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 […]
Archive for the ‘Climate change’ Category
“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 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, […]
Thoughts on an equinox
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter, tagged climate crisis, climate justice, equinox, future, Holocene, hope, inequality, seasons on September 22, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
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 […]
Through an Anthropo(s)cenic Glass, Darkly
Posted in Anthropocene, Cinema, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, tagged 1 Corinthians 13, Anthropocene, climate trauma, Congress of Culture, deep time, Earth's deep past, eco-trauma, geology, geophilosophy, Holocene, IPCC, Late Holocene, Lviv, Peter Brannen, Solaris, Tarkovsky, Through a Glass Darkly, Ukraine, Vermont Humanities Conference, Zizek, Конгрес культури on August 11, 2021 | 1 Comment »
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 […]
Equinoxx
Posted in Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, tagged Bill McKibben, bioregionalism, equinox, seasons, Vermont, weather on March 24, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Equinoxes and solstices are geometrical phenomena. They mark the passage of time in ways that are easy to understand and more or less universal. I understand people’s desire to watch for them, to mark them out, and to even reclaim them as somehow more primordial than other kinds of temporal passage points. But changing seasons […]
Another cheap ecocultural manifesto
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Manifestos & auguries, tagged ClimateJustice, environmental justice, manifesto, manifestos, principles, statements on March 8, 2021 | 2 Comments »
Manifestos are back in style (if this one, this one, and this one are any indication). Here’s my latest crack at a fairly simple statement of principle. The lesson of the field of environmental studies, to which I’ve dedicated more than three decades of my life, is that there’s a civilizational task ahead of us. […]
No surprises
Posted in Blog stuff, Climate change, Politics, tagged 01-06-21, Capitol, climate denialism, disinformation, far right, fascism, hope, image war, information war, insurrection, January 6 2021, meme magic, QAnon, right-wing media, Trump, Trump-Like Derangement Syndrome, Trumpism, Trumplan, U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C. on January 7, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
I am an academic who researches, writes, and teaches about the human relationship with the ecological environment within which we live and on which we depend. I recognize that that relationship is deeply troubled, and I want to be working on untroubling it. Politics — the shaping and implementation of policy to steer collective and […]