[Let me know if I am violating some sort of copyright, I’ll remove the excerpts immediately.]

“The good life is built by enclosing spaces of privilege and imagined safety. Construction workers are not invited inside. Environmental hazards are dumped outside. The irony, of course, is that those hazards sneak back in. But that is not the plan. The plan for a good life is to let others suffer for making your security enclosure and for the hazards you produce.” – Tsing (2019), The Political Economy of the Great Acceleration

“Non-sustainability developed not as an unintentional effect […] but as an active strategy of states, corporations and citizen groups on both sides of the Communist/Free World line. Non-sustainability was an ideology for each; we called it ‘growth’. Population promotion, chemical pollution, the reckless use of fossil fuels, eutrophication and the spread of radioactivity were active programmes. Now that commentators have pointed out the ecological challenges, everyone wants to deny that they were caused deliberately; in such denials, we imagine such effects as the human condition – rather than as results of a political culture.” – ibid.

“What is needed, I think, is an inversion of materialism. For capitalism was supposed to be purely materialist but suddenly we read in it a completely idealistic idea of what the world is made of. It is – and this is a metaphor that Isabelle uses as well – as if we were extracted from a point of view which is of nowhere, basically. And this idea of the nowhere is shared by the notion of utopia. So for me – and here I may differ from Isabelle – the absolute enemy is utopia because in the dream of utopia, that place of nowhere, there is a perverse link between capitalism and its enemies. This is no doubt a reflection of my French background but, as I see it, the perverse pleasure of losing to an enemy that is bigger has shaped the entire attitude of the left.” – Bruno Latour in Latour, Stengers, Tsing & Bubandt (2018) Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse, Ethnos, 83:3, 587-606, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2018.1457703

“[…] scientists are actually interesting people doing something else. We might not always agree with what they are doing, because sometimes they insist on being stupid and boring.” – ibid.

“I would like to come back to what you said earlier, Bruno. I am not a utopian. But what I hold on to, and what I would take from Guattari, is that we are living in a situation of ecological devastation both of the environment and of social and mental ecologies. In this situation, anybody who says: ‘We know that people are unable to do that’ or ‘people will never accept that’ are taking devastation as their ground for argumentation. My position is not utopian, but I want to hold on to a basic kind of ignorance: we still do not know what people are able to do. So those people who reject action by saying that ‘it has already been tried’, those people are the enemy to me. The proximate enemies, I mean. I want to reclaim the insight of those who explore what people together are capable of achieving in concrete situations and on concrete issues from the starting point that the environ- ment makes us ill.” – Isabelle Stengers, ibid.