Racing Extinction Quotes
Christopher W. Clark: The whole world is singing, clicking, grinding, whistling, and thumping... but we've stopped listening.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Louie Psihoyos: When you factor in everything, the clearing of the land for grazing, feeding, transporting, livestock causes more greenhouse gases than all the direct emissions from the entire transportation sector.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Louie Psihoyos: It's like we're living in the age of dinosaurs *but* we can do something about it.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Louie Psihoyos: The Blue Whale is the biggest creature on the planet, bigger than any dinosaur ever. Just like dinosaurs, they're going extinct.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Louie Psihoyos: We have many many ways to fix this problem. The question is are we going to do it fast enough?
Movie: Racing Extinction
Stuart Pimm - Conservation Ecologist, Duke University: If you want to know what that does get a sea-shell and drop it in a glass of vinegar. A whole variety of creatures simply dissolve into the acid ocean that we've created.
Movie: Racing Extinction
John Veron: It sounds a bit silly: change your diet and save the planet but if humans could become vegetarians now, you would make a *massive* difference.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Boris Worm - Marine Research Ecologist, Dalhousie University: What happens to this planet is now in our own hands.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Unknown voice-over: Your life depends on the oceans breathing. And in fact animals could only exist on land after plankton in the oceans had produced enough oxygen for them to live by.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Louie Psihoyos: My hope is that if you can show people the beauty of these animals, there's a chance to save these things.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Louie Psihoyos: We're at that tipping point now, where it's either too late or just the beginning of a movement.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Shawn Heinrichs: With the explosion of demand in China for shark fin soup it was estimated that 250,000 sharks were caught for the fin trade, every single day.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Louie Psihoyos: Sharks pre-date dinosaurs. They survived four mass extinction events. And in just this one generation that I've been alive, we've cut down their numbers by about 90.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Unknown voice-over: By far and away the biggest factor in producing this mass extinction is destroying natural habitat or converting natural habitat into land for food.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Lester Brown: Cattle and ruminants of all kinds produce methane as a byproduct of breaking down grass and other things that they feed on.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Lester Brown: Methane is something like 22 times more potent as a climate changing gas than is CO2, so it doesn't take very much methane to make a difference.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Louie Psihoyos: It's an incredibly inefficient way of producing food. Three-quarters of agricultural land is used just to feed livestock.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Louie Psihoyos: A cow can basically fill up a 55-gallon garbage bag full of methane every day. One cow's not a problem, but now we have 1.5 billion of 'em!
Movie: Racing Extinction
Stuart Pimm - Conservation Ecologist, Duke University: Each year about one in a million species should expire naturally. In the next few decades, we'll be driving species to extinction *1,000* times faster than we should be.
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Michael Novacek: It's difficult to estimate precisely how many species we're going to lose: In a 100 years or so we could lose up to 50 of all the species on Earth.
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John Veron: Climate is controlled by the oceans. Oceans are the big guys; they're in control. And the oceans now are slowly changing. And that is the danger we face today.
Movie: Racing Extinction
John Veron: A mass extinction is driven by a change in the environment. And we are changing the environment precisely along the lines that can trigger off one of these great catastrophes. There's been five mass extinctions, and they've had different causes, but there's been one common factor in all of them: a massive increase in carbon dioxide. And you've never had a carbon dioxide spike like is happening now.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Jason Hall-Spencer - Marine Biologist, Plymouth University: The ocean's chemistry is changing really rapidly, scarily fast.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Jason Hall-Spencer - Marine Biologist, Plymouth University: When we put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere it doesn't all stay there. Between a third and a half gets absorbed by the oceans.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Unknown voice-over: The CO2 reacts with water to form something called carbonic acid. And each year the ocean becomes more and more acidic.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Jason Hall-Spencer - Marine Biologist, Plymouth University: I don't think it's a competition between these problems. I don't think one can be put above the other. I think it's like saying, well is global warming worse than ocean acidification or is fishing all the big fish in the sea worse than polluting it? And I think it'd be foolish to try and single out any one of them, to say This is how we're going to fix the planet's problems. We need to fight them on all fronts.
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Austin Richards: The human eye is so limited. We see only a tiny little sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's like if you owned a grand piano in your house but you can only hear one note on it.
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Boris Worm - Marine Research Ecologist, Dalhousie University: When I give a talk on plankton I say first of all let's take a breath, and let's take a second breath, and then contemplate the fact that second breath came from the ocean because it was produced ultimately by phytoplankton which produced half of the oxygen that we breathe.
Movie: Racing Extinction
Shawn Heinrichs: We can't afford to keep making the same mistakes, because there'll be nothing left.
Movie: Racing Extinction