Most of what we think of as distinctively human has occurred in the last 10,000 years in the Holocene - a period in which the Earth was abnormally quiet.

The only way major change in environmental policy is going to happen, the only way, is if there is a very strong, very active popular movement that demands it and such a movement would be unparalleled because it would be a popular movement that says, "Raise our taxes so that we change our behavior."

Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

It's obvious that there are vast variety of consequentialist views, depending on what we think goodness consists in, what our notion of consequence is, and what level (or levels) of human action we think the principle should be applied.

Citizens often think of a state's interests in terms of the promotion of ideals such as democracy, a particular way of life, or other values which they endorse or see as part of their historical continuity and identity. In this domain as in others values are not fixed, and so a state's interests are dynamic and in a constant state of negotiation and construction.

Our differences should not be exaggerated.

Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.