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Fusion and omnipotence, these sentiments characteristic of early infancy, lie at the basis of such ‘post-nature’ discourse, participating in the dream of a total absorption of nature into the commercial technosphere of contemporary capitalism

This fable, claiming to break with the world-view of the moderns that it incriminates, in the end actually reproduces it. It proceeds from the same regime of historicity that dominated the nineteenth century and a part of the twentieth, in which the past is assessed only as a backdrop, for the lessons it yields for the future, and in a representation of time as a one-directional acceleration.

Deriving from these ‘closed world’ views came the metaphor of ‘Spaceship Earth’ that seen from the Moon suggests its finite and fragile character … not without giving a new sense of geo-technocratic power, the pleasure of imagining oneself piloting the whole system.

The elites of the two post-war blocs conceived the planet as a ‘closed world’, a unified theatre where the battle between the two superpowers was played out; a vast reserve of supplies of strategic resources to make possible a faster growth than the other bloc and ensure social peace; a ‘gigantic laboratory’.

Indeed, quantifying nature is today big business, just as quantifying the economy had been after the Second World War.

A narrative that makes the management of the Earth system a new object of knowledge and government.

Instead of a concentric view in which the economy is within the social, itself framed by a thousand feedback loops within the biosphere and the Earth system, the environment became a new column in the bookkeeping of big corporations, which gave themselves new sustainable development divisions. The project of the ‘green economy’, born within international institutions in recent years, accentuates this development.

In place of ‘environment’, there is now the Earth system. While triumphant industrial modernity had promised to prise us away from nature, its cycles and its limits, placing us in a world of boundless progress, the Earth and its limits are today making a comeback. We are facing ‘the intrusion of Gaia’, in the words of Isabelle Stengers.

This story of awakening is a fable. The opposition between a blind past and a clear-sighted present, besides being historically false, depoliticizes the long history of the Anthropocene.

"No one is going to win the Nobel Prize in economics for finding the solution to climate change. (..) Arthur C. Pigou identified the general problem and the solution— (...) “Pigouvian taxes.” Each of the 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted this year causes at least about $40 worth damage. The correct—the only correct—approach is to price each and every ton of carbon according to the damage it causes."

"In a state, on the other hand, plunder precedes redistribution. It is precisely in order to be able to plunder continuously that redistribution is instituted".

"Far from being materialistic, the capitalist system is an idealistic world based on credit. It is for precisely this reason that it always harbors the possibility of crisis."

"In fact, what Marx called communism hardly differs from what Kant called “the kingdom of ends.” It is, in other words, a society in which you treat any other “always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”"

"It was Hegel, in his 'Philosophy of Right', who rst explicated capital, nation, and state as a mutually interrelated system."

"In my view, the situation that Fukuyama called “the end of history” means that once this Capital-Nation-State form is realized, any subsequent fundamental revolution is impossible. "

"Capital- Nation-State (...) is a mutually complementary apparatus. For example, a capitalist economy allowed to take its own course will inevitably result in economic inequality and conflict. But the nation, as something that intends communality and equality, will seek to resolve the various contradictions and inequalities introduced by the capitalist system. The state in turn realizes this intention".

"Yet nature was everywhere present on city streets—albeit in a state of profound up-heaval—in the form of epidemic diseases, rotting garbage, piles of manure, smoky skies, polluted waterways, and occasional fires.¹

"The overwhelming tendency among critics, with a few important exceptions, has been to focus on cars rather than roads and on the behavior of drivers rather than the powerful forces shaping American land-use patterns."

"By 1956, when Congress funded construction of the interstate highway system, nearly all of the basic patterns underpinning the creation of car-centered landscapes—as well as nearly all of the most significant environmental problems related to heavy car use—were firmly in place. With these changes, the United States became Car Country".

"What Ford and his fellow automobile manufacturers helped invent—with help from countless others—was essentially a technological ecosystem, an intricate set of interconnected inventions, institutions, and behav-iors that by mid-century more or less defined the American way of life."

"The greatest problem of the twenty-first century may well not be one of resource “taps” at all. The end of cheap garbage may loom larger than the end of cheap resources."

"The rise of capitalism launched a new way of organizing nature, mobilizing for the first time a metric of wealth premised on labor productivity rather than land productivity."

"For capitalism is impossible to understand as a closed system; the endless accumulation of capital is the endless internalization of nature. Capitalism is defined by frontier movement." - yep.

"An ingenious civilizational project has been at the core of this strategy, to construct nature as external to human activity, and thence to mobilize the work of uncommodified human and extra-human natures in service to advancing labor productivity within commodity production.".

"The end of Cheap Food may well be the end of modernity, and the start of something much better."

"We can say with some confidence that food—not just land—has become a central site of the world class struggle in a way that is entirely unprecedented, and unthinkable even three decades ago."

"The novelty of neoliberalism’s peculiar agricultural revolution is found in a strange mix of finance and empire, combined with coercive overproduction and forced underconsumption—without a productivity revolution"

It took about 2.5 calories of energy to deliver a calorie of food in the 1930s. The ratio then moved sharply upwards, to 7.5:1 in the 1950s, and 10:1 by the early 1970s.56 By the twenty-first century, fifteen-to-twenty calories were needed to deliver one calorie of food from farm to table, considerably more for globally sourced fruit."

"The hybrid revolution was, however, won at a heavy cost to farmer autonomy. Because hybrid crops, in contrast to open-pollinated ones, produce seed of inferior quality, hybridization “uncouples” seed from grain. This compelled farmers to make an annual pilgrimage to seed stores to purchase new seeds."

"Often regarded as a Cold War project, the Green Revolution emerged first in the United States during the 1930s."