Paul Rosolie: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Among many things you’re also an artist is trying to convert the thing that is nature into the thing that we humans can understand, the complexity, the beauty of it. That’s what Darren Aronofsky tried to do with those couple of films. That’s something that I hope you do actually in a medium of film too, that would be very interesting. And you do that in a medium of books currently. How much do you think we understand about the history of life on Earth? I think we got it all wrong. N, I don’t know. It seems like they change it all the time. They say that Easter Island, when I was in college, they were big on telling you that Easter Island they ruined their environment and they had environmental collapse, and that’s why there’s nobody on Easter Island. It was a cautionary tale. We could ruin our environment. And now it seems like they’ve changed their mind on that. And then when humans entered North America, seems to be hugely up to speculation. And Africa, that we all spread out of Africa, and then the Pleistocene Overkill Extinction theory, and it seems like every few years they update it and they change it and they say, “Oh, no, no, no, no. The guys from 10 years ago, actually my new theory is the best theory. Let’s write some books and get me on Letterman.” And it seems like there’s a new prevailing theory, that’s really always exciting and edgy, about how we got here and where we came from and how we dispersed and maybe even has some political implications like how we should use the Amazon moving forward. The Amazon was engineered by people, so fuck it, let’s just cut it down. Yeah, I tend to believe that we mostly don’t understand anything, but there is an optimism in continuously figuring out the puzzle of that.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.