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 […]
Archive for the ‘Climate change’ Category
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 »
Russia, the climate crisis, & ecocide
Posted in Climate change, Politics, tagged Anthropocene, capitalocene, climate crisis, colonial-capitalocene, colonialism, coloniality, decolonialism, Decolonization, ecocide, environmental consequences of war, postcolonialism, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian war, Ukraine, war on June 29, 2023 | Leave a Comment »
My recent E-Flux article, “Russia, Decolonization, and the Capitalism-Democracy Muddle,” raised the question of Russia’s potential “decolonization” — what it means (and doesn’t), and how the debate over it, and over decolonization in general, needs some political updating. The article seems no less relevant after the abortive mutiny led last week by the Wagner Group’s […]
The global precariat and its enemies
Posted in Climate change, Manifestos & auguries on December 3, 2022 | 2 Comments »
To put things in the simplest terms possible: The global climate precariat — all of those whose lives and communities are endangered by the storms, floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and wars produced or intensified by a destabilizing global climate system — are a vast segment of humanity. It is growing daily. Together, the global precariat […]
Rewiring our capacity for ecocultural change
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged climate archaeology, climate trauma, conversion, eco-anxiety, ecocultural change, ecocultural identity, Ecological Civilization, ecological grief, environmental melancholia, experience, Katimavik, magic mushrooms, neuroplasticity, peak experiences, process-relational theory, psychedelics, Robin Carhart-Harris, solastalgia, youth corps programs on August 10, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Research on the usefulness of psychedelics for treating depression, anxiety, addiction, and post-traumatic stress has been growing steadily. (See here, here, here, and here for glimpses of it, and To the Best of Our Knowledge‘s recent exploration of it for a fascinating in-depth look at the topic.) I’d like to extrapolate from that research for […]
What does it mean to plant a tree (or a trillion)?
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged forest fetish, grasslands, New York Times, reforestation, savannas, tree planting, Trillion Trees, Zach St. George on July 20, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Here, for instance, in Brazil’s Parque Nacional da Chapada dos Veadeiros? Zach St. George’s New York Times article “Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World?” is an excellent overview of the reality of tree planting versus the ideal of it. Among the reality-checks:
“This is a fossil fuel war”
Posted in Climate change, tagged climate politics, energy transition, fossil fuel dependency, Russia, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine on March 27, 2022 | 1 Comment »
The invasion of Ukraine has shifted media attention away from many other things, Covid and climate among them. But the climate implications of the war have not gone unnoticed. To start with the obvious: Russia is a petrostate. As Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta writes, More than a third […]
The Anthropocene Unconscious
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged Anthropocene Unconscious, Fredric Jameson, geopolitical unconscious, Jameson, Jamesonian ecocriticism, Mark Bould on January 17, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
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 […]
Navigating climate trauma
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, tagged Andrei Tarkovsky, Anthropocene, climate trauma, Solaristics, the Zone, This Mazéd World, Vermont Humanities on November 2, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
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 […]
Solaristics, ETs, and the ontology of climate trauma
Posted in Climate change, Science & society, tagged Andrei Tarkovsky, anomalistics, boundary work, climate trauma, COP26, ETs, Exo Studies, extradimensional, extraterrestrial intelligence, integral theory, Jonny Greenwood, Lars von Trier, Melancholia, NHI, nonhuman intelligence, SANHI, science studies, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, Solaris, Solaristics, Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky, UFOs on October 25, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
As we prepare for another Climate Change Conference of the Parties, and all the activist organizing around it, it’s important for us to come to terms with exactly what we are dealing with. This post approaches climate change from a somewhat oblique, exo-planetary perspective. I have given a few talks recently in which I propose […]
Garden & Dump conference videos
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged climate trauma, eco-trauma, pre-traumatic stress syndrome, Stalker, Tarkovsky, the Zone on September 27, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
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, […]