now the sort of general theory is, you know, yes, the Earth changes very slowly, except for these extraordinary moments. And I’d say the whole point … - Elizabeth Kolbert

I think what all nonfiction writers are aiming for is to make people think about things differently — to tell you a story from somewhere that, if you’re vaguely familiar with it, challenges what you think you know about it, or, if it’s a story you’ve never heard before, introduces you to a whole new place or a whole new idea. I’m basically trying to tilt your worldview a little bit.

you have a situation where we really need to be taking serious action on climate change, and we’re still having this surreal—I guess I would use the word—debate over whether it’s happening or not. And I think a clip like that shows that, you know, people are really speaking entirely different languages. We’re just not even speaking to each other using—you know, we’re using English, but we’re not really speaking the same language. We’re not looking at the same—well, some people are looking at scientific data, and some people are not, let me just put it that way. And it’s very, very hard to carry on, you know, a reasonable and sort of post-Enlightenment conversation.

we’ve already set so many changes in motion, right? I mean, climate change is occurring; whatever anyone in Congress says, it’s occurring right now. You can watch, and scientists are watching, tracking species on the move all over the planet, trying to track the climate as it changes, so either moving upslope or moving toward the poles. And to the extent that we can preserve any parts of the planet that are not being chopped up or chopped down, so that we can allow species to move where they need to go, to track climate change, that is one thing that we can do, even as climate change unfolds. And unfortunately, climate change has been set in motion so that, really, though we desperately need to reduce our carbon emissions, we’re not stopping that process anytime in the near future, so that we need to start thinking about, you know, a world in which everything is on the move and preserving corridors that things can migrate through.