The first online book launch for Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth was just held on Zoom, sponsored by the RUTA Association and University of Tallinn’s Institute of Humanities. It was facilitated by Professor Epp Annus, and featured seven author-contributors in addition to the book’s editor, me (Adrian Ivakhiv).
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has written about the book that it “deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.” I think and hope that my overview of the book’s theoretical framework, and the rich diversity of author profiles and topics we covered — the Anthropocene, colonialism and decolonialism, the role of art in war, multispecies relations with land, the affective sensibilities and soundscapes of war and resistance, and more — captured why that might be so. My introduction focused especially on the question of why and how the Russo-Ukrainian war should be considered an “environmental war,” and why that is relevant to all of us.
The video of the event can be viewed here:
Hi,
It’s striking that the book and talk position the war specifically as an environmental war. This frame connects the devastation in Ukraine to the broader, global crisis of the Anthropocene in a way that feels urgent and necessary. To hear that philosophers and scholars are actively reimagining a “habitable Earth” from within that context is profoundly moving.