Simon L. Lewis > Quotes

“We have altered the Earth system physically and chemically through disrupting the global cycling of carbon, causing warming of the surface of the Earth and acidification of the oceans; and biologically, through species extinctions and the movement of many species to new locations. Of these myriad changes, summarized in Figure 8.1, some are being preserved in geological archives, including glacier ice and sediments accumulating on the ocean floor.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

“If all other emissions stopped immediately, it would take converting about 50 per cent of all the world’s croplands to forest to reduce carbon dioxide levels to 350 ppm by 2100.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

“From a narrative perspective, beginning the Anthropocene with the birth of the modern world tells a story of a new profit-driven mode of living. This new geological epoch is built from slavery and colonialism, enabled by a long-distance financial industry. The human epoch is a story of domination, and the resistance to that domination.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

“the central, pressing, existential threat to human civilization results from a core contradiction in today’s mode of living: it is powered by energy sources that are undermining the ability of today’s globally integrated network of cultures to persist. That threat is climate change. In short, fossil fuel use is a progress trap.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

“The Earth system has changed over this period due to the relationship between a dominant class of people and the rest: it is the outcome of the dynamics of the actions of the powerful and the desires of billions of people. Those with the power to direct others created the Anthropocene, but its unfolding is the result of the forces of human history, including the impacts of opposing the power that elites wield. This description of the Anthropocene tells of people having the agency to change the world, but our abilities to do so being far from equal.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

“As the twentieth-century German physicist Max Planck famously quipped, ‘a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

“today wild mammals make up just 3 per cent of the total mass; the other 97 per cent is made up of the human component of the Earth system – some 30 per cent being us humans and 67 per cent the domesticated animals that feed us.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

“The present day is marked by pervasive environmental changes that are clear in almost every geological deposit, whether glacier ice, stalagtites, or sediments from lake-beds or the ocean floor. From spherical carbonaceous particles to microplastics to changes in the carbon and nitrogen cycles indicated by the changing levels of certain carbon and nitrogen isotopes, a human fingerprint is obvious.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

“Beyond this, the choice of start date for the Anthropocene will inevitably feed into the stories we tell about ourselves and wider human development. If the Anthropocene is pinned to the Columbian Exchange, the deaths of 50 million people, and the beginnings of the modern world, then it is a deeply uncomfortable story of colonialism, slavery and the birth of a profit-driven capitalist mode of living being intrinsically linked to long-term planetary environmental change. What we do to each other matters, as well as what we do to the environment. And given that nobody meant to transfer diseases that killed tens of millions, it is also a cautionary story: human actions can cause accidents with terrible consequences.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene

“The impacts of exponential growth form some of the core challenges for societal development in the Anthropocene. Everything seems fine for a long time and then, almost immediately, it is not.”
― Simon L. Lewis, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene