Astrophysicist and NPR blogger Adam Frank writes about the “sustainability bottleneck” as the state faced by technological civilizations like ours, which have learned how to “intensively harvest” energy, but not how to sustain themselves through the crisis this harvesting sets off. It turns out there may be millions of planets that give rise to life in our galaxy alone. Frank […]
Archive for the ‘EcoCulture’ Category
Sustainability bottleneck (or, No one here gets out alive?)
Posted in EcoCulture, GeoPhilosophy, tagged Anthropocene, astrobiology, Buddhism, cosmology, sustainability, sustainability bottleneck on January 22, 2015 | 7 Comments »
Anthropocenic reckoning
Posted in EcoCulture, GeoPhilosophy, tagged Anthropocene, Anthropocene Working Group, Clive Hamilton, Revkin on January 17, 2015 | 2 Comments »
With environmental and eco-political news in the front pages daily, it’s easy to get back into the swing of regular, even daily, posting after the winter holiday lull. Here’s more on the “dating the ecocrisis” theme… Andy Revkin is reporting that the Anthropocene Working Group has concluded that the middle of the twentieth century makes […]
More transgressions
Posted in EcoCulture, tagged Anthropocene, planetary boundaries, science, Will Steffen on January 16, 2015 | 1 Comment »
The journal Science has just released more news of planetary boundary transgression. (This is related to my post from a few days ago.) Specifically, of nine such boundaries connected to “processes and systems [that] regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth System,” four have been crossed. Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are […]
Peak wild fish (or, one more of 1000 plateaus)
Posted in EcoCulture, tagged enclosure, peak oil, peak wild fish, transition on January 14, 2015 | Leave a Comment »
Two kinds of historical turning points define our era. The first kind involves the retrospective identification of new forms of enclosure, exploitive intensification, or system derailment. Debates over the beginnings of a recession, or of a war, or — on a larger scale — of the Anthropocene, are about this kind of backdating: how far back do we […]
How to stop a pipeline
Posted in EcoCulture, Politics, tagged climate justice, ecopolitics, indigenous resistance, petropolitics, pipelines, tar sands on November 8, 2014 | 1 Comment »
More information here and here. Not all Wet’suwet’en agree. See here and the video here.
GMO debate: New Yorker vs. Vandana Shiva
Posted in EcoCulture, Politics, tagged environmental science, food, food politics, GMO labeling, GMOs, Vandana Shiva, Vermont on November 3, 2014 | 1 Comment »
With its passage of Act 120 this past June, Vermont became the first U.S. state to require mandatory labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). (This followed Connecticut’s and Maine’s decisions to require it once adjacent states do.) Since then, GMO food manufacturers have announced they will challenge that decision in court. Meanwhile, critics of GMOs […]
The semio-ethics of Coke’s polar bear mascots
Posted in EcoCulture, MediaSpace, tagged animals, branding, brands, Coca-cola, environmental communication, mascots, polar bears, WWF on October 16, 2014 | 1 Comment »
A journalist asked me to say something about the use of animal mascots for commercial purposes. In an email, she wrote: “What does a brand owe an animal mascot, especially one at risk? For instance, polar bears face rapid habitat loss, yet Coke has only donated $2 million to the WWF for conservation efforts. There’s also Kellogg’s […]
Climate movement
Posted in EcoCulture, Politics, tagged Bill McKibben, climate justice, Naomi Klein, People's Climate March, UN Climate Summit on September 22, 2014 | 7 Comments »
As I write, Bill McKibben is being interviewed left and right, Tom Ashbrook is interviewing Naomi Klein and pushing her to outline a vision that isn’t capitalism-as-we-know-it, Time magazine is saying this could be the largest march of its kind — which raises the question of what kind it is — and the
Busy being born…
Posted in EcoCulture, Politics, tagged climate justice, ecopolitics on September 17, 2014 | 1 Comment »
When humans look back on our time from the next era, they might see this weekend’s People’s Climate March as a key event in the movement that led to the next era. The alternative is a little scarier: it’s that there will be no next era, or at least no humans looking back from it. […]
Winona LaDuke at UWS3
Posted in EcoCulture, Politics, tagged climate justice, ecopolitics, indigenous, petropolitics, Under Western Skies, Winona Laduke on September 12, 2014 | Leave a Comment »
Winona LaDuke’s talk (at Under Western Skies 3) was, as always, powerful and empowering. Here are some quoteworthy lines from it. “I’ve lived my entire life in the fossil fuel era. I’d like a graceful exit out of it.” “I want to be able to walk out of my teepee into a Tesla.”
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