Three things have drawn me repeatedly to the red rock landscape around the small north-central Arizona city of Sedona. First, and most obvious, is the landscape itself, which counts among the most distinctive and stunningly beautiful in the world. Second is the set of processes that landscape has set in motion in the conditions of late capitalist […]
Archive for the ‘Eco-culture’ Category
Returning to Sedona
Posted in Eco-culture, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged Arizona, Claiming Sacred Ground, Coconino National Forest, eco-pilgrimage, ecological management, environmental management, heterotopia, landscape, National Forests, political ecology, Red Rock Country, sacred landscapes, Sedona, Sedona Verde Valley Red Rock National Monument, U. S. Forest Service, vortexes, vortices on November 20, 2016 | 1 Comment »
Offsetting the New York Times
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged air travel, carbon accounting, carbon offsets, indulgences, New York Times on October 26, 2016 | 2 Comments »
A friend shared a post about a seemingly unbelievable “opportunity” for the world’s ultra-rich — to “circle the globe on an inspiring and informative journey by private jet, created by The New York Times in collaboration with luxury travel pioneers Abercrombie & Kent.” On this 26-day itinerary, you’d be taken “beneath the surface of some […]
World Listening Day
Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged acoustic ecology, ecomusicology, global hum, soundscape, soundscape ecology, World Listening Day on July 18, 2016 | 3 Comments »
Today is World Listening Day, a global event held annually to Celebrate the listening practices of the world and the ecology of its acoustic environments; Raise awareness about the growing number of individual and group efforts that creatively explore Acoustic Ecology based on the pioneering efforts of the World Soundscape Project, World Forum for Acoustic […]
Assessing Murray Bookchin’s legacy
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged Bookchin, Damian White, eco-anarchism, Janet Biehl, Kurdish revolutionary movement, libertarian municipalism, Murray Bookchin, Rojava on July 12, 2016 | 5 Comments »
Damian White has posted an excellent review of Janet Biehl’s book Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin at the Jacobin blog. Bookchin’s legacy has undergone something of a revival of late thanks to the efforts of Kurdish eco-socialist communitarians in Rojava.
A case for a non-mammalian food ethic
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged diets, food ethics, freeganism, locavorism, mammalism, mammals, veganism, vegetarianism on January 12, 2016 | 24 Comments »
Vegetarianism has been part of my identity for the last 25 years (thanks to arguments like this one and this one), but I’ve been increasingly recognizing the term’s limits.
To bother (with protest), or not?
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged COP21, global climate change, Paris climate summit, protest, Srnicek and Williams on December 4, 2015 | 2 Comments »
Writing in The Independent, “Left accelerationists” Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek make the case that we need not bother protesting the Paris climate summit. There are better things to do than that. They argue, first, that the negotiators won’t change anything under pressure, and probably won’t even notice that pressure coming from the streets. (Especially […]
What’s happening?
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged Adbusters, Billion People March, Climate Games, ClimateJustice, COP 21, Paris climate summit on November 9, 2015 | 2 Comments »
The beginning of COP 21, the UN Conference on Climate Change, is three weeks away. So what else is happening, you ask? 1) The Campaign Against Climate Change‘s Time to Act! campaign, 350.org, Reclaim Power, and various other formations are preparing actions around the world on the eve of the summit (November 28-29) and a huge demonstration in Paris […]
Cinema, ecology, & the death of carbon capitalism
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, tagged carbon capitalism, CENHS, Cultures of Energy, ecocinema studies, energy humanities on June 23, 2015 | 3 Comments »
Rice University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) has made my Cultures of Energy talk available on their YouTube channel. It’s a longer version of the material I presented at the SCMS “Post-Cinema” panel. Here’s the abstract: This paper thinks through the intersections of three developments: (1) the much debated “end of cinema” […]
Coming Thursday to news screens near you
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged Papal climate encyclical on June 16, 2015 | 1 Comment »
To have the world’s leading religious figure make a statement like this one — heavily anticipated and already leaked out in draft form — will be a game-changer. And a godsend (literally for some, figurally for most) to the climate justice community — which, after all, should be all of us.
The cosmopolitics of Herzog’s bears
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, tagged Alutiiq, animal philosophy, cosmopolitics, Finn Yarbrough, Grizzly Man, queer ecologies, shamanism, Timothy Treadwell, Werner Herzog on June 12, 2015 | 1 Comment »
One of the films that gets a lengthy treatment in my book Ecologies of the Moving Image is Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, about the death of Timothy Treadwell at the hands of a brown bear in Alaska. I characterized it there as a complex and nuanced film that provides a series of somewhat contradictory — but cognitively and […]
4 Noble Truths of Socio-Ecological Suffering
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, Manifestos & auguries, tagged Anthropocene, buen vivir, carbon capitalism, ClimateJustice, ecological sacrifice zones, environmental justice, Sydney Tar Ponds on May 1, 2015 | 8 Comments »
Some 2500 years ago, a man named Siddhartha Gotama articulated what have come to be known as the “4 Noble Truths”: the truth of dukkha, or fundamental suffering (that there is a basic unsatisfactoriness to life), the truth of its causes (that it arises from an ignorance and misperception of the nature of things, which are […]