"We all live on the same planet, it is our only home, so... we used to rotate crops back in the day and, you know, who cares if you're going to make a profit if everybody's too dead or glowing in the dark to be able to purchase anything"
About this Quote
Berryman takes the most overused plea in the book - "we all live on the same planet" - and rescues it by swerving into something blunt, weirdly folksy, and unmistakably apocalyptic. The crop-rotation aside is the tell: he is deliberately downgrading climate and ecological collapse from a partisan, technocratic debate into a basic competence test. Our grandparents managed not to exhaust the soil because they understood limits. The joke is that modern capitalism, armed with data dashboards and MBAs, can still fail at the same elementary lesson.
The line works because it weaponizes tonal whiplash. He starts with the Hallmark version of environmental ethics, then punctures it with a shrugging "back in the day" and "you know", as if the solution is so obvious it's embarrassing we need to say it aloud. That casualness is strategic: it refuses the polished TED Talk language that often lets audiences feel virtuous without changing anything.
The darker punch - "too dead or glowing in the dark" - drags profit logic to its endpoint. He's not arguing that profit is immoral; he's pointing out it's self-negating when it eats the conditions that make markets possible: living bodies, stable ecosystems, a future. Coming from an actor known for roles that play with the unsettling and the grotesque, the imagery lands as both gallows humor and warning. The subtext is impatience with incrementalism: if the choice is between quarterly earnings and survivable reality, the spreadsheet is the irrational one.
The line works because it weaponizes tonal whiplash. He starts with the Hallmark version of environmental ethics, then punctures it with a shrugging "back in the day" and "you know", as if the solution is so obvious it's embarrassing we need to say it aloud. That casualness is strategic: it refuses the polished TED Talk language that often lets audiences feel virtuous without changing anything.
The darker punch - "too dead or glowing in the dark" - drags profit logic to its endpoint. He's not arguing that profit is immoral; he's pointing out it's self-negating when it eats the conditions that make markets possible: living bodies, stable ecosystems, a future. Coming from an actor known for roles that play with the unsettling and the grotesque, the imagery lands as both gallows humor and warning. The subtext is impatience with incrementalism: if the choice is between quarterly earnings and survivable reality, the spreadsheet is the irrational one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
|---|
More Quotes by Michael
Add to List
