climate is changing, but I think it's changing for natural variation reasons and I think mankind has been adapting to climate as long as man has walked the earth.

Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.

The Anthropocentic Age - the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet - cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.

We have altered the physical, chemical and biological properties of the planet on a geological scale. We have left no part of the globe untouched.

Men are weak now, and yet they transform the Earth's surface. In millions of years, their might will increase to the extent that they will change the surface of the Earth, its oceans, the atmosphere, and themselves.

I did not imagine that the second half of my life would be spent on efforts to avert a mortal danger to humanity created by science.

We live in an epoch of denudation.

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

The hoax is that there are some people who are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful, they can change climate. Man can't change climate.

I don't see it as coincidence that the great acceleration of the Anthropocene influences on Earth came during the same decades as our first exploration of the other planets.

The earth's climate has been changing since God created it, with or without man. On that, we should all agree.

The earth's history over the past several million years is that for every 100,000 years, we go through a dramatic climatic cycle where we get 90,000 years of ice age and 10,000 years of a warm period. I think people today just have the expectation that we deserve a perfectly benign climate forever.

Climates always change. The question is, how are we going to adapt to climate change? Now, it may be true that we are accelerating it inadvertently by messing with our atmosphere, but regardless of that, the climate will change.

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.

Earth's biosphere gave birth to humans and our thoughts, which are now reshaping its planetary cycles. A planet with brains? Fancy that.

What I wonder most about the Anthropocene is not when did it start - but when, and how, will it end? Will it end? Or is it possible that our own growing awareness of our role on Earth can itself play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome toward one that we would desire?