Category: EcoCulture


Sighting Oil

Filed under: EcoCulture — 2 Comments
March 11, 2013

While it’s been out for several months now, the current issue of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, a special issue on Sighting Oil, deserves more press than it’s gotten.

The journal is housed at the University of Alberta, which makes it particularly well situated to critically observe the development of Alberta’s infamous Tar Sands. The issue features several critical as well as visual essays on oil (including one by Allan Stoekl on peak oil), tar sands and pipeline politics, visual representation, “dark ecology,” BP and its Gulf Oil Spill, and much else.

 

(And here’s one thing we’ve been doing about it: Vermont towns say no to Tar Sands oil.)

 

 

Tags:
Comment

Latour on Gaia & Natural Religion

Filed under: EcoCulture, SpiritMatter — 3 Comments
October 30, 2012

Bruno Latour’s upcoming Gifford Lectures sound remarkable. See ANTHEM for the details.

There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of “natural religion” is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of ‘’natural religion’’.

[. . .]

A search for collective rituals should begin with works of art and experiments able to explore in sufficient detail the scientific and political composition of the common world.

more

Perhaps the promise of Latour’s work — aside from its sociological and science-studies import — is reaching a new culmination as the religious and ecological threads he’s been toying with for so long come to their mutual fruition.

 

Thanks to Adam for the head’s-up.

 

Tags: ,
Comment

Take-home message

Filed under: EcoCulture — 1 Comment
October 13, 2012

… from Bill McKibben and 350.org’s new roadshow, “Do The Math,” previewed tonight here at the University of Vermont:

If climate scientists (and climate change modelers) are correct that the burning of more than a small fraction of the world’s available fossil fuel reserves will trigger changes that will induce paroxysms of preventable suffering, then prudence, honor, and justice dictate that we should act to prevent that from happening.

 

View full article »

Tags: , ,
Read More & Comment

The wound of eco-trauma

Filed under: EcoCulture — 2 Comments
September 18, 2012

My article “The Wound of What Has Not Happened Yet: Cine-Semiotics of Eco-Trauma” appeared in the trilingual (English-German-Czech) arts journal Umelec late last year. (It kicked off the issue, followed by Mark Fisher’s wonderful “Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism.”)

The editors illustrated it with photos from David Cronenberg’s Crash, which I found funny. The online version doesn’t quite capture the effect. The English version is now available open access here and here.

The article is a remixed outtake from the final chapter of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image, which is scheduled to come out in Spring 2013 in Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s Environmenal Humanities Series.

 

 

Tags: ,
Comment

Nature & the Popular Imagination keynote

Filed under: EcoCulture, ImageNation — Leave a comment
June 7, 2012

Here’s the abstract for the keynote I will be giving at Nature and the Popular Imagination in Malibu this August. It builds on my recent talk at Bucks College, but without the nod to pop-cultural interest in Avatar.

THE AGE OF THE WORLD MOTION PICTURE

starring the Cinematic Earth, with cameo appearances by Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson, Martin Heidegger, C. S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, Lynn Margulis, James Cameron, Stanley Kubrick, Donna Haraway, and Koko the Gorilla

View full article »

Read More & Comment

SAR “Nature, Science, Religion” volume out

Filed under: EcoCulture, SpiritMatter — 1 Comment
May 20, 2012

I received my copies in the mail this week of the book that arose out of the School of Advanced Research seminar on “Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment.”

It’s a handsome volume, whose contents provide a level of cross-cutting conversation that, I think, is rare among edited collections. Catherine Tucker did a fabulous job editing it.

She and I co-wrote the introductory chapter, which can be read here.

I don’t yet have an electronic version of my closing chapter, “Religious (Re)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature,” but I’d be happy to share a pre-publication version of it upon request. An excerpt of it can be found here.

Tags: , , , ,
Comment

We are the 1%

Filed under: EcoCulture, SpiritMatter — 1 Comment
May 5, 2012

The other 99% have apparently gone extinct. (The estimate is actually closer to 100% than 99%.) This I just learned form Joshua Schuster’s talk on “Digital extinction.”

The earth’s biological diversity is also the highest it’s ever been. We are living between the achievement (of speciation to tremendous levels of flourishing) and the projection (that up to half of species will go extinct in the next hundred years, massive extinction being underway). Celebrate the moment.

Appropriate thoughts for Cinco de Mayo (and belatedly for May Day and Beltane).

 

Comment

NT6: Morton: “They are here”

Filed under: EcoCulture, GeoPhilosophy — 3 Comments
May 4, 2012

Tim Morton, “They are here”

Talking Heads video “Crosseyed and painless” (dir. Toni Basil, featured the Elecric Boogaloos). Is the non-national anthem of global anxiety. The sound of the end of the world and beginning of history. The first moonwalk is here (not Michael Jackson). The Levinasian “il y-a”, environmental creepiness, but we don’t know what yet. The dancers are suspended in claustrophobic white space, in their world.

View full article »

Tags: ,
Read More & Comment

Green Countercultures

Filed under: EcoCulture — 3 Comments
April 3, 2012

An interesting call for papers from Ecozon@…

Call for Papers: Ecozon@ Issue 4.1 (Spring 2013)

Green Countercultures

Guest Editor: Peter Mortensen, Aarhus University

From the late 1950s to the early 1970s an extraordinary counterculture emerged among young people in various western countries, opposing the values of mainstream society. The counterculture originated in a protest again Cold War moralism, conservatism and consumerism, and it was later galvanized by opposition to ethnic discrimination and the US war in Vietnam.

View full article »

Read More & Comment

Nature & the Popular Imagination (redux)

Filed under: Academe, EcoCulture — Leave a comment
March 30, 2012

We’re getting some good submissions, but there’s room for more. The deadline for proposals has been extended to May 1. I’m sharing the call for papers again here…

The International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) is pleased to announce its next conference in Malibu, California at Pepperdine University in August 2012.  The conference theme will be “Nature and the Popular Imagination.”  

View full article »

Read More & Comment