Compared to last year’s report, this one will be brief.
The blog has been a little more active this past year than in its first year, featuring some 200 posts (compared to 140), many of them short but some quite substantial. Highlights included the cross-blog Vibrant Matter reading group (in May and June), the recurring process-object debates (see Geophilosophy), more writing on film, and more political commentary (including about oil and the Gulf spill and other environmental matters).
Since this time last year, the blog tripled its number of subscribers to over 200, and averaged between 1500 and 2000 page views a week (and around 1000 unique visits a week), with spikes reaching well above that and lulls when the blog was less active. The big change — the migration from MovableType to WordPress (here, where you are) — occurred earlier this month, and subscribership on this new site has gone from almost nothing to over 100 in the three weeks since that migration. Thanks for the loyalty, and a warm welcome to any new subscribers.
I’ve only started using Google Analytics since moving to WordPress, so I can’t compare data directly for the popularity of recent blog posts with older ones. But for some of the more popular blog posts over time, see the “Popular posts” list to the right. I only include more substantive posts there, not the quickies, like this one, that get picked up by some weird flight of fancy and bounced and re-tweeted around the web. The most popular post since the recent move to WordPress has been, by far, my list of books of the decade in ecocultural theory. That post resulted in a six-fold spike in visits, including what was probably an all-time high, for this blog, of visitors on the blog at once: over fifty, according to Sitemeter (which, since it collects its information in temporal chunks, might mean something more like “in a 15-minute period,” but still…).
Writing to an online audience always feels a little mysterious to me, and without doing some kind of survey I can’t tell you much about who you are. But I can tell you that you live all over the world: the U.S. is the source of by far the largest number of visitors to this site, but many come from Canada and the U.K. (which consistently vie for second place), Italy, Australia, Germany, Thailand, Israel, Sweden, New Zealand, Brazil, Norway, India, Ukraine, Spain, and many other countries. I’m happy that some of you choose to participate by commenting on posts, linking from your own blogs, and so on. (And it’s nice when those conversations, like the one between Paul, Mark, and me here, spin off well beyond anything of interest in the original post.) Without that feedback and participation I would have grown tired of writing here long ago, so thanks very much for the moral support it provides.
I haven’t had too many complaints about the appearance or maneuverability of the new blog design, and I like it very much myself, so it will stay as is, at least for a while. (Page loading has speeded up recently, but let me know if it is still too slow for you.) As mentioned before, the new design combines 85ideas’s Motion theme with a digitally manipulated (by web designer Ines Berrizbeitia) image of a photo I took on Graham Island, Haida Gwaii. The old design is still up, and it remains the best and easiest way to view the whole history of the blog organized into its nine topical categories (which you can find there in the right-hand sidebar).
One of the intentions behind this new design is to provide for a more magazine-like feel, and over time I expect the blog will become less personal and more webzine, or “blogazine.” Expect to see a few new contributors this year, an expansion into poetry, more sound, and more consistent and reliable coverage of the communicative arts — which are, after all, the main ways that ecoculture spreads and seeps into the world.
Immanence will remain its own distinctive fusion of philosophy, ecology, and culture, with politics, spirituality, and media commentary thrown into the mix. But it is not only immanent to itself, but to the world, which is its source and its destination. This blog is, in the end, just a circulatory node, a passageway, an alley filled with posters, announcements, and passionate graffitos chalked up at night while the city sleeps, with the sly intent of redirecting traffic inconspicuously but decisively once the morning routine begins. (Kind of like those alien architects rearranging the world in Dark City.)
Thanks to all of you for paying attention, and especially to those who have participated in discussions, linked or set up feeds from here to your own blogs, and helped keep my own interest going in this online venture. It’s that kind of feedback that makes a blog, at least when, like this one, the work involved is a labor of love, with no advertising and no remuneration. Keep coming back and you will be edified.
Thank you, all, for being there.
No, Thank-you for posting such valuable information and taking the time to do it as well. It is much appreciated. Keep it coming.
Dear Adrian,
I found your blog just last week when you posted your list of books on ecocultural theory on EANTH. I wrote about it on my newly started blog “In Rhizomia” (www.rhizomia.net), and on the blog ‘Resilience Science’ (where it perhaps stick out as something refreshingly different).
I am glad I found your blog since your writing aligns with some of my fields of interests. My research lies at the connections of urban ecology, sociology and political ecology and I am currently working at the African Centre for Cities at University of Cape Town (http://africancentreforcities.net/)(I am Swedish, before working at the Stockholm Resilience Centre).
As your blog is about undermining taken-for-granted dualisms like society and nature, I though I share my thoughts on my work in Cape Town as a way of presenting myself a little bit further.
In Cape Town I am engaging with people mobilizing to rehabilitate vegetation at an urban wetland area. However, while this might be the apparent thing they are doing, their activity is at the same forging new heterogenous collectives together with the plants they are planting. Together, this collective of humans and non-humans, alongside the space they are claiming, has come to articulate marginalized and oppressed identities from apartheid and colonial Cape Town. And the collective is growing with new species being attracted, like butterflies and birds generating new biophysical processes in the are, alongside school children and local organizations who are joining the activity of planting and claiming urban space.
One interesting interpretation, which really seems to be piercing through and destabilize old dualisms of society and nature, is that the physicality of the plants, called fynbos, makes the plants respond and grow quickly when being planted, which in turn seems to aid in sustaining collective action among humans. The plants helps both to interest others to join in planting, and to claim space when no-body is there. The (social) movement being spun around this wetland area is thus helped by plants, the plants play a part (just like the physical area itself) in sustaining and shaping collective action. In social movement theory these silent ‘activists’ would of course not be granted a role in collective action, but for me it seems that the plants are playing a role in generating and supporting collective action. Maybe you would know of more such narratives from your reading? I especially thought your book by Escobar could be interesting to me (which I will order soon).
Best regards and thanks for blogging,
Henrik Ernstson (PhD)
In Rhizomia (www.rhizomia.net)
that’s really awesome! congratulations on all the subscribers!
Please let me know if you’re looking for a writer for your site. You have some really great articles and I think I would be a good asset. If you ever want to take some of the load off, I’d absolutely love to write some material for your blog in exchange for a link back to mine. Please blast me an email if interested. Thanks!