I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. Jonathan Swift
Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature. Al Gore
Landscape - the external surface of the earth beneath the atmosphere... is merely an outward manifestation of most of the factors at work in the area. Richard Hartshorne
The glacier was God's great plough set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth. Louis Agassiz
You're an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can't anymore, and that's another way we're just changing the surface of the Earth in very dramatic ways. Elizabeth Kolbert
Secondly, the nature of the revolutions which have altered the surface of the earth must have had a more decisive effect on the terrestrial quadrupeds than on the marine animals. Georges Cuvier