Reading Bill McGuire‘s 2012 book Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes, I came across this description of the annual “pulse” called an “Earthbeat,” which is supposedly responsible for Earth’s preference for volcanic eruptions between November and April (also known as “volcano season”): rather like a beating heart, the Earth changes […]
Archive for the ‘Anthropocene’ Category
Skipping an Earthbeat
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Science & society, tagged Aaron Wildavsky, Anthropocene, Bill McGuire, dynamic earth, Earthbeat, earthquakes, environmentalism, fragile Earth, Gaia, geology, Mary Douglas, risk as culture, volcanoes on June 15, 2018 | 4 Comments »
Welcome to the Feverish World (CFP)
Posted in Academe, Anthropocene, tagged 1968, artscience, Bruno Latour, C. P. Snow, eco-arts, EcoCulture Lab, ecopoetics, ecopolitics, Feverish World, two cultures, University of Vermont on May 25, 2018 | 6 Comments »
Please circulate widely… FEVERISH WORLD 2018-2068: ARTS & SCIENCES OF COLLECTIVE SURVIVAL A Symposium and Convergence in Burlington, Vermont, October 20-22, 2018 Fifty years after the widespread international protests of 1968 challenged institutional norms, and some sixty years after C. P. Snow lamented the gap between academia’s “two cultures,” those of the arts and the sciences, […]
(Fore)shadowing
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, Punctum Books, Shadowing the on May 6, 2018 | 9 Comments »
Coming soon… “volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz”
Anthropo(s)cenic Chernobyl* in image & text
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged Anthropocene, Chernobyl, Chornobyl, Four Noble Truths, Gund Institute, Herzog, images, nuclear accidents, nuclear power, sacrifice zones, Shadowing the Anthropocene, slow violence, socio-ecological suffering, Ukraine, University of Kansas on April 15, 2018 | 6 Comments »
My Gund Institute research talk from a few months ago, on “Navigating Earth’s ‘Zone of Alienation’: Chernobyl and the Search for Adequate Images of the Anthropocene,” can now be viewed online (see link below). It consists mostly of out-takes from my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, forthcoming later this year from Punctum Books.
The 5 D’s
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, tagged Alan Weisman, capitalism, Countdown, decapitalization, decarbonization, Decolonization, demilitarization, demographic transition, deplasticization, human population growth, overpopulation, plastic planet on April 11, 2018 | 3 Comments »
… that might get humans to pull through the next few centuries relatively intact as a species (if not undiminished or unscathed): Decarbonization, Deplasticization, Demilitarization, Decolonization, and Demographic Transition. The first, Decarbonization, entails a dramatic reduction in industrial production of atmospheric carbon (and other greenhouse gas) emissions. It will keep conditions for the flourishing of […]
Rant for the day
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, tagged agency, Anthropocene, climate solutions, ClimateJustice, Ecozoic, fossil fuel era, global justice, good Anthropocene, sustainability transition on December 14, 2017 | 6 Comments »
Let’s face facts: Life in such cold climates as the one I live in (it was 8°F/-14°C here this morning) would hardly be possible, for us in such numbers as we are, without fossil fuels. The harnessing of fossil fuel energy has enabled tremendous innovation — innovation that, if managed well, could help us get […]
Beyond sustainability’s 3 pillars: an exercise in eco-political ontology
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, tagged Anthropocene, decoloniality, ecology, environment, environmental sociology, environmental thought, four pillars of sustainability, governance, governmentality, land, markets, Marshall Sahlins, Ontology, epistemology, people, political sociology, state, sustainability, sustainability science on December 1, 2017 | 9 Comments »
It’s become a cliché for people in environmental, policy, and even corporate circles to talk about the “triple bottom-line,” or the “three pillars” or “three-legged stool,” of sustainability. Those “pillars” are almost universally understood to be the economic, the environmental, and the social (sometimes rendered, more trenchantly, as social justice). Some have argued that a fourth, the cultural, should […]
The SF of sustainability
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene, geochronology, Holocene, interglacial, Late Holocene on May 18, 2017 | 8 Comments »
Since it’s the Holocene that has provided the conditions for the (human-led) biogeochemical experimentation that has now likely achieved a runaway state, and since “Holocene” was never anything other than a placeholder term — it only means “entirely new” — it seems inappopriate to replace it with the term “Anthropocene.” “Holocene” begins as a leap of […]
Anthropocenic sublime
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene, Chernobyl, sublime on July 30, 2016 | 6 Comments »
I’ll be giving the following talk at the “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene” workshop at the National University of Singapore this coming week. Navigating the Zone of Alienation: Chernobyl and the Anthropocenic Sublime Abstract: