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Anthropocene Quotes

Browse 16 quotes about Anthropocene.

Anthropocene Quotes

“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.”

PowerMankindHumanEcologySurvival Of The FittestAnthropocene
Book:Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
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“If Faustian restlessness is one of the defining characteristics of modern humans, then, by Pääbo’s account, there must be some sort of Faustian gene. Several times, he told me that he thought it should be possible to identify the basis for our “madness” by comparing Neanderthal and human DNA. “If we one day will know that some freak mutation made the human insanity and exploration thing possible, it will be amazing to think that it was this little inversion on this chromosome that made all this happen and changed the whole ecosystem of the planet and made us dominate everything,” he said at one point. At another, he said, “We are crazy in some way. What drives it? That I would really like to understand. That would be really, really cool to know.”

PsychologyHuman NatureHuman ConditionAnthropoceneBehavioral Genetics
Book:The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
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“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.”

HumanityThings That MatterDecolonizationReparationsAnthropoceneReclamations
Book:The Book of Form and Emptiness
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“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.”

FearMankindFutureAsteroidsAnthropocene
Book:Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
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“System knowledge alone tends to favor technocratic visions; transformation knowledge by itself may encourage blind activism; orientation knowledge without system and transformation knowledge is idle. But even the combination of these types of knowledge will be useless as long as they are not implemented within a suitable knowledge economy, comprising research, education, public discourse, and political action. Much of the needed knowledge is unavailable - either because it is inaccessible, suppressed, or unimplemented, or because it does not yet exist or has been lost. Even in the face of global challenges, there will not be just one way into the future, but various modes of bringing together the richness and diversity of human experiences. New form of knowledge, as well as new forms of individual and social life ready to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene (including new strategies for knowledge production and energy provision, for dealing with social justice and the flow of materials, for health care en traffic, etc) will not simply follow from a radical 'paradigm shift'. They will rather result from exploration processes that may eventually form a matrix. thus giving birth to new insights and forms of life that we could not have anticipated.”

KnowledgeEvolutionAnthropoceneForms Of Life
Book:The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene
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“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.”

AtheismClimate ChangeScience And ReligionModern ScienceScientismIslam And ScienceNew AtheismScience And GodAnthropoceneBiodiversity Loss
Book:Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World
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“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.”

TimeRomanticismGeological TimeWalter ScottAnthropoceneJames WattJames Hutton
Book:The International Companion to the Scottish Novel
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“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.”

ScienceInformation AgeCyborgAnthropoceneHuman ExceptionalismInformaticsCyborgianHistorical WoundsScientific Age
Book:When Species Meet
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“Neither the onset of epistemic evolution nor that of the Anthropocene can easily be assigned a singular date, cause, or origin. From this perspective, the primary question is less what or who caused the Anthropocene but how humanity can live with it. Each potential genesis proposed above catches important aspects of the long-term historical development that drove us and the planet we inhabit into this new stage. There is nog question that power, violence, exploitation, and oppression were crucial factors. In examining the dark side of history, we see indeed that not all cats are gray; we may well distinguish the oppressors and the oppressed. But identifying causes and culprits does not necessarily put us into a better position for predicting which solutions are equal to the challenges of the Anthropocene. We cannot simply bail out or excuse ourselves from the evolution of knowledge, but we may attempt to understand it better, including the detailed pathways that have brought us to where we now stand - and whence we will be launched into the future.”

AnthropoceneEpistemic Evolution
Book:The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene
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