10 Quotes by Peter Brannen

We take for granted the shape of our world and the position of the continents— the familiar geography that seems as eternal as the order of the planets. But this arrangement is temporary: it isn't how the planet has been and it isn't how it will be.

When you put a log on the fire, the light and heat you see is, in a literal sense, the decades of sunshine that tree basked in over its lifetime.

The notion of the noble savage living in harmony with Nature should be dispatched to the realm of mythology where it belongs. Human beings have never lived in harmony with nature.

Though plant and animal life on land might strike us as the default setting for Earth, it was revolutionary for a planet whose continents had been barren for more than 4,000 million years.

If we just did one thing, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but we’re doing everything simultaneously as hard and fast as we possibly can.

Today humans emit a staggering 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year, perhaps the fastest rate of any period in the last 300 million years of earth history – a period that, you’ll note, includes the End-Permian mass extinction.

As should be clear by now, perhaps no national project has had more of an incidentally beneficial effect on science than the Interstate Highway System has had on geology. In.

While the Texas oil economy relies on the truth of geology, many of its inhabitants remain stubbornly resistant to its charms.

Clearly the story of planet Earth is not the story of Homo sapiens. Almost all of that walk would be through a forbidding landscape with no complex life on it whatsoever. Not in the deep sea, not atop the mountains, not in the tropics, nor on the endless barren granite interiors of the continents.