The erosion of agency has consequences for our politics. As a result of all this, the fundamental ethical challenge of the anthropocene is the recovery of agency, or alternatively to come to terms with its loss and to understand how to go on.

The millennium development goals are important, both morally and economically, because much of the world's population maybe is as much as a third of the world's population hasn't yet reached the level of economic development where we begin to get a dissociation from people's economic status and their reports about personal happiness. So we really do need to do much more and much more effectively in order to give everyone the kind of basis for which they can have good vibes.

Environmental philosophy just is philosophy full stop. It only sprung up as distinct subfield because mainstream philosophy was ignoring some of the most important philosophical challenges of our time.

Is it in the interests of Britain to leave or remain in the EU? As we saw in the referendum, there are different Britains and they see their interests in different ways. For a lot of everyday blokes the EU affected their sense of identity in ways they disliked, and they were right in thinking that the EU didn't return much to them by way of economic benefits.

People with long memories and a vivid sense of the past have an immediate understanding of politicians like Donald Trump. They are not surprised by the behavior of Google, a corporation that notionally (until recently anyway) espoused the slogan "don't be evil" and then runs over individual people and even entire nations in the pursuit of profit.

We're not good at noticing slow, steady changes in our environments, our senses are not very acute compared to those of many animals, and we're pretty awful at abstract thought, much less acting on it.

The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!