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Archive for the ‘Anthropocene’ Category

State of the Eco-Humanities, Take 1

Posted in Academe, Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , on June 8, 2016 | 4 Comments »

This post is the first of a series of reflections on the state of the Environmental Humanities, or Eco-Humanities, and of where this interdisciplinary field might be headed. A note on terminology: The term “Environmental Humanities” has caught on in ways that “Eco-Humanities” and other variations have not, but the debate between them has hardly occurred, […]

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Wark on the geopolitics of the Anthropocene

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , on May 7, 2016 | 2 Comments »

McKenzie Wark has written a very provocative piece on the geopolitics of the Anthropocene, or what he calls “The Geopolitics of Hibernation.” A quote: 

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30 Years (or 30,000): Spectral stories of Chernobyl

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 25, 2016 | 4 Comments »

I’ll be giving this talk at the University of Kansas on Thursday. It’ll be exactly two days after the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. And 16 days before the 30th anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech about the accident. Pravda (Truth) first reported in any detail on the accident on May 6 and 7. The future of the Soviet […]

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Artistic bubbleology 101

Posted in Academe, Anthropocene, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , on April 20, 2016 | 3 Comments »

One of the best ways to respond to the Bubble I mentioned in the last post is through the arts. Here’s the poster for my summer course examining artistic responses to the global crisis.

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Living in a bubble

Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , , on April 19, 2016 | 6 Comments »

I’ve been using the metaphor of the Sustainability Bottleneck in my teaching, but another one that is more immediately graspable is The Bubble. Two things landed in my in-box this morning that testify to this (but that’s a pretty daily occurrence, e.g., see this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, all from the past week). One […]

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Post-Paris thoughts: The beginning of the end?

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , , , on December 13, 2015 | 7 Comments »

The Paris climate talks were successful in that they resulted in an agreement that is both better than nothing and better than most of us expected. They were a failure in that even if they are followed to the letter — and there’s no provision for enforcing whether anyone follows them or not — they would […]

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Climate Justice for dummies

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , on December 9, 2015 | 1 Comment »

Here’s how I would explain the concept of Climate Justice in four easy steps: The wealthiest 1% emit 2500 times more greenhouse gases than the poorest 1%. Those greenhouse gases are in the process of changing the Earth’s climate to render it uninhabitable for the kind of mix of human & nonhuman species that exists […]

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Wark on Moore’s Capitalocene

Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on November 6, 2015 | 5 Comments »

McKenzie Wark gets at some very important issues in what we might call “the ontology of the Anthropocene” in this review of Jason Moore’s book Capitalism in the Web of Life. Moore’s work, as he acknowledges (and as I have argued here before), provides an important contribution to rethinking the relations between humanity, the nonhuman world, and […]

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Not just waiting for Godot

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , , , on September 11, 2015 | 19 Comments »

You may take this as more optimistic blathering from within the pessimistic morass, but here goes. Those of us who teach environmental studies — who teach impressionable young adults about the colossal challenges facing humanity in the coming decades, with the looming climate crisis, resource wars and (human and nonhuman) refugee crises, and mass extinction on a […]

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Peirce’s “long revolution”

Posted in Anthropocene, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 4, 2015 | 10 Comments »

As the world’s refugee crisis builds — reminding us that much worse movements of people loom ahead, and much worse wars, as climate systems destabilize and the capitalist world-ecology unravels in the decades and centuries ahead — I can’t help asking myself what, if anything, philosophy can offer in response. It depends on which philosophy, of course. But […]

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Bandwagocene

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , on July 21, 2015 | 3 Comments »

These days, it takes a course release for an academic to keep up with the avalanche of books being published with titles that feature the word “Anthropocene.” To read them would take a sabbatical. Doing anything approximating a “slow read” would require, well, retirement. But that’s no reason not to try. Here’s just a quick sample […]

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Anthropocene & equity

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , on June 1, 2015 | 5 Comments »

I’ve reported previously on how critics see the “Anthropocene” concept as overgeneralizing from the causal nuances of actual responsibility for climate (and global system) change. In an excellent summary of recent writing on the topic, ecosocialist climate observer Ian Angus answers the question “Does Anthropocene science blame all humanity?” with a definitive “no.” That doesn’t mean that the term […]

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