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Archive for the ‘Eco-culture’ Category

secret language (of scientists) going public

Posted in Eco-culture, tagged on January 3, 2010 | 8 Comments »

At a time when so many social mammal species are in crisis, it’s at least heartening to see news like tonight’s 60 Minutes segment on “The Secret Language of Elephants” or today’s Times Online article “Scientists say dolphins should be treated as ‘non-human persons’.” The scientific taboo on anthropomorphism is finally lifting, and animal behavior studies are becoming more like anthropology — something that only the lone rogue anthros like John Lilly or Barbara Noske would have dared call for not too long ago…

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Avatar: Panthea v. the Capitalist War Machine

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , on December 21, 2009 | 42 Comments »

New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat has it partly right: with its tree/Goddess-worshipping, tribal-shamanic-indigenous-hunter-gatherer-Daoist-pagan New-Age all-is-One-ism, Avatar is an expression of the longstanding American tradition of pantheist nature spirituality. Douthat thinks that that’s mainstream and that Hollywood is fully behind it, but it’s really still the insurgent religion to muscular Christianity and militarist nationalism. This is one of the rare films in which the Goddess (Mother Nature & the Natives) takes on the Capitalist War Machine and… well, you’ll have to see who wins.

But behind it all is the Spielberg factor, i.e., that the overt message (‘Man vs. Nature’, or rather high-modernist techno-capitalism vs. Body-Shop-nature-tech) is undercut by the implicit message that it is science, technology, and Hollywood magic — the Image Industry, the Spectacle — that enchants us and brings us what we really want. And they bring us new life, maybe eternal life […]

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two democracies… (& planet compost)

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , on December 19, 2009 | 3 Comments »

The responses to the final COP-15 “deal” from the environmental and social justice communities seem, at this point, to be largely negative. It’s a start, some acknowledge, but it’s pretty late to be starting, and it’s really pretty vacuous — a lost opportunity. My last post tried to put a positive spin on things by arguing that the events in Copenhagen reflect the tension between two models of democracy, and that there is hope for the future in the very crystallization of the second model. Let me expand on that a little.

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Copenhagen: changing the climate of democracy

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , on December 17, 2009 | 7 Comments »

What makes COP-15 a turning point is that a new set of connections are being forged in the heat of the confrontation of active citizens from around the world with the reality of global political-economic power structures. Paul Hawken’s “largest movement in the world,” the movement of movements made up of environmental, social justice, and indigenous rights civil society organizations — which isn’t a movement yet until it begins to move and act in a coordinated manner — and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “multitude” — the multiple and internally differentiated force that is, or that can become, capable of acting in common toward a global democracy — are both being born today, in the stark meeting of global justice activism with ecological reality.

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From Cap & Trade to apocalypse

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged , on December 2, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Annie Leonard’s Free Range Studios, whose viral video The Story of Stuff made some waves a little while back, has now produced a critique of the Cap and Trade system, some version of which is the most likely outcome of negotiations taking place in Copenhagen over the coming days. Over at Grist, David Roberts claims […]

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polar bears for green blogs

Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged on November 4, 2009 | 4 Comments »

This blog was added to the Directory of Best Green Blogs earlier today. To honor that I thought I would re-post a link to one of my favorite climate change related videos: the plastic bag polar bears emerging from the subway vent and melting back into them (i.e., the Environmental Defense Fund NYC subway ad […]

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Ostrom on climate change

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , on November 2, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Derek Wall at the eco-lefty Another Green World has just alerted us to an excellent piece new Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom has written on the climate change debate. Please read it, ye Copenhagen-bound.

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climate change supermodeling?

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged , , on October 30, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Also published at Indications. Having just written a piece for Environmental Communication about the promises and pitfalls of cognitive science-based approaches to communicating about issues like climate change, I can’t help commenting on this video and blog post that arrived this morning on my blog reader from identity campaigning, re-posted from Cognitive Policy Works. The […]

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Where the Wild Things Are

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, tagged , , on October 28, 2009 | 9 Comments »

I loved Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, so I’ve compiled a list of some useful online resources about the film, book, and author (mostly for my own sake, so I can easily access them if and when I might get around to writing more about it). Just to summarize what I like most […]

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Ostrom’s Nobel, the commons, & blog flow

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , , on October 15, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Several days of silence calls for at least a whimper of sound here… I’ve been on the road (Washington, DC, Boston, and tomorrow Montreal) and writing for crisp deadlines in amidst the travel. And I’m still uncertain as to whether it’s better to post little snippets just to keep the flow coming to your blog […]

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Ken Burns’ parks and nature’s nation

Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , on October 5, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Before Ken Burns’ 6-part, 12-hour series on the national parks was aired, a perceptive article by the LA Times’ Scott Timberg warned that it might be greeted by “sharp knives.” Ten years in the making, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, finally came to our television screens last week, and so far no sharp knives […]

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vampyroteuthis infernalis

Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture on September 29, 2009 | 3 Comments »

(Here’s the reference from the last post…) This is one of my favorite scenes from the David Attenborough-narrated Planet Earth series… The music is toned down, soft and sparse and a little eerie, some of the cinematic apparatus (at least the lights of the submersible) is displayed on camera, and we get a hint of […]

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