When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so; now the situation is reversed.
India's rivers are undergoing a drastic change. Our perennial rivers are becoming seasonal. Many of the smaller rivers have already vanished.
The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.
Given enough time, polar bears might migrate off the Arctic ice, evolve darker coats, find a different diet, and thrive in a new, warmer climate. But if the ice on which they depend disappears in a few decades, they are likely to die.
It turns out that as the climate changes, the distribution of that water is changing very fundamentally. So now we have too much, too little, wrong place, wrong time. It's salty where it should be fresh; it's liquid where it should be frozen; it's wet where it should be dry; and in fact, the very chemistry of the ocean itself is changing.
As the planet warms, evolution speeds. We've known this for a long time.
places to hunt places to hide are getting harder to find, and pet canaries and goldfish too, did you notice that?
It's taken us a short time to change the nature of nature. In my lifetime, more change than during all preceding human history put together.
Millions of our race are now supported by lands situated where deep seas once prevailed in earlier ages. In many districts not yet occupied by man, land animals and forests now abound where the anchor once sank into the oozy bottom.
Life is a force in its own right. It is a new element. And it has altered the Earth. It covers Earth like a skin.
