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Archive for the ‘Anthropocene’ Category

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, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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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Keeping up with the scholarly literature on the Anthropocene, or even on the humanities-relevant Anthropocene, has become a full-time job, and no one I know is paid to do that full-time. (All of the Anthropocene literature is arguably humanities-relevant, but not to the same degree.) To give a sense of the numbers: I counted a […]

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Mark Bould’s new book The Anthropocene Unconscious makes more or less the same argument as I made in my 2008 New Formations article “Stirring the Geopolitical Unconscious: Toward a Jamesonian Ecocriticism,” later expanded in the “Terra and Trauma” chapter of Ecologies of the Moving Image, but he applies it to literature rather than film. The […]

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I’m happy to share my talk from the recent Vermont Humanities conference. It captures the essence of things I’ve been writing and thinking about over the last while. And rather incredibly for a humanities conference, it was 100% glitch-free (despite the talk’s audio-visual intricacies; well, the image fades aren’t perfectly smooth, but those can be […]

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Videos from the Aarhus (Denmark) conference “The Garden and the Dump: Across More-than-Human Entanglements” are available and free for the viewing, here on the conference YouTube channel. They include talks by philosophers Timothy Morton and Michael Marder and a wonderful conversation between Chen Quifan, Alice Bucknell, and Angela YT Chan. My own talk, “Event, Time, […]

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Marking the passage of the seasons from summer to winter and back again is something people have done for millennia. Seasons are reliable — anyone living outside the equatorial band will continue to have colder and warmer seasons, probably for the rest of our lives. But many of us are realizing that larger cycles may […]

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My thinking about the Anthropocenic predicament continues to be informed, even haunted, by Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker, along with their literary predecessor novels by (Lviv-born) Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, respectively. Two keynote talks I’ve been invited to give this October — one for Ukraine’s Congress of Culture, to take place in […]

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“Trust your immune system.” One often hears this slogan, or some version of it, from people who are against vaccination. But what does it mean, or what should it mean for an intensely social species like ours, living in a microbiologically fluid and creative environment like Earth’s biosphere? We can only trust something if we […]

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