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Archive for the ‘Eco-culture’ Category

Ecomedia Studies handbook

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , on August 8, 2023 | 1 Comment »

I’m happy to share the news that the Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies is out — and is entirely open-access, which is especially thrilling, as Routledge handbooks can otherwise get pretty expensive. It’s a 36-chapter mega-volume that tries to define the field and lay out some of its most exciting international contours. The volume is […]

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Symbiocene@Ruigoord.NL

Posted in Anthropocene, Cultural politics, Eco-culture, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2023 | 1 Comment »

Two things to consider before your morning coffee. 1) We are living through a Holocene collapse event,* when the nearly 12,000 year old regime of relative climate stability, the “comfort zone” for most of what we know as human civilization, is beginning to tear to shreds. (Here’s just one of the shreds from yesterday’s news.) […]

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Sigh/n of relief

Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged , , , on June 19, 2023 | 1 Comment »

As the world breathes a sigh of relief that this meeting happened at all, ecocritics can wonder about the semiotics of the image framing Chairman Xi Jinping’s meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Relief : Is this: China as a force of nature? Xi backed by the power of the Earth itself? Blinken […]

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Rewiring our capacity for ecocultural change

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Readings on ecofascism and far-right ecologism

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 29, 2022 | Leave a Comment »

While it’s easy to overuse the term “ecofascism,” applying it to things that don’t necessarily deserve it (the debate might be a little like the one I’ve been following over whether Putinist Russia qualifies as fascist), it’s important for anyone involved in environmental issues to have a sense of where the term does apply and […]

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What does it mean to plant a tree (or a trillion)?

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , , 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:

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The Anthropocene Unconscious

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , 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 […]

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Garden & Dump conference videos

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged , , , , , 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, […]

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Camera as anaconda

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 8, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

To say that Billie Eilish’s “Your Power” video is intended to get under your skin (as many online commenters have suggested) is understating things. First, there the topic of the song itself (which I won’t comment on). Then there’s the interspecies intimacy (which I also won’t comment on, except to say, I can’t imagine doing […]

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Intimations (through the fog of an unwinding pandemic)…

Posted in Eco-culture, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 25, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

On the fifty-first Earth Day (this past Thursday), two of my classes premiered a virtual exhibition of environmentally themed art. Called “Intimations: Eco-Artistic Glimpses Through the Fog of an Unwinding Pandemic,” the exhibition features several dozen works in a multitude of media including paintings and drawings, digital images, collages, narrative poetry and haiku, 3-D works […]

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Another cheap ecocultural manifesto

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , 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. […]

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In defense of ecological metaphor

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

In my writing about media, I’ve been using the words “ecology” and “ecosystem” fairly liberally. In a new piece called “The Limitations of the ‘New Ecosystem’ Metaphor,” The Columbia Journalism Review’s Lauren Harris argues that this metaphor is misguided. She interviews media scholar Anthony Nadler, who has claims that the metaphor “naturaliz[es] current trends in the diffusion and development of news practices.” Its use “suggests ‘spontaneous, self-ordering principles’ in the news market obscuring all the social, political, and economic decisions that undergird the status quo.”

I want to respond to that argument here by presenting the case that “ecology” is not a metaphor imported from biology, but that it’s more like the other way around: “media ecology” is a description of the world of media as much as it is a description of the world of biology. Both media and biology are constituted by the actions and processes of their constituents. In this sense, it is not a metaphor but a way of seeing, and it’s more important to ensure we understand what it is we are looking at.

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