Learning to Die in the Anthropocene Quotes

“Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“Carbon-fueled capitalism is a zombie system, voracious but sterile.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“We must keep up our communion with the dead, for they are us, as we are the dead of future generations.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“The coal miners struggling for a democratic stake in production didn’t just protest, share news stories, and post messages. They didn’t just march. The African-American activists struggling for civil rights didn’t just tweet hashtag campaigns. They didn’t just hold meetings. They fought and bled and died for a world they believed in, for a share in the power they produced. Coal”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality. Carbon-fueled capitalism is a zombie system, voracious but sterile. This aggressive human monoculture has proven astoundingly virulent but also toxic, cannibalistic, and self-destructive. It is unsustainable, both in itself and as a response to catastrophic climate change.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“Through the ice ages of the past and into the long summer of the Holocene we carried tools, furs, fire, and our greatest treasure and most potent adaptive technology, the only thing that might save us in the Anthropocene, because it is the only thing that can save those who are already dead: memory.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“Carbon-fueled capitalism is a zombie system, voracious but sterile. This aggressive human monoculture has proven astoundingly virulent but also toxic, cannibalistic, and self-destructive.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“Our hominid ancestors evolved during a period of general planetary cooling, and humans themselves evolved in a glacial climate colder than the one we live in today. Civilization as we understand it developed during what has been an unusually long and mild interglacial period, beginning around 10,000 BCE and continuing into the recent past. After the icy millennia of the late Pliocene, the Holocene was a kind of Eden, and being the clever, adaptable animals that we are, we took advantage of it. Human civilization has thrived in what has been the most stable climate interval in 650,000 years.40 Thanks to carbon-fueled industrial civilization, that interval is over.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“You've heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march and chant. Some look away, deny what's happening and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in wireless, robot staffed, 3-D printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Flight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“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

“A sword is a sword, whichever way it cuts.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“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

“[N]obody seems to have the tools, clout, or conceptual framework we need to fix it, or even to come up with a good plan to protect ourselves from the greatest dangers. [...] And while smart, dedicated, and thoughtful people fumble with political machinery that doesn't work, such as carbon-pricing markets, protests, and the United Nations, all of us in the Global North go about our business, driving, flying, leaving lights on, running heaters and air conditioners, eating meat, charging our devices, living unsustainable lives predicated on easy consumption.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“How bodies harvest, produce, organize, and distribute energy determines how power flows, shaping the political arrangements of a given collective organism behind whatever ideologies the ruling classes may use to manufacture consent, obscure the mechanisms of control, or convince themselves of their infallible omniscience.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“Arrangements of bodies in systems don't arise from ideal notions of how governance should work, but rather emerge out of the vibrating bodies themselves, the systems the inhabit, and the interactions between the two.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“These two ways of learning to die come together in the role of the humanist thinker: the one who is willing to stop and ask troublesome questions, the one who is willing to interrupt, and the one who resonates on other channels and with slower, deeper rhythms.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“In the world of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality—What does my life mean in the face of death?—is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“We're going to need new ideas. We're going to need new myths and new stories, a new conceptual understanding of reality, and a new relationship to the deep polyglot traditions of human culture that carbon-based capitalism has vitiated through commodification and assimilation. Over and against capitalism, we will need a new way of thinking about our collective existence. We will need a new vision of who "we" are.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“Global warming is not the latest version of a hoary fable of annihilation. It is not hysteria. It is a fact. And we have likely already passed the point where we could have done anything about it. From the perspective of many policy experts, climate scientists, and national security officials, the concern is not whether global warming exists or how we might prevent it, but how we are going to adapt to life in the hot, volatile world we've created.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“the Islamic State has been able to survive only because it has taken control of most of Syria’s oil and gas production. We tend to think of climate change and violent religious fundamentalism as isolated phenomena, but as Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley argues, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“You’ve heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march, and chant. Some look away, deny what’s happening, and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in a wireless, robot-staffed, 3D-printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Fight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“21 As environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson puts it, “The Anthropocene presents novel challenges for living a meaningful life.”22 Historian and theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has claimed that global warming “calls us to visions of the human that neither rights talk nor the critique of the subject ever contemplated.”23 Whether we are talking about ethics or politics, ontology or epistemology, confronting the end of the world as we know it dramatically challenges our learned perspectives and ingrained priorities. What does consumer choice mean compared against 100,000 years of ecological catastrophe? What does one life mean in the face of mass death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful decisions in the shadow of our inevitable end? These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They cannot be graphed or quantified. They are philosophical problems par excellence. If, as Montaigne asserted, “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age, for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene.24 The rub now is that we have to learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“The study of the humanities is nothing less than patient nurturing of the roots and heirloom varietals of human symbolic life.”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

“If human existence on Earth were a day, our approximately five millennia of recorded history would take up the last half hour before midnight. Throughout 99.9 percent of humanity’s two hundred thousand years on Earth, the average planetary temperature never rose above 61 degrees Fahrenheit and carbon dioxide concentrations never went above 300 parts per million (ppm). Nearly”
― Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization