The Great Acceleration Quotes

“This should come as no surprise. Intellectual, social, and political inertia are normally powerful forces. Modern thought and institutions, evolved and nurtured in the late Holocene, fit comfortably with a world of cheap energy and stable climate.”
― John Robert McNeill, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945

“Humans did so in the Pleistocene by helping to drive hundreds of species of large mammals to extinction. They did so in the mid-Holocene by clearing forests for farming. Although we do not do so, it is possible to define the Anthropocene so that it begins with any of these activities.”
― John Robert McNeill, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945

“The rapid global economic growth from the 1950s required ever-increasing quantities of raw materials and foodstuffs—metals, oil, coal, timber, fish, meat, and agricultural commodities of all types. Heightened demand for these pushed commodity frontiers ever outward, into parts of the world that were not yet wholly integrated into the modern economy.”
― John Robert McNeill, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945

“François Mitterrand is credited with saying that the most essential quality for any statesman is indifference”
― John Robert McNeill, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945

“In the half century after 1950, the global economy grew sixfold. Annual economic growth averaged 3.9 percent per year, far outstripping the estimated historical averages for the industrial age up to that point (1820–1950) of 1.6 percent per year and for the “early modern,” post-Columbian world (1500–1820) of 0.3 percent per year”
― John Robert McNeill, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945