“That’s what we didn’t, perhaps, understand: that there would be no before and after to catastrophic climate change, that the dystopian could be so cozy with the quotidian.”
“The term is a little too fashionable these days, but it is useful because it assigns a name to something we all uneasily recognize: a world whose rules are fundamentally different from the ones we were taught.”
““Law is a circuit between imagination and the material world,” he writes, in one of the book’s many beautiful sentences. The book aims to show how our shared philosophical premises inform our laws, our behavior, and ultimately our world.”
“Purdy divides the nation’s past relationship to nature into four phases. The first phase he names is the providential, characterized by the belief that God bequeathed us land to settle and transform.”
“Next came the Romantic perspective, exemplified by John Muir, which inverted the providential view. Romantics found the greatest beauty in untouched land, and their efforts led to the preservation of many wild spaces.”
“A third, utilitarian credo, championed by Theodore Roosevelt among others, sought to manage the country’s forests and other resources responsibly. The goal was worthy, but utilitarians framed this management as a technocratic task that fell to experts: they believed in “administration rather than democracy.””
“Finally, the ecological doctrine, emerging in the early 1960s, stressed the oneness and interdependence of all life, epitomized by Rachel Carson’s revelation in Silent Spring that pesticides permeated far beyond their intended targets.”
“And now? Purdy declines to coin a name for the contemporary American attitude toward nature, possibly because there is no single overriding one. But he does offer a thoughtful inquiry into what an Anthropocene attitude might optimally look like.”
“Today, Purdy writes, we are (or should be) in the process of shifting to a postecological way of thinking: [P]ristineness and pollution, ecological connection and technological alienation, are blended and are matters of degree … Paradox, partiality, and the mixed-up character of everything have come after the grasp at wholeness that began the ecological age.”
“We might say (though Purdy doesn’t) that the postecological attitude stands to the ecological as postmodernism stands to modernism: a discourse that continues along the same lines, but without the belief in purity and coherence assumed by its predecessor.”
“Purdy turns to a surprising source: Henry David Thoreau, who, he points out, has been claimed by Romantics in the past, but who ultimately eludes their constraints. Certain passages from Thoreau, he argues, can be profitably reread “with Anthropocene eyes”: His Concord is full of the artifacts of old and new settlement, down to the soil itself, seeded with stone tools and potsherds that tinkle against the hoe as he works his bean-field. There is nothing pristine in this place, no basis for a fantasy of original and permanent nature. There is only a choice among relationships with and attitudes toward ever-changed places. These do not just accommodate the damage and ruptures of the landscape: they begin from and depend on them.”
“To praise the mutilated world — to embrace, in some sense, nature’s desecration — is not defeatism or complacency. The difference is subtle, but Purdy’s preferred attitude toward the Anthropocene promotes equanimity about the inevitable wreckage — the potsherds, the scars — combined with an ability to savor and nurture the beauty and vitality that emerge from it. Purdy quotes another poet, Wallace Stevens, to illustrate the point: “The imperfect is our only paradise.””
“Throughout After Nature, Purdy is more focused on intellectual frameworks than policy proposals. Yet the book is firmly anchored in political conviction. Purdy calls for recognition of the unavoidably political nature of the questions we face.”
“Extrapolating from the economist Amartya Sen’s famous observation that famines don’t occur in democracies, Purdy writes that in the Anthropocene, “the world of scarcity and plenty, comfort and desperation, is not just where we live; it is also what we make.” In the past, political decisions may have determined who had adequate shelter from storms; now they may help determine the ferocity of the storms themselves. Accordingly, Purdy insists that we must make the Anthropocene universally democratic. “[I]f Anthropocene ecologies are a political question,” he writes, “then no one should be left out of the decisions that shape them.””
““The comparative study of human cultures across the world and through time helps us see that our particular way of doing things, right here, right now, is a contingent adaptation to particular circumstances,” he writes, “yet at the same time an adaptation built with universal human templates of meaning-making and symbolic reasoning, with tools and technologies we have inherited from the past.””
““The problem with our response to climate change isn’t a problem with passing the right laws or finding the right price for carbon or changing people’s minds or raising awareness,” he writes. “The problem is that the problem is too big … The problem is that the problem is us.””
““Learning to die as a civilization,” he tells us, “means letting go of this particular way of life and its ideas of identity, freedom, success, and progress.””
“Is it humanity per se that has brought about these massive disruptions, or is it a very specific economic and political system, benefiting a very small subset of people, that is responsible?”
“The first perspective is represented by Elizabeth Kolbert, who argues in The Sixth Extinction that Homo sapiens has always lived in unique disharmony with the environment.”
“The most prominent spokesperson for the second viewpoint is Naomi Klein, whose This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate makes the case that global capitalism, and not the human species itself, is the real culprit.”