The field I’ve worked in for the last few decades, which has come to be known as the Environmental Humanities (capitalized or not), is one that requires keeping up with ongoing scholarship not only in the humanities, but also in the social sciences and the biological and earth sciences. From my reading of the field, […]
Archive for the ‘Anthropocene’ Category
Symbiocene talk, AI, & other things
Posted in Anthropocene, Media ecology, tagged AI, artificial intelligence, big data, Free Cultural Space, Glenn Albrecht, human-nature relationships, Symbiocene, Towards the Symbiocene on June 27, 2024 | 1 Comment »
This blog has been a bit quiet as I transition to my new position as Woodsworth Chair in Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University. I’ll be sharing more about that soon. In the meantime, I can share links to a few recent talks. Last year’s Free Cultural Spaces symposium “Towards the Symbiocene,” held in Amsterdam’s Club […]
Anthropocene dust-up: what it means
Posted in Anthropocene, Science & society, tagged Anthropocene epoch, Anthropocene Working Group, Erle Ellis, geological time scale, geology, IUGS, Jan Zalasiewicz, Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy on March 22, 2024 | 1 Comment »
The recent International Union of Geological Sciences decision to reject the proposed “Anthropocene epoch” might seem confusing. Here’s a piece of draft material from my forthcoming book-in-progress, The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds, that attempts to bring the situation up to date. Comments welcome! Please note that the […]
White smoke
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene Working Group, Erle Ellis on March 5, 2024 | Leave a Comment »
Everyone sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for geologists to finally decide whether or not we have entered the Anthropocene epoch can now breath a sigh of relief. They’ve sent up their white smoke signal to indicate that yes, they’ve decided. (Oh, maybe I’m mixing it up with the Vatican.) They’ve decided no. […]
Angel of Apocalyptic History
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, tagged Angel of History, apocalypse, Apocalyptic Anxieties, apocalypticism, climate anxiety, climate hope, eco-trauma, Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University, talks, trauma on December 9, 2023 | 2 Comments »
My talk at the recent “Apocalyptic Anxieties” conference, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, is available for viewing at the SFU Institute for the Humanities YouTube page, or below. Here is an abstract of the talk: From the Angel of Apocalyptic History to the Optimism of the Will: Climate Hope within States of Urgency Apocalyptic […]
The population bli(m)p
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, demographic transition, demography, human population growth, overpopulation, population on October 14, 2023 | 7 Comments »
When I was younger, I would occasionally hear from fellow environmentalists that the “real problem” was human overpopulation. (The standard answer, from the well informed, was: nope, it’s inequality, extractive capitalism, institutional inertia, patriarchal values, colonialism, et al. “Overpopulation” was a symptom, not the disease.) The population-mongers have mostly faded since then, as the “demographic […]
Symbiocene@Ruigoord.NL
Posted in Anthropocene, Cultural politics, Eco-culture, tagged Amsterdam, autonomism, eco-art, Free Cultural Spaces, Glenn Albrecht, hippies, Ruigoort, squatting, Symbiocene, Timothy Morton on July 27, 2023 | 1 Comment »
Two things to consider before your morning coffee. 1) We are living through a Holocene collapse event,* when the nearly 12,000 year old regime of relative climate stability, the “comfort zone” for most of what we know as human civilization, is beginning to tear to shreds. (Here’s just one of the shreds from yesterday’s news.) […]
The event that might be big
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene Working Group, science studies on December 19, 2022 | 1 Comment »
The New York Times’ Raymond Zhong summarizes the latest deliberations on the Anthropocene in an article called “For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age.” The article features some good implicit sociology-of-science: Like the zoologists who regulate the names of animal species or the astronomers who decide what counts as a planet, […]
Sharpening our moral clarity
Posted in Anthropocene, Cultural politics, tagged colonialism, Decolonization, global anti-imperialism, imperialism, indigenous peoples, Indigenous theory, Kim Tallbear on October 12, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Indigenous intellectuals like Kim Tallbear see the current Anthropocene crisis (climate change, etc.) as a continuation and intensification of the kind of thing Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans (among others) have experienced for centuries. Her thoughts for Indigenous People’s Day, shared on Tallbear’s Substack account, are well worth reading. Describing a “radical hope” that might […]
The age of migrations to come
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Bruno Latour, earthbound, Gaia Vince, mass migrations, migration on August 22, 2022 | 1 Comment »
Gaia Vince’s Guardian article “The Century of Climate Migration: Why We Need to Plan for the Great Upheaval,” adapted from her forthcoming book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World, is a very good overview of the coming age of mass migrations. It’s also more or less what I’ve been arguing in my […]
After the Anthropocene, the deluge?
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene, Cenozoic, Chthulucene, dystopia, Ecocene, ecotopia, Ecozoic, futures, futurism, futurology, imagination, Late Holocene, pluriverse, terminal Cenozoic, Thomas Berry, utopia on August 4, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
On the Ecocene, the Chthulucene, the Ecozoic, and other Holocene successor terms The term “Anthropocene” has come to be accepted among many intellectuals as the best, or perhaps least worst, name for the geological present, when human activities have come to dominate the planet. It’s still debated among geologists, with “Holocene” or “Late Holocene” preferred […]
The event of Chɵrnobyl (resonance renewed)
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged 1986 Chernobyl accident, Chernobyl, Chornobyl, Chɵrnobyl, Cold War, nuclear power, Putin, Russia, Ukraine, USSR on February 25, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
My recent 2022 Mohyla Lecture at the University of Saskatchewan, “The Chɵrnobyl Event: Ecology, Media, and the Anthropocene,” is now available to be watched online. (That “ɵ” in “Chɵrnobyl” is intentional; I discuss it in the talk.) In addition to updating some of my work on the Chɵrnobyl “hyper-event” and its multiple impacts, the talk […]
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