The field I’ve worked in for the last few decades, which has come to be known as the Environmental Humanities (capitalized or not), is one that requires keeping up with ongoing scholarship not only in the humanities, but also in the social sciences and the biological and earth sciences. From my reading of the field, […]
Archive for the ‘Eco-theory’ Category
The 3 Body Problem’s Ecological Fallacy
Posted in Eco-theory, Science & society, tagged 3 Body Problem, anthropocentrism, Cixin Liu, ecocriticism, ecological fallacy, ecotheory, Netflix, science fiction, speculative fiction, Three Body Problem, zero-order humanism on July 1, 2024 | Leave a Comment »
This is a slightly evolved out-take from my recent Vermont Humanities talk, which can be viewed here. Netflix’s 3 Body Problem was remarkably entertaining, I thought, but the whole San-Ti plot line is built around a basic ecological fallacy. Let me explain. (And I’m referring here to the Netflix series, not necessarily to the novel […]
The population bli(m)p
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, demographic transition, demography, human population growth, overpopulation, population on October 14, 2023 | 7 Comments »
When I was younger, I would occasionally hear from fellow environmentalists that the “real problem” was human overpopulation. (The standard answer, from the well informed, was: nope, it’s inequality, extractive capitalism, institutional inertia, patriarchal values, colonialism, et al. “Overpopulation” was a symptom, not the disease.) The population-mongers have mostly faded since then, as the “demographic […]
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 »
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 […]
More-or-less-(than)-human
Posted in Eco-theory, tagged David Abram, entanglement, language, more-than-human, more-than-humans, nonhuman, Theodore Sturgeon on October 19, 2022 | 1 Comment »
The term “more-than-human” has become a popular way of designating the “nonhuman” within the environmental humanities. Other terms used include “other-than-human,” and much less frequently “unhuman” and “inhuman,” with the latter’s negative connotations upended (successfully or not) to read positively. “More-than-human” was, to my knowledge, first used by David Abram in his 1996 ecophilosophical bestseller […]
Eco-querying The Dawn of Everything
Posted in Eco-theory, Politics, tagged David Graeber, David Wengrow, environmental politics, freedom, Graeber and Wengrow, ontological turn, Ontology, political theory, state, The Dawn of Everything, The Immanent Frame, three ecologies, visionary experience on July 21, 2022 | 2 Comments »
The Immanent Frame, the Social Science Research Council’s forum on religion, secularism, and the public sphere, is in the midst of publishing a series of responses to David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. My contribution, entitled “The Dawn of Everything Good?“, appeared last week. The series can be read here. The following […]
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:
Ways to inhabit the world
Posted in Eco-theory, Process-relational thought, tagged bioregionalism, Fribourg, Hanegraaff, imaginal practices, imagination, inhabitory practices, placemaking, prehension, reinhabitation, religion, religious imagination, ritual, Ritual Creativity, ritual studies, Whitehead on June 24, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
The following post elaborates on some comments I made this week at the Ritual Creativity conference at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Deep thanks to conference organizers Katri Ratia and François Gauthier for inviting me to what turned out to be an immensely rewarding event, and to my co-panelists Graham Harvey, Sarah Pike, and Susannah […]
Eco+Deco, a manifesto in progress
Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-theory, Manifestos & auguries, Science & society, tagged colonialism, coloniality, decolonialism, Decolonization, ecological science, ecologization, ecology, indigeneity, indigenization, land, Latour, manifestos, Ontology, postcolonialism, reindigenization, Toronto Biennale of Art on May 31, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Some of the best art exhibitions today show that the socially engaged art world is undergoing two shifts that some of us in the environmental humanities have been advocating for some time: they ecologize and they decolonize. An excellent example of this is the second edition of the Toronto Biennale of Art, currently wrapping up […]
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 […]
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