The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.

Now in Wikipedia it's really interesting. If you put something incorrect up on Wikipedia within minutes there are people crawling all over that sentence saying, "This is wrong" or "I want to change this" or "You've got to include an amplification," et cetera. So there's this massive checks and balances that actually makes that accuracy work. This is the kind of model that we - and I'm not sure why no one's discussing this - that we now have to begin to apply to fake news.

Humanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness.

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.

I think capitalism will not disappear, but it's going to increasingly not be the exclusive arbiter of economic life. It's going to have to find value in interacting with the sharing economy on many levels. And this hybrid system that's already emerging among millennials is going to be a mature system where, by midcentury, part of the day will be in the capitalist market, part of the day in the sharing economy, depending on your marginal costs.