The crisis before us is the culmination of a 500-year global rampage of conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth— as well as killing by Europeans and Euro-Americans of the indigenous communities that stood in their way. The technical and scientific forces that created unparalleled luxury and unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite are the forces that now doom us. Ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel— thirteen of the fourteen warmest years since weather record-keeping began over a century ago have occurred in the opening years of the twenty-first century— we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism.

– Chris Hedges,  Wages of Rebellion