Quotes from Leigh Phillips

Both the Pollyannas and the Cassandras are wrong, and both stand in the way of social justice, the former by condemning us all to catastrophic climate change and the loss of other vital ecosystem services for the sake of profit; the latter by condemning us all to a hair-shirted existence and refusal of further human development due to a romantic, unscientific belief in a static, unchanging balance of nature.

The flourishing of the whole local and foodie scene is dependent on a policy background of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation.

Hidden beneath localism's DIY attitude is a deep pessimism: it assumes we can't make large-scale, collective social change," worries Sharzer.

Mother Nature is not beneficent. She is not maleficent either of course. Merely augustly, majestically capricious.

It is the market that drives planned obsolescence, not growth or consumerism.

Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, "the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.")

The campaign against economic growth and overconsumption should have no place on the left. While its current austerity-ecology incarnation appears to many progressives as a fresh, new argument fit for the Anthropocene, it is in fact the descendent of a very old, dark and Malthusian set of ideas that the left historically did battle with.

Even the Jonestown Peoples' Temple Agricultural Project built community.

One of the most important popular concepts that we do have to ditch is the idea that there is some natural balance that mankind is intruding upon as a result of our growth.

Amazon is as much a complex planning mechanism based in human ingenuity as it is an inhuman place to work. Some 150 years later, we have much the same reaction of awe and terror at the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism as had Marx in the face of its Victorian antecedent.

The globalisation of food (or production of any commodity) is not the enemy per se, although it could and should certainly be more rationally planned.

English humorist Alan Coren was surely wrong when he said that the only books guaranteed to sell well were those about cats, golf and the Third Reich. His book Golfing for Cats, adorned with a Swastika, could also have done with some Peak-Oil pie-charts and a centerfold pull-out of a topless Martin Heidegger.

Our skyscrapers are not separate from nature; they are nature, as much as a termite colony's cathedral mound or a chaffinch nest or a bee hive. As are our iPhones and washing machines and bathyscaphe research submarines that take us to the depths of the Mariana Trench.

People searching for a new relationship with nature and a set of spiritual values to counter the individualism, political economy and environmental impact of modern industrial society latched on to the image of the Ecological Indian.

They built cities, terraced hillsides and irrigated fields, shaped the land with intentional fires, and cleared forests, all of which contributed directly to deforestation, soil depletion and erosion. In forgetting all these works, the myth of the Ecological Indian infantilises and denies agency to native peoples, erases civilisations and replaces them with imaginary wildernesses. It too is an act of conquest.

Indeed, the long-standing establishment embrace of the Malthusian worry explodes any suggestion that anti-growth is a particularly radical position. But then elites have never really liked the vast bulk of humanity, believing us all to be lesser creatures, unlettered, unrefined.