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"I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history."
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"We all are travelers traveling on a very big spaceship called Earth. Let's not ruin the engines of our very own spaceship in the name of development."
"I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available."
"High status males had multiple wives or additional mating opportunities in the ancestral environment."
"Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways."
"I think Captain Cousteau might be the father of the environmental movement."
"Since this was the first and only series I had ever produced, I was unaware of what the "Normal" environment was for a studio. I tried to run it as I did in my SF studio."
"When I was on that boat, I realized the only way I would feel creatively challenged was if I totally changed everything about my environment and put myself in a storm, in a sense."
"I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved."
"Man should be master of his environment, not its slave. That is what freedom means."
"We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted."
Explore more quotes by Jared Diamond
"Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north."
"I've worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don't want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons."
"Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?"
"The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources."
"Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence."
"No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment."
"Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population."
"We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs."
"We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific."
"Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn't long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we've got in this country."
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