Industrial agriculture freed many people to pursue lives their parents and grandparents could never have. It made America modern. Michael Specter Read Quote
Some people will deny anything that displeases or scares them: unusual pain in their chests, unwanted lumps beneath their skin, or the fact that humans share ancestry with apes are a few examples. Another is climate change. Michael Specter Read Quote
There are people who could watch a hurricane like Sandy blow out of the Atlantic every other day and blame it on anything but human activity. They are like those who, having been diagnosed with diabetes, eat donuts for breakfast. There’s not much to do about them. Michael Specter Read Quote
The best way to deal with climate change has been obvious for years: cut greenhouse-gas emissions severely. We haven’t done that. In 2010, for example, carbon emissions rose by six per cent – the largest such increase on record. Michael Specter Read Quote
We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds – the same as our brain. Michael Specter Read Quote
The passengers in our microbiome contain at least four million genes, and they work constantly on our behalf: they manufacture vitamins and patrol our guts to prevent infections; they help to form and bolster our immune systems, and digest food. Michael Specter Read Quote
I moved from Moscow to Rome with my family and two bicycles in 1998, and spent a lot of that year- and the next – obsessed, I am sorry to admit, with the bicycles. Italy, after all, was a place where thousands of middle-aged men felt perfectly comfortable spending many hours a week in brightly colored spandex. Michael Specter Read Quote
Even a two-degree climb in average global temperatures could cause crop failures in parts of the world that can least afford to lose the nourishment. The size of deserts would increase, along with the frequency and intensity of wildfires. Michael Specter Read Quote
The Maldives, a string of islands off the coast of India whose highest point above sea level is eight feet, may be the first nation to drown. In Alaska, entire towns have begun to shift in the loosening permafrost. Michael Specter Read Quote
Many climate scientists say their biggest fear is that warming could melt the Arctic permafrost – which stretches for thousands of miles across Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. Michael Specter Read Quote
