Activists From The United States

"One of the most important lessons I also learned from anarchism is that you need to look for the radical things that we already do and try to encourage them. This is why I think there is so much potential for anarchism in the Black community: so much of what we already do is anarchistic and doesn’t involve the state, the police, or the politicians. We look out for each other, we care for each other’s kids, we go to the store for each other, we find ways to protect our communities. Even churches still do things in a very communal way to some extent. I learned that there are ways to be radical without always passing out literature and telling people, “Here is the picture, if you read this you will automatically follow our organization and join the revolution.” For example, participation is a very important theme for anarchism and it is also very important in the Back community. Consider jazz: it is one of the best illustrations of an existing radical practice because it assumes a participatory connection between the individual and the collective and allows for the expression of who you are, within a collective setting, based on the enjoyment and pleasure of the music itself. Our communities can be the same way. We can bring together all kinds of diverse perspectives to make music, to make revolution."

"Not just our communities of color, but in every community there is a need to stop advancing ready-made plans and to trust that people can collectively figure out what to do with this world. I think we have the opportunity to put aside what we thought would be the answer and fight together to explore different visions of the future. We can work on that. And there is no one answer: we’ve got to work it out as we go."

"I tried to figure out how this applies to me. I began to look at Black history again, at African history, and at the histories and struggles of other people of color. I found many examples of anarchist practices in non-European societies, from the most ancient times to the present. This was very important to me: I needed to know that it is not just European people who can function in an anti-authoritarian way, but that we all can. I was encouraged by things I found in Africa—not so much by the ancient forms that we call tribes—but by modern struggles that occurred in Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Even though they were led by organizations, I saw that people were building radical, democratic communities on the ground. For the first time, in these colonial situations, African peoples where creating what was the Angolans called “popular power.” This popular power took a very anti-authoritarian form: people were not only conducting their lives, but also transforming them while fighting whatever foreign power was oppressing them. However, in every one of these liberation struggles new repressive structures were imposed as soon as people got close to liberation: the leadership was obsessed with ideas of government, of raising a standing army, of controlling the people when the oppressors were expelled. Once the so-called victory was accomplished, the people—who had fought for years against their oppressors—were disarmed and instead of having real popular power, a new party was installed at the helm of the state. So, there were no real revolutions or true liberation in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe because they simply replaced a foreign oppressor with an indigenous oppressor."

"Through the Imagination, All is possible."

"The people themselves have to create structures in which they articulate their own voice and make their own decisions. I didn’t get that from other ideologies: I got that from anarchism."

"We are not going to get through some of our internal dynamics that have kept us divided unless we are willing to go through some really tough struggles. This is one of the other reasons why I say there is no answer: we’ve just got to go through this."

"Revolution is learning how to bring a large variety of personalities together into a powerful harmony. This harmony must lay down some general direction and get work done. It’s never easy. It’s struggle. It takes a lot of skill."

"One must never stop learning and growing and working for the People."

"Because of the totally racist, genocidal dynamic within this Babylonian Empire, the understood that we must primarily look to ourselves to free ourselves."

"When old strategies don’t work, you need to look for other ways of doing things to see if you can get yourself unstuck and move forward again."

"Our struggles here in the United States affect everybody in the world. People on the bottom are going to play a key role and the way we relate to people on the bottom is going to be very important. Many of us are privileged enough to be able to avoid some of the most difficult challenges and we will need to give up some of this privilege in order to build a new movement. The potential is there. We can still win—and redefine what it means to win—but we have the opportunity to advance a richer vision of freedom than we have ever had before. We have to be willing to try."

"Nationalism and statism are different because nationalism can be anti-state. But they can have commonalities in that nationalism may only be against a particular kind of state, such as a Racist State, or a Fascist State."

"Only the People’s full participation can bring true victory. And the People are real individual human beings, like me—with brains, desires, fears, angers, dreams, etc."

"Anarchist theory and practice cannot take the form of a mere adherence to the founding fathers and canonical practices, such as Kropotkin, Bakunin, and the Spanish Civil War. Tired of hearing it! Anarchism HERE in Babylon must reflect our unique problems and possibilities for struggle. Our struggles are not just against capitalism. Too simple. Our struggles are not just against racism. That’s also too simple. There are all kinds of negative “isms” we are fighting against and, just as important, all kinds of worlds we are fighting for. That’s why the whole idea and practice of “convergences” and “spokescouncils” are so important to activists in general to learn from and enhance because they are about making space for all “Voices” to be heard and factored into the decision-making so that whatever activities comes forth from it prefigures the kind of new worlds we truly want."

"How can we nurture every act of freedom? Whether it is with people on the job or the folks that hang out on the corner, how can we plan and work together? We need to learn from the different struggles around the world that are not based on vanguards. There are examples in Bolivia. There are the . There are groups in Senegal building social centers. You really have to look at people who are trying to live and not necessarily trying to come up with the most advanced ideas. We need to de-emphasize the abstract and focus what is happening on the ground."

"Oppositional thinking and oppositional risks are necessary. I think that is very important right now and one of the reasons why I think anarchism has so much potential to help us move forward. It is not asking of us to dogmatically adhere to the founders of the tradition, but to be open to whatever increases our democratic participation, our creativity, and our happiness."

"Some of our ideas about who we are as a people hamper our struggles. For example, the Black community is often considered a monolithic group, but it is actually a community of communities with many different interests. I think of being Black not so much as an ethnic category but as an oppositional force or touchstone for looking at situations differently. Black culture has always been oppositional and is all about finding ways to creatively resist oppression here, in the most racist country in the world. So, when I speak of a Black anarchism, it is not so tied to the color of my skin but who I am as a person, as someone who can resist, who can see differently when I am stuck, and thus live differently."

"Struggle is very tough and when you cross that line, you risk going to jail, getting seriously hurt, killed, and watching your comrades getting seriously hurt and killed. That is not a pretty picture, but that is what happens when you fight an entrenched oppressor. We are struggling and will make it rough for them, but struggle is also going to be rough for us too. This is why we have to find ways to love and support each other through tough times. It is more than just believing that we can win: we need to have structures in place that can carry us through when we feel like we cannot go another step. I think we can move again if we can figure out some of those things. This system has got to come down. It hurts us every day and we can’t give up. We have to get there. We have to find new ways."

"What does it say about you, if you allow someone to set themselves up as your leader and make all your decisions for you? What anarchism helped me see was that you, as an individual, should be respected and that no one is important enough to do your thinking for you."

"Republics actually existed in India at least as early as the days of the Buddha (6th century before Christ). The republican form of government in ancient India had a duration of at least a thousand years. We have records of no other country, ancient or modern, where republics have existed and continued for so long a period. Even more important than her republics has been the spirit of freedom and democracy which has manifested itself in many forms among the Indian people from the earliest ages. The Vedas show that the principle of representative government were held by the ancient Aryans 12-13 centuries before the Christian era.""

"The fact is, not Europe but Asia seems to have been the cradle of political liberty, the cradle of democratic and republican government, in the world ... research makes it clear that the democratic and republican institutions of Europe and America actually send their roots back to Asia, and especially to India."

""When the British first appeared on the scene, India was one of the richest countries of the world; indeed, it was her great riches that attracted the British to her shores. For 2,500 years before the British came on the scene and robbed her of her freedom, India was self-ruling and one of the most influential and illustrious nations of the world." "This wealth," says was created by the Hindus' vast and varied industries. Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilized world - nearly every kind of creation of Man's brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty - had long, long been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or than any other in Asia. Her textile goods - the fine products of her loom, in cotton, wool, linen, and silk - were famous over the civilized world; so were her exquisite jewelry and her precious stones, cut in every lovely form; so were her pottery, porcelains, ceramics of every kind, quality, color and beautiful shape; so were her fine works in metal - iron, steel, silver and gold. She had great architecture - equal in beauty to any in the world. She had great engineering works. She had great merchants, great business men, great bankers and financiers. Not only was she the greatest ship-building nation, but she had great commerce and trade by land and sea which extended to all known civilized countries. Such was the India which the British found when they came."

"Most environmental dilemmas have to do with limits (usually limits to either resources or to waste sinks). And most environmental solutions have to do with reining in our wants and ambitions in some way. Cleverness may help at the margins—as when chemists identify a relatively harmless substance that can substitute for a toxic one. But without self-limits on population and consumption, no amount of cleverness can halt humanity’s accelerating march toward collapse. Economist William Stanley Jevons got an inkling of this stark reality in 1865, when he published his observation that making coal usage more efficient led to increased coal mining (and depletion), not conservation. Too often, we outsmart ourselves by thinking we’re doing something to save resources and reduce pollution, when in fact we’re just paving the way for more of the same. Another intelligence-resistant problem is deciding what’s a good life or a good death. These are arguably the most important personal questions with which any of us will ever grapple, but intelligence doesn’t always help with answers. It’s true that smart people sometimes avoid a lot of problems that plague less-smart people (such as falling prey to obvious scams and rip-offs). But they just as often end up burdening themselves and others around them with even bigger problems brought on by the unforeseen consequences of their own cleverness—as when a smart investor or inventor accumulates a huge fortune, over which their heirs fight bitterly, to the point that family dynamics are poisoned for generations to come. Finally, there is the uber-problem that should be at the top of all our minds—the long-term survival of humanity. We naturally want our species to stick around. And we like to think that our intelligence improves our prospects in that regard. But, so far, the evidence points in the opposite direction."

"We’ve spent the last few million years evolving big brains, and we won’t un-evolve them in short order. Further, encouraging dull-wittedness and ignorance would result in terrible short-term consequences (as we Americans are likely to discover during the second Trump presidency). Moreover, intelligence is cool: it gives us art, music, literature, science, mathematics, and so much more. At least some of these achievements and abilities are arguably worth saving. So, what’s our best long-term plan to avert self-destruction, given that intelligence is now baked into our species? There are those who say the solution lies in realizing that we fixate on just one kind of intelligence—linguistic, rational thinking—to the exclusion of others, and that we’d be better served by nurturing multiple intelligences, including musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, and logical-mathematical. That’s good advice as far as it goes. But we’re unlikely to heed it sufficiently until we acknowledge why we came to rely so much on linguistic intelligence in the first place: it gave us power over our environment and over one another. So, our dilemma is as much one of ends (power) as means (language-based intelligence). In addition to needing a counterbalance to linguistic intelligence, we also need a way to check our individual and collective pursuit of excessive power."

"Life may be unique to Earth. Even if single-celled organisms can readily evolve in conditions that exist on millions or billions of other planets, we have no actual evidence that complex, multi-cellular life exists anywhere else in the vastness of space. Bacteria appeared on our planet roughly 3.7 billion years ago; by 2 billion years ago, the tree of life was branching into what would become a stunning web of creatures, huge and tiny. Plants, animals, and fungi proliferated, formed relationships, and produced ecosystems. The result was a planet full of life, and one whose atmosphere, temperature, chemical composition, and weather are all largely shaped by the side effects of the strategies that organisms use to thrive. However, in a matter of mere centuries, we humans are unraveling the web of life and triggering a mass extinction event that is likely to impact virtually all species on the Earth, and to destabilize the fundamental planetary systems upon which we too depend. Mass extinctions have happened before. The web of life is, paradoxically, both resilient and fragile. On five previous occasions (most recently the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 65 million years ago) our world lost up to 95 percent of its species. The current wave of extinctions that’s being triggered by humans is, so far, not on the same scale, but it is proceeding far more rapidly than previous ones. We humans represent a new kind of threat to the rest of life: our development of language, tool-making, and fire-spreading rendered us hyper-effective hunters and foragers. Tens of thousands of years ago, we were already reshaping landscapes and impacting wildlife. Our ability to expand our own habitat has generated unwanted results: some prey animals were hunted to extinction, and in a process of competitive exclusion, humans caused many local extirpations by appropriating the resources of habitats for themselves. These unintended effects then impacted humans themselves, often by compromising their food supply. Therefore, over time, humans who stayed in any given ecosystem long enough to learn its limits embraced cultural traditions to moderate their demands on it. However, since the start of the European conquest of most of the rest of the world, and especially since society’s rapid adoption of fossil fuels starting around 1800, human impact on the biosphere has accelerated at a breathtaking pace. Expanding human populations and associated land use changes, industrial agriculture, industrial forestry, industrial-scale fishing, proliferation of toxic chemicals, and climate change are decimating native species of plants and animals around the world. According to some estimates, populations of many non-domesticated species have declined, on average, by 70 percent, and the pace of species extinctions has quickened to 100 or more times the usual or “background” rate. What will the world come to look like if these trends continue? In one scenario, Earth will have become fully domesticated in a century or two, so that humans and machines control planetary systems (including climate patterns, ocean currents, the water cycle, and the carbon cycle). In this possible case, very little of wild nature will be left. In the far more likely scenario, the unraveling of the web of life and the destabilization of planetary systems will lead to the collapse not just of biodiversity but civilization as well. Is it too late to save biodiversity and the living Earth? … I’ll argue that only a collective effort to put wild nature at the center of our priorities will prevent its devastation and the possible disappearance of our own species, among countless others."

"Climate change is a wicked problem… [and] there is no way to solve it without sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, and without thereby generating more problems. For example, shrinking the economy would reduce carbon emissions, but it would throw a lot of people out of work (in effect, we did trial runs during the financial crash of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020; both times, carbon emissions plunged, yet everyone was eager to “get back to normal”). Building vast amounts of low-carbon energy-producing and energy-using infrastructure would also reduce emissions, but that would require tens of trillions of dollars of investment as well as enormous quantities of depleting, non-renewable minerals—the mining of which would generate pollution and destroy wildlife habitat."

"Intelligence is useful and entertaining. Companies go out of their way to hire applicants with high IQ scores, and spectacular intellectual achievements in the arts and sciences can win the hero-worship of generations ([like] Aristotle, Bach, Einstein). Measuring smarts is the job of an industry. Indeed, smartness is so endlessly praised in modern society that questioning its value may constitute one of the most dissident of human acts. High intelligence has been defined in many ways, but typically as the capacity for abstraction, logic, self-awareness, learning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. High intelligence values itself, selects for itself, and fascinates itself. Our remarkable human intellectual achievements are deeply tied to language, whose development occurred as a self-reinforcing evolutionary feedback process. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, early humans derived a collective survival advantage by developing precursors of language, which enabled them to coordinate their behavior and to plan. But language requires extra brain power, so natural selection also worked to increase brain size, which enabled further development of language, which conferred still more survival advantages, and so on. If evolution produced high intelligence, then high intelligence is latent in evolution. Yet high intelligence is quite rare in nature. While all species communicate to some degree, only one has developed abstract, symbolic language. If language-based high intelligence offers survival advantages, why has it cropped up in nature only once?"

"The world, our world, finds itself caught between a rock and hard place. The relationship that we humans have developed with fossil energy over the last 250 years is a textbook definition of an addiction, and increasingly looks like a Faustian pact: we know that it’s slowly killing us, we know we should be leaving it in the ground and we also know that we will someday have to live without it anyway, yet we just can’t stop burning it and we can’t get enough of it, because we have multiplied our numbers and built our whole world around it. The detox “replacement medications” that we are using do not seem to be working so far, even as we keep increasing their doses. We are of course “pledging” to try harder and harder in the future, yet we keep relapsing into our fossil addiction, year after year, day after day, one flight at a time, one car ride at a time, one purchase at a time, one degree of comfort or of convenience at a time. By doing so we keep turning our eyes and minds away from the real nature of the upcoming and inevitable “energy transition”, the only one that is in fact likely to happen in our lifetimes, and which as Richard Heinberg said will almost certainly be a transition “from using a lot to using a lot less”."

"It’s sad when loved ones die, and few of us look forward to our own demise; hence the perennial quest for an elixir of eternal life, or at least a cure for cancer. But if nobody died, the planet would quickly fill with humans and empty of all the things that feed and provision us. Death clears space for new life; it is the non-negotiable price of admission to the great banquet of existence."

"For a population of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary energy abundance has led to many good things (for some of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience. But we are about to become victims of our own success."

"…civilization’s survival dilemma in the 21st century is best described by a concept from population ecology—overshoot. This refers to the situation where a crucial resource temporarily becomes more abundant, thereby enabling a group of organisms to grow its population beyond levels that can be sustained over the long run. For a population of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary energy abundance has led to many good things (for some of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience. But we are about to become victims of our own success."

"Agriculture enabled population growth and social complexity, but it gradually robbed soils of nutrients. Sailing ships guided with clocks and navigational charts could increase the scope of trade, but building wooden ships (and making charcoal for forging steel) was leading to the deforestation of whole continents. A reckoning with limits seemed to be in store. Then a miracle happened. People who lived in some key centers of global trade started using fossil fuels—energy sources capable of delivering power in previously unimaginable and seemingly endless quantities. Coal, oil, and natural gas enabled the development of transport technologies (steamships, railroads, cars, trucks, and airplanes) that overcame prior limits to the speed of travel and trade, so that products and resources that were abundant in one place could be transported to places where they were scarce. Fossil fuels could be used to increase the rates of resource extraction via powered mining machinery, and to process lower grades of ores as more concentrated ores were depleted. They could be fashioned into plastics and chemicals to substitute for some natural materials that were getting scarce, such as hardwoods and whale oil. And they could be made into artificial fertilizers, which could replace soil nutrients lost due to unsustainable agricultural practices. All these developments together enabled population growth at rates that far outstripped historic trends: human numbers expanded from one billion to eight billion in a mere two centuries. We were, in effect, stretching existing constraints on population and consumption to the point that it was difficult for many people to see that boundaries still existed at all."

"Limits exist everywhere in nature. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy—pick your field, dig into the literature, and you’ll soon be struck by how everything in the universe is defined by limits of temperature, weight, volume, density, number, power, frequency, speed, and more. Limits enable the functioning of systems at scales from the subatomic realm all the way up to galaxy clusters. If there is any physical thing that could credibly be claimed to be infinite, it is the universe itself. But not all cosmologists believe the universe is infinite, and proving whether it is or not may be impossible in principle. Leaving the totality of the cosmos to one side (an action possible only within the human brain—which does, most assuredly, have its own limits), everything else we encounter in life has boundaries. So, why have many people become obsessed with either denying or overcoming limits, to the point where they appear to feel that life can have meaning only if it’s tied to some limitless thing, quality, or substance? Humanity’s obsession with limitlessness probably began with the origin of language, which enables the asking of questions. People tens of thousands of years ago began to ask, “What happens to our essential sense of self when we die?” Their efforts to manage existential terror likely led them to tell stories about a boundless otherworld in which the dead live forever. Looking up at the night sky, they saw a realm of blackness punctuated by moving points of light; upon this screen they projected their wants, needs, and fears. Our lives and those of all the creatures around us may be brief, these early people must have thought, but there is another dimension that lies beyond—a dimension without endings. We’ve been searching for a path to infinity ever since."

"As we’ve grown our population and our per capita consumption rates, we’ve been taking habitat away from other organisms. As a result, nature is in full retreat. Vertebrate and invertebrate animal species have suffered average population declines of 70 percent in the past 50 years, and thousands of plant species are endangered as well."

"The past few thousand years of human history have already seen several critical accelerators. The creation of the first monetary systems roughly 5,000 years ago enabled a rapid expansion of trade that ultimately culminated in our globalized financial system. Metal weapons made warfare deadlier, leading to the takeover of less-well-armed human societies by kingdoms and empires with metallurgy. Communication tools (including writing, the alphabet, the printing press, radio, television, the internet, and social media) amplified the power of some people to influence the minds of others. And, in the past century or two, the adoption of fossil fuels facilitated resource extraction, manufacturing, food production, and transportation, enabling rapid economic expansion and population growth. Of those four past accelerators, our adoption of fossil fuels was the most potent and problematic. In just two centuries, energy usage per capita has increased eightfold, as has the size of the human population. The period since 1950, which has seen a dramatic increase in the global reliance on petroleum, has also seen the fastest economic and population growth in all of human history. Indeed, historians call it the “Great Acceleration.” Neoliberal economists hail the Great Acceleration as a success story, but its bills are just starting to come due. Industrial agriculture is destroying Earth’s topsoil at a rate of tens of billions of tons per year. Wild nature is in retreat, with animal species having lost, on average, 70 percent of their numbers in the past half-century. And we’re altering the planetary climate in ways that will have catastrophic repercussions for future generations. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole human enterprise has grown too big, and that it is turning nature (“resources”) into waste and pollution far too quickly to sustain itself. The evidence suggests we need to slow down, and, in some cases at least, reverse course by reducing population, consumption, and waste."

"Prior to the widespread use of coal, oil, and natural gas, agrarian societies saw cyclical periods of rise and fall. But the scale of expansion since the dawn of the fossil-fueled industrial revolution, beginning roughly at the start of the 19th century, has been unprecedented. Energy usage per capita has grown 800 percent, as has population. Meanwhile, the contours of society have been transformed: for the first time in human history, most people now live in cities."

"During the last 200 years, per capita energy usage grew eight-fold, while human population expanded at about the same rate. As a result of energy growth, all the things we do with energy became more doable. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and mining exploded in scale. Energy became so abundant that it seemed we could solve any human problem, now or in the future, just by throwing more energy at it. We even reconfigured our economic system so that it assumes and requires perpetual growth. But growth in fossil-fuel energy can’t continue much longer: depletion and climate change will see to that. And even if we make a wholehearted effort to switch to low-carbon energy sources, we face limits to nature’s supplies of materials with which to make solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, and batteries."

"Fossil fuels enabled a dramatic expansion of energy usable by humanity, in turn enabling unprecedented growth in human population, economic activity, and material consumption."

"Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species, and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail."

"If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species."

"Using science, technology, and cheap energy, we expanded farmlands, chain-sawed forests, exploited fisheries, mined minerals, pumped oil, and flattened mountains for their buried coal. And we did these things in a way that was not remotely sustainable. By harvesting renewable resources faster than they could regrow, by using non-renewable resources that could not be recycled, and by choking environments with industrial wastes, we were borrowing from future generations and from other species."

"Global human population has doubled three times in the past 200 years, surging from 1 billion in 1820 to 2 billion in 1927, to 4 billion in 1974, to 8 billion today. Its highest rate of growth was in the 1960s, at over 2 percent per year; that rate is now down to 1.1 percent. If growth continues at the current rate, we’ll have about 18 billion people on Earth by the end of this century. All of this would be fine if we lived on a planet that was itself expanding, doubling its available quantities of minerals, forests, fisheries, and soil every quarter-century, and doubling its ability to absorb industrial wastes. But we don’t. It is essentially the same beautiful but finite planet that was spinning through space long before the origin of humans."

"Thank you, Peter, for... this important and timely book. ...I’ve been following your work for several years, and I discussed it in my own recent book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. The data-driven, mathematical methods you and your colleagues have developed for understanding patterns in history seem highly illuminating. In the U.S., rising economic inequality (since the 1970s) has immiserated the working class, while the number of elites (e.g., billionaires) and elite aspirants (e.g., people with law degrees) has skyrocketed. As you show... these developments align with a historical pattern seen repeatedly in complex societies, and... never seems to end well. In End Times, you lay out... what your analysis means for the United States in the 2020s. It’s not a pretty picture. ...we’re seeing the evidence of increasing polarization and political ill will everywhere."

"Depleting and climate-changing coal, oil, and natural gas have brought about dramatic human population growth, along with immense profits and unprecedented wealth (for the few). But all of these presumed and probably transitory benefits have been based on depleting natural resources, and on processes that are perilously changing the climate and degrading ecosystems across the planet. Every time we pick up a gasoline-powered machine we are viscerally linked to that chain of ersatz benefits and spiraling impacts."

"Sound and accurate journalism defends our democracy. It's one of the most effective weapons at our disposal to contain the power-hungry. I've always said that All the President's Men is a violent movie. No shots are fired, but words are used as if they were weapons."

"There was a time during a period of national crisis when politicians from both sides of the aisle put partisan politics aside to uncover the truth. There was a time when Democrats and Republicans united to navigate a peaceful ending to a corrupt and criminal presidency. There was a time when members of Congress placed defending our democracy above party interests for the greater good."

"I think he hates me a little, because after all, this year, the year of his professional "boom", there has been more talk about him by virtue of our flirtation than for his performances as an actor! (Barbra Streisand)"

"I've always appreciated diversity. I believe that American culture is founded on diversity and for this reason it is still alive and inspiring. I grew up in what you might call an unfortunate part of Los Angeles, where there wasn't much to do but experience the differences, go to different places, and hear different stories."

"The Gulf disaster is worse than a terrible oil leak. It’s the product of a failed energy policy that looked at profits before people and environment."

"Redford is a very good collaborator, a kind of alter ego for me: he was that young prince who was blond in appearance, but who had a much darker interior. It was clearly a metaphor for America. And most of the stories we've done together have become love movies, romantic movies. In my opinion, he was the ideal prototype of this kind of event. We never got tired of working together. We've always been somewhat demanding of each other, trying to get the most out of each of us, and we didn't waste time knowing what would work or not. It was a great advantage: we knew each other perfectly. (Sydney Pollack)"