Cross-posting this piece by Emil from A(s)cene. Taylor’s coral reef art is beautiful. See also the discussion of Donna Haraway’s “String Figures” lecture and Bruno Latour’s 11 theses on capitalism.
Category: EcoCulture
The Media and Environment Scholarly Interest Group just won the prize for best attended business meeting at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Or so we were informed by the SCMS interest group liaison present at the meeting.
This year’s SCMS featured what to my mind was by far the largest assemblage of panels and papers on all manner of environmental/ecological themes: analyses of filmic representations of nature, disasters and catastrophes, animals and nonhumans; theoretical excursions in ecocinema, eco-aesthetics, toxic and “energetic” media, frontier and extraction imaginaries, and more; and eco-materialist analyses of production processes, data backup systems, and other things. Some of these were sponsored by the M & E interest group; many were not.
For all the complaints many of us in the U.S. heard or voiced about the cold, this past January was the fourth warmest on record, and the 38th consecutive January and 347th consecutive month (almost 29 years) that global temperatures have been above the average for the 20th century.
Since I was traveling at the time, I failed to note an interesting story that got covered in the science press about the organizational support and funding behind the climate denial movement.
As reported in articles in Scientific American, The Guardian, and elsewhere, a recent peer-reviewed study published in Climatic Science by sociologist Robert Brulle supports many claims that have been made by environmental scientists and activists documenting the organizational support and funding behind the climate denial movement — a close to $1 billion a year machine of nearly 100 organizations.
Most revealingly (or rather, obscuringly), denialism has been able to cloak its funding sources behind what have effectively become “money laundering” operations like View full article »
Not that readers of this blog need to be reminded of this, but some of our friends might (if you have friends like Donald Trump)…
Generalizing about global climate change from a cold snap is like predicting who will win the world series based on a single ball or strike in pre-season. The two things are about the same thing — temperature, baseball — but there’s little real connection between them beyond that.
This Washington Post article from the last U.S. “polar vortex” is helpful in putting things into perspective.
Reposted from e2mc: evolving ecological media cultures:
I’ve begun a YouTube playlist entitled “Ecomedia,” where I’ll be sharing ecologically relevant PSAs, eco-art videos, and other works relevant to the broad and loose category encompassed by its title.
Feel free to “like” it, subscribe to it, and send suggestions to me about videos that should be added to the list.
Note that simply typing in “ecomedia” in a YouTube search won’t get you to it — it’ll take you instead to the commercial CBS Ecomedia site.
Plant scientists are wondering if plants really communicate with each other (and with insects and other organisms) or if they just “eavesdrop” on each other’s “soliloquies.”
At stake in the debate are the definitions of communication (e.g., is it necessarily intentional, and is intentionality necessarily conscious intentionality?) and behavior (is it something that only animals do?).
What seems certain is that plants can and sometimes do share information. This article from Quanta summarizes recent research.
My upcoming talk at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs comes from the East European strand of my research.
The talk will be called “Becoming Tuteishyi: Peregrinations in the Zona of Ukraine, with Walter, Gloria, Andrei, Bruno, and Other Explorers.”
The description reads as follows:
Drawing on the author’s research and travels, this talk will consider Ukraine’s ambiguous positioning within global cultural discourse by recourse to theories of borderlands (via Walter Mignolo and Gloria Anzaldua), hybridity and amodernity (via Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway), postcommunism and postcolonialism, and to images of anomalous zones and errant wanderings, with particular attention to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
Nothing like a bit of good news* to make us feel that the fight against fossil-fuel gangsters is worth continuing…
“We’re actually winning the fight against climate change, but most people don’t know it yet.”
And this:
“Within eighteen months . . . solar will be able to compete in three-quarters of the world’s electricity markets without subsidies.
Some pictures from the Mosaïcultures international exhibition of horticultural arts at Montreal’s Botanical Gardens. The exhibition continues until September 29.
Lise Cormier’s Mother Earth
