The photos are a bit too beautiful to resist sharing. And the stories taken from the archive of the already screened: “like scenes from Mad Max,” “like waking up on Mars,” “like a nuclear winter morning”. . . White urban Australia’s dreamtime apocalypse of being taken over by the Outback, the uncanny aboriginal sacred that […]
Archive for the ‘Eco-culture’ Category
Mars attacks Sydney!
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged ecoapocalypse, ecocinema, film on September 23, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Derrick Jensen’s Star Wars diet lite
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged Derrick Jensen, ecopolitics, media on September 21, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I agree with Mediacology‘s critique of Derrick Jensen’s ‘dark side’ — or at least of a certain linearity in his political vision — but I still find his Star Wars spoof pretty funny. And I think it’s good to have someone saying the things he says (like these). And his column does add some fire […]
fairy villages, bowerbird art, & other ambiguous objects
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged ambiguous objects, animacy, animism, art, eco-art, entropy, paganism, relationalism on September 20, 2009 | 56 Comments »
One of my (largely dormant) pet projects over the years has been to document and theorize anonymous, self-decomposing artworks made in collaboration with nature and time. These works are creative engagements with environments — often simple rearrangements of physical materials (rocks, wood, found pieces of scrap metal or discarded trash, and the like) — by […]
pleasures of the (un)sustainable
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged Bataille, ecopolitics, hedonism, sustainability on September 2, 2009 | 3 Comments »
A propos yesterday’s post on transition culture and the Bataillian (versus Malthusian) thermodynamics of ecopolitics, the new issue of the Harvard Design Magazine, on “(Sustainability) + Pleasure,” turns out to be all over this topic. Wendy Steiner’s “The Joy of Less” introduces it well, positing a sensualism that’s quite happy with the “pleasure economy” of […]
transition culture, ecology, & Bataille’s glorious excesses
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, tagged Bataille, ecotheory, McDonough, Ontology, epistemology, recycling, Stoekl, transition towns on September 1, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Reading about the growing “transition towns” movement back to back with a read-through of Design Philosophy Papers’ latest issue on Bataille and “Inefficient Sustainability” has gotten me thinking about some of the unspoken premises that make their way into environmentalists’ prognostications of the future. The transition towns movement began in Totnes, England, home of the […]
Teddy Goldsmith & left-right ecopolitics
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged ecopolitics on September 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The obits have been coming in, albeit a little slowly, for Edward “Teddy” Goldsmith, founder of the fearless and influential British journal The Ecologist, co-founding member of Britain’s Green and Ecology parties, and publisher of the instrumental 1972 manifesto A Blueprint for Survival. Goldsmith, who died in his sleep on August 21, was a controversial […]
spinning the Earth
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged Buddhism, Deleuze, imagination, visuality, Whitehead on August 25, 2009 | 5 Comments »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M&hl=en&fs=1& Just by linking Carl Sagan’s eloquent little Pale Blue Dot to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, James Ure’s Buddhist Blog brings out the buddhism inherent both in Sagan’s words and in the imagery of the Earth from space. That imagery (as I’ve discussed before here and here) is multivalent, but Sagan’s spin on it […]
prairie dogs & cosmopolitics in Santa Fe
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged anthropology, Christianity, cosmopolitics, ecopolitics, ecotheology, Latour, paganism, Stengers, syncretism on August 22, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Over the past several days I’ve gone from the cool wetness of Alaska’s southeast coast to the high dryness of north-central New Mexico. The first was pure holiday, accompanied by loved ones (including those who generously funded it) and featuring glaciers, salmon, a black bear (devouring one of the salmon), a ride on one of […]
eco-arts & ‘experimental geography’ round-up
Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged eco-art, ecomedia, geography, landscape, performance on July 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The eco-arts blogosphere has kept simmering through the early summer. Greenmuseum.blog, connected to the excellent online environmental resource and exhibition space Green Museum, has taken on a new look. The blog had recently covered the Earth Matters on Stage EcoDrama Symposium, held at the University of Oregon. Mike Lawler’s EcoTheatre blog also provided coverage of […]
cinematic ecologies
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Philosophy, tagged Agamben, ecocriticism, ecomedia, film, Heidegger on July 11, 2009 | 7 Comments »
As ecocriticism expands and deepens in scope (of subject matter & media examined), extent (internationally), and diversity (in approaches, connections with other schools of thought, etc.), its interactions with non-literary fields such as cinema studies, theatre/performance studies, and musicology (as I posted about recently) are starting to develop in healthy ways. The ASLE conference had […]
some favorites
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged ecotheory on July 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
As chair of the awards committee for the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, I’ve had to start thinking about the best scholarly books published in the last couple of years. Given the overlap between “the study of religion, nature, and culture” and this blog, I thought I’d throw out some […]
mercy mercy me (the ecology)
Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged ecopolitics, music on June 30, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The explicitly ecological piece on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On was Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), which, like a lot of his music at the time, fuses a clear-eyed realism with an optimistic, gospel-tinged sense of possibility. I’m not sure where this video comes from (or why David Bowie appears in it), but the shots […]