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Archive for the ‘AnthropoScene’ Category

Zone as metaphor, metaphor as Zone

Posted in AnthropoScene, EcoCulture, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

My book Ecologies of the Moving Image takes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zone, so richly depicted in his celebrated 1979 film Stalker, as a kind of master metaphor for how cinema works and, by implication, how art in general works: it beckons its receiver into following it into a zone where, at best, anything can happen. The […]

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Books of the decade in ecocultural theory

Posted in Academe, AnthropoScene, EcoCulture, GeoPhilosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2020 | 6 Comments »

How best to characterize the past decade in books? This list focuses on three themes: attempts to grapple with the nature of the climate and extinction crises, the “ontological” and “decolonial” “turns” in cultural and environmental theory, and efforts to map out the “multispecies entanglements” that characterize our world and the acute challenges we face.

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Don’t travel the Anthropocene without this

Posted in AnthropoScene, tagged on September 29, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

I just found out that Punctum Books has created a Shadowing the Anthropocene travel mug based on Vincent van Gerven Oei’s superb cover design of my book. Cool. Readers can spare yourself the money for the book (read the free PDF) and get the mug instead! (Hipster alert!)

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Pandemic epistemology 2

Posted in AnthropoScene, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve been haunted by Ed Yong’s description of science from the Atlantic article “Why Coronavirus is So Confusing,” which I shared a few days ago: “This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our […]

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The world’s downtown

Posted in AnthropoScene, EcoCulture, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 13, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

With New Yorkers forced to stay home, and arts organizations getting creative in how they are making available their offerings, The New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section has suddenly become more relevant to the rest of us, whose visits to the city were previously so infrequent as to make reading it a form of […]

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The state of things

Posted in AnthropoScene, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 9, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

I have many friends who are despairing that, with Bernie Sanders’s exit from the presidential race, the United States has lost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to elect a leader who is honest, reliable, and completely untethered to the vested interests that keep our whole system careening towards catastrophe (climate change, ecological collapse, mass extinction, out-of-control AI, […]

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More on pandemic politics & future scenarios

Posted in AnthropoScene, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , on April 6, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

There’s a lot of interesting thinking going on in response to the coronavirus pandemic and how it will “change everything.” Here’s the beginning of a curated sampling. It takes for granted that there will be suffering, a lot of it, unequally distributed and with a preponderance of it coming down on first responders and low-wage, […]

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The (un)binding & (re)bounding of worlds

Posted in AnthropoScene, SpiritMatter, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 2, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

The following is a short essay I wrote for the Peder Sather/Reassembling Democracy workshop on “Environmental Change and Ritualized Relationships with the Other-than-Human World,” held at UC Berkeley this past December. There are physical boundaries between humans and specific nonhumans—fences, walls, windows (of homes, gardens, kennels, zoos, abbatoirs, safari vehicles, camera lenses, guns); and there […]

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So, here we are…

Posted in AnthropoScene, SpiritMatter, tagged , , , , , , on September 8, 2019 | Leave a Comment »

Wow, what a reaction the article described here has gotten… This version includes a follow-up comment below. Jonathan Franzen’s “What If We Stopped Pretending?” articulates an important point about hope and hopelessness in the face of climate change. Franzen suggests that an “all-out war on climate change” no longer makes sense because the scenario for […]

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Sobering up…

Posted in AnthropoScene, GeoPhilosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 22, 2019 | 4 Comments »

Peter Brannen’s Atlantic article “The Anthropocene is a Joke” provides a helpful cold shower for those who’ve gotten a little too drunk on the concept of the Anthropocene. The entire article is worth reading. Here are a few snippets:

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P-N transition, or, toward the Neocene

Posted in AnthropoScene, tagged , , , , , , , on March 17, 2019 | 2 Comments »

It’s nice to see archdruid John Michael Greer’s proposal for a “Pleistocene-Neocene transition” get a little traction in the science press — specifically, in a Science Alert article by psychologist Matthew Adams. Greer, whose writings on religion and ecology are respectably out-of-the-box, advocates against the Anthropocene label on the basis that a geological epoch — […]

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Koinocene (or Cœnocene)?

Posted in AnthropoScene, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 7, 2018 | 2 Comments »

Peircian thinker Gary Fuhrman has posted an interesting piece on the naming of the Anthropocene, entitled Holocenoscopy. Noting that the word Holocene means nothing more than “entirely recent,” as opposed to the Pleistocene, which means “most recent,” so there’s really nowhere left to go with naming geological periods after their recentness, Fuhrman suggests we look to another […]

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