Long before the 20th century, the trajectory was set. Mesopotamia form — Extinction

"Lets not be too quick to blame the human race for everything. We must remember that a great many species of animals became extinct before man ever appeared on earth. At the same time it is probably true that when two husky representatives of Homo sapiens, with clubs, corner the last two birds of a species, no matter how far they have or have not evolved, both the phylogeny and the ontogeny of those birds are, to all intents and purposes, over."

"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the form of environmental devastation. Of the earth’s estimated 10 million species, 300,000 have vanished in the past fifty years. Each year, 3,000 to 30,000 species become extinct, an all-time high for the last 65 million years. Within one hundred years, between one-third and two-thirds of all birds, animals, plants, and other species will be lost. Nearly 25 percent of the 4,630 known mammal species are now threatened with extinction, along with 34 percent of fish, 25 percent of amphibians, 20 percent of reptiles, and 11 percent of birds. Even more, species are having population declines. Environmental scientists speak of an “omega point” at which the vast interconnected networks of Earth’s ecologies are so weakened that human existence is no longer possible."

"Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many [if not all] species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid."

"[We] cannot bring back species from extinction… We are still driving 150 species to oblivion daily… Collapse will not change anything in our attitudes. As long as humans remain genetically identical to who they are today, I’m afraid they will collapse again, and again, after this coming collapse, and probably risk complete extinction. This is not speculation, but simply looking at historical evidence: over thousands of years we have collapsed pretty much constantly—anthropologists have documented the collapse of more than 82 (!!!) civilisations. We are now at the stage of a systemic, global collapse because we are one, united global economic machine that has used up everything on the planet. Our species is wired for growth, and we are designed to go through boom-and-bust cycles. What comes after the next bust will be a significantly smaller civilisation… There will be another, smaller boom, then collapse again. With each collapse many… “species” risk disappearance."

"Species are threatened because of over-exploitation, habitat destruction, climate change, and so on. Efforts to reverse, or stall, a decline in population would have to go on indefinitely (i.e., would have to be sustainable) unless all of the factors involved in the decline are removed. But modernity is the cause of all of those factors, so conservation will inevitably fail until modernity ends (and then there would be no conservation efforts with humans needing to be more involved in saving their own lives). Sometimes, predators are excluded through complex fencing. But these are used to exclude predators which were introduced (either deliberately or accidentally) by humans into ecosystems which had never previously included them. The fencing has to be maintained constantly, may fail to be 100% effective all of the time. The fencing itself also excludes many of those species inside the fence from the area outside of the fence. So it’s an artificial ecosystem that requires management by humans (the worst predator of all). For ever. That is unsustainable and not much better than a wildlife park. Humans, of course, aren’t excluded as they can come and go via gates."

"The most wretched of all current trends is of course the mass extinction of organisms, which has been escalating for decades and is still increasing in magnitude."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"