12 Quotes by Andreas Malm

No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement - and it has its fair share of radicals - ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing.

If it weren't for the economy operated by humans constantly assailing the wild, encroaching upon it, tearing into it, chopping it up, destroying it with a zeal bordering on lust for extermination, these things wouldn't happen. The pathogens would not come leaping towards us. They would be secure among their natural hosts. But when those hosts are cornered, stressed, expelled and killed, they have two options: go extinct or jump.

More to the point, however, is that China could become the cradle of this disease only because global tendencies were present in the concentrated form.

Perhaps humanity should thank Covid-19 for taking the early route through Europe.

The alarm signals have echoed without being heard, as in a forgotten cave. Already in 1994, the eminent dialectical biologist Richard Levins and his colleagues warned that 'creating new habitats - for example, by bulldozing forests - permit rare or remote microorganisms to become abundant and gain access to people.

If it weren’t for the economy operated by humans constantly assailing the wild, encroaching upon it, tearing into it, chopping it up, destroying it with a zeal bordering on lust for extermination, these things wouldn’t happen. The pathogens would not come leaping towards us. They would be secure among their natural hosts. But when those hosts are cornered, stressed, expelled and killed, they have two options: go extinct or jump.

Self-isolation in a slum is a contradiction in terms.

The epoch of the Capitalocene is characterized by uncontrolled speed-up in the production of hazardous nature.

It should now be abundantly clear that the comparison between the climate crisis and Covid-19 rests on a category mistake. It’s a bit like comparing a war with a bullet. Covid-19 is one manifestation of a secular trend running parallel to the climate crises, a global sickening to match the global heating.