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 […]
Archive for the ‘Eco-culture’ Category
Ecomedia Studies handbook
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Media ecology, tagged António Lopez, ecomedia, ecomediality, media studies, media theory, Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, three ecologies on August 8, 2023 | 1 Comment »
Symbiocene@Ruigoord.NL
Posted in Anthropocene, Cultural politics, Eco-culture, tagged Amsterdam, autonomism, eco-art, Free Cultural Spaces, Glenn Albrecht, hippies, Ruigoort, squatting, Symbiocene, Timothy Morton 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.) […]
Sigh/n of relief
Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged China, geopolitics, political semiotics, Xi Jinping 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 […]
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 […]
Readings on ecofascism and far-right ecologism
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged Anti-Creep Climate Initiative, bibliographies, climate justice, climate politics, climate systems breakdown, eco-fascism, ecofascism, environmental politics, far right, far-right ecologism, radical environmentalism, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, Shane Burley, The Rise of Ecofascism 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 […]
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:
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 […]
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, […]
Camera as anaconda
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged anaconda, animal cinema, animal studies, animals, Archie the Anaconda, Billie Eilish, camera movement, cinema studies, ecocinema, film theory, music videos, objectivation, power, predators, process-relational thought, sexual abuse, subjectivation 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 […]
Intimations (through the fog of an unwinding pandemic)…
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged Earth Day, Earth Week exhibition, eco-arts, EcoCultureLab, environmental art, environmental studies, Rubenstein School, student work, University of Vermont 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 […]
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. […]