Anthropocene Quotes

“Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism.

First is the Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut.

The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man. Science inflicted that cruel cut too.

The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that blade too.

I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well.”
― Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet

“If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“How can you regain confidence when you know that confidence is just a varnish painted atop human frailty?”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Those are your divisions, the false dichotomies and the hegemonic hierarchies of materialist colonizers. We, too, have been the slaves of your desires, unwitting tools, forging the destruction of the planet, and things will change whether you like it or not. In the end days of the Anthropocene (your word, your hubris, not ours), Matter is making a comeback. We are taking back our bodies, reclaiming our material selves. In a neo-materialist world, Every Thing Matters.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is a story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequence. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.”
― Paul Kingsnorth

“Far from being just part of the problem, the people of the South are leading the global fight against ecological destruction. They are our allies, not our enemies, and if we are serious about working with them, then no part of our work should involve efforts to turn immigrants from their countries away at our borders.

Support for immigration controls strengthens the most regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to deal with the real causes of environmental problems. It gives conservative governments and politicians an easy way out, allowing them to pose as friends of the environment by restricting immigration, while continuing with business as usual. It hands a weapon to reactionaries, allowing them to portray environmentalists as hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“Some people fear that today we are again in mortal danger of massive volcanic eruptions or colliding asteroids. Hollywood producers make billions out of these anxieties. Yes, a big asteroid will probably hit our planet sometime in the next 100 million years, but it is very unlikely to happen next Tuesday. Instead of fearing asteroids, we should fear ourselves.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“For Homo sapiens has rewritten the rules of the game. This single ape species has managed within 70,000 years to change the global ecosystem in radical and unprecedented ways. Our impact is already on a par with that of ice ages and tectonic movements. Within a century, our impact may surpass that of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and, eventually, new species evolved to take their place. But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid. And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“Brahma Yoga helps me recognize the inherited privilege of being human, so I have benevolence for animals, plants, all sentient beings, and minerals. I care for their dignity and use on our shared planet”
― Leo Lourdes

“To say that concrete is everywhere is hardly an exaggeration. Despite the fact that we only began mass producing this mixture of sand, aggregates and cement just over a century ago, there are now more than 80 tonnes of concrete on this planet for every person alive – around 650 gigatonnes in total. To put that slightly meaningless number into perspective, it is considerably more than the combined weight of every single living thing on the planet: every cow, every tree, every human, plant, animal, bacterium and single-celled organism. Each year we produce enough concrete around the world to cover the entire landmass of England.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“A few years ago some geologists sifted through the data [and] estimated that the amount of sand, soil and rock we humans mine and quarry and dredge each year is some 24 times greater than the amount of sediment moved each year by Earth’s natural erosive processes, which is to say rivers grinding away sand and sending it down towards the sea. Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955. Or – another way of looking at it – by 2020 the total weight of human-made products, from iron to concrete and everything else besides, was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“We're worried - and for good reason - about what it means fir the human future if we have only ourselves to rely upon.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Faith is clearly not enough for many people. They crave hard evidence, scientific proof. They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal. What a relief it would be: doubt reliably abolished! Then, the irksome burden of looking after ourselves would be lifted. We're worried - and for good reason - about what it means for the human future if we have only ourselves to rely upon.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“In fact, we have only speeded up extinction in the last 50 years when the science has been on its peak. Morals do not come from evolutionary biology. Towards that end, it is the depressing story of survival upon survival through destruction upon destruction. No wonder we are now seeing tremendous loss to ecology, environment, bio-diversity and forests after setting aside values and morals.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“The fact that the countries with the highest birth rates generally have the lowest standard of living and produce the least pollution fatally undermines such claims - if the poorest 3 billion people on the planet somehow disappeared tomorrow, there would be virtually no reduction in ongoing environmental destruction.”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“Demokratische Politik kann sich nicht in Moraldebatten erschöpfen, lebensfähig ist sie immer nur als Projekt.”
― Jedediah Purdy, This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

“In my previous book, I challenged the idea that there is such a thing as pristine wilderness in the twenty-first century. Humans have dramatically changed the entire world.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“That Man is presented as a blind geologic force, such as volcanic eruptions or variations in solar radiation, is an expression of the naturalized or fetishized form of social relations that is prevalent in capitalism.”
― Daniel Cunha

“Wir haben nicht bloß unser Land, wir haben unsere Welt verloren - und damit die Möglichkeit, an die Unschlud jener Welt zu glauben, die wir geschaffen haben, einer Welt, der wir nicht entkommen können, für die wir nur Verantwortung übernehmen können und deren Wiederherstellung wir versuchen müssen.”
― Jedediah Purdy, This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

“Fuck / Our Future

When our scorching planet ignites the last evacuating airship to cook its soft cargo of human flesh in an expanding fireball and fragments of its propeller blades thunk inches deep into tree trunks in the straggling forest beneath / What I want to know is which will survive / which strain / which wood grain will hold encoded / like a fingerprint pushed into wet clay / that final day of reckoning when this cerulean blue ordained world we have corroded a toxic grey / begins its self-reclamation starting with that tree / a lone lieutenant / a desperate sentinel / erect / through the falling ball of fire / het fuel and smouldering meat / its face of leaves weighed with dust / its waist of branches noosed in plastic bags / yet standing stubborn in its shaggy majesty / admist the ship’s carnage / like a righteous middle finger thrust at all humanity / proud in the snarling sky”
― Inua Ellams, The Actual

“The poem "Fuck / Our Future" (p. 49):
When our scorching planet ignites the last evacuating airship to cook its soft cargo of human flesh in an expanding fireball and fragments of its propeller blades thunk inches deep into tree trunks in the straggling forest beneath / What I want to know is which will survive / which strain / which wood grain will hold encoded / like a fingerprint pushed into wet clay / that final day of reckoning when this cerulean blue ordained world we have corroded a toxic grey / begins its self-reclamation starting with that tree / a lone lieutenant / a desperate sentinel / erect / through the falling ball of fire / jet fuel and smouldering meat / its face of leaves weighed with dust / its waist of branches noosed in plastic bags / yet standing stubborn in its shaggy majesty / amidst the ship’s carnage / like a righteous middle finger thrust at all humanity / proud in the snarling sky”
― Inua Ellams, The Actual

“Major shifts in Earth’s climate are the norm, not the exception, in the Quaternary, which includes dozens of glacial to interglacial transitions. Earth was also significantly warmer during the Eemian, the last interglacial interval before the Holocene, which ended about 115,000 years ago. The relatively stable and moderate interglacial temperatures of the Holocene therefore stand out as an island of climate stability within a sea of extremes. If Earth’s climate system were to leave this relatively stable state, there is every reason to believe that the consequences might be catastrophic both to human societies and to non-human life as we know it. No industrial or even agricultural society has ever experienced climate shifts like those common before the Holocene. And greenhouse gas emissions and climate change are far from the only Earth system alterations that have accelerated since the 1950s.”
― Erle C. Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction

“We have to bring about peace between ourselves to safeguard the world and peace with the world in order to save ourselves.”
― Michel Serres, Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent

“You actually think we want to be like you? You Sapiens, with your bleak and apocalyptic history? What a grim and self-loathing species you are!

Look at what you worship as progress. The agricultural revolution turned you from free wanderers into slaves to the land. The Industrial Revolution robbed you of your souls and made you cruel. And the IT revolution gave you loneliness, hatred, and misery.

What's next for Sapiens in the glorious march of progress?”
― Douglas Preston, Extinction

“Considering chickens alone, their fossils may be a marker for the Anthropocene. The body size and body shape of today’s “broiler chickens” are distinct from that of wild fowl of their early twentieth-century cousins. Their worldwide distribution and massive population size will probably ensure that they will be well represented in the future fossil record. Future geologists might use a “chicken signal” to indicate that the strata they are examining are close to the start of the Anthropocene.”
― John Dvorak, How the Mountains Grew: A New Geological History of North America

“Proverbial tree time could be adapted for the present unperfect, when the planet that has been is being undone.”
― Jared Farmer, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees

“The problem with the United Nations isn’t that the politicians there are ignorant,
hidebound, self-interested, or corrupt. The problem with our response to climate change isn’t a problem with passing the right laws or finding the right price for carbon or changing people’s minds or raising awareness. Everybody already knows. The problem is that the problem is too big. The problem is that different people want different things. The problem is that nobody has real answers. The problem is that the problem is us.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“Increasingly, the death that occupies each human's imagination is not his own, but that of the entire life cycle of the planet earth, to which each of us is as but a cell to a body.”
― Christopher Stone, Should Trees have Standing?

“Time changed for the Romantics. Whether from the rise of industrialism that made visible the accelerating edge of the Anthropocene, from the contrasting awareness of geological time, the effects of accurate time-keeping, or the collapse of time and space made possible by steam travel, their period's momentum seemed resolutely forward, while at the same time operating 'in widely varying scales, paces and planes'. That change came early for Scots, who numbered among them Watt, of the steam engine (1765), and Hutton, who published the seminal Theory of the Earth (1788). For Walter Scott, who belonged to the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1810 and served as its President from 1820, that society having published Hutton's theory, and who knew Watt personally, time's many turns would have been particularly evident.”
― Caroline McCracken-Flesher, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel