We live in a world in which everyone wants solutions. But we can't find solutions if we don't understand the problems, and we can't understand the problems without knowing how we got here.

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

The bizarre thing about the anthropocene is that never has humanity been more powerful and never have individual humans felt so powerless. This is because so much that drives the circumstances of the anthropocene is the aggregation of apparently negligible acts, often amplified by technology, rather than decisive acts by autonomous decision-makers.

Attitudes are changing very quickly.

We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.

Philosophers (and probably most intellectuals) are more interested in pursuing what they see as the logical implications of their theories than they are in paying attention to the shlumpy diversity of defensible values that people actually have, and then trying to figure out how these might be negotiated in the life of an agent or community.

Ethics is prescriptive and can change behavior, but usually only at the margins.