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Archive for the ‘Eco-theory’ Category

“Trust your (foamy) immune system”

Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 2, 2021 | 7 Comments »

“Trust your immune system.” One often hears this slogan, or some version of it, from people who are against vaccination. But what does it mean, or what should it mean for an intensely social species like ours, living in a microbiologically fluid and creative environment like Earth’s biosphere? We can only trust something if we […]

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In defense of ecological metaphor

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

In my writing about media, I’ve been using the words “ecology” and “ecosystem” fairly liberally. In a new piece called “The Limitations of the ‘New Ecosystem’ Metaphor,” The Columbia Journalism Review’s Lauren Harris argues that this metaphor is misguided. She interviews media scholar Anthony Nadler, who has claims that the metaphor “naturaliz[es] current trends in the diffusion and development of news practices.” Its use “suggests ‘spontaneous, self-ordering principles’ in the news market obscuring all the social, political, and economic decisions that undergird the status quo.”

I want to respond to that argument here by presenting the case that “ecology” is not a metaphor imported from biology, but that it’s more like the other way around: “media ecology” is a description of the world of media as much as it is a description of the world of biology. Both media and biology are constituted by the actions and processes of their constituents. In this sense, it is not a metaphor but a way of seeing, and it’s more important to ensure we understand what it is we are looking at.

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Eco-humanities seminar

Posted in Academe, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , on January 29, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

I will be making parts of my “Advanced Environmental Humanities” course open to the EcoCultureLab community and a limited broader public. Technical details remain to be worked out, but I’d like to make our readings and discussions open, so as to include interested participants from outside the university community. The course is a graduate and […]

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Ecologizing Radiohead

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Music & soundscape, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 21, 2021 | 2 Comments »

What better way to understand ecological perception than by applying it to a study of the music of Radiohead, right? Okay, I’ll explain. “Ecological perception” is not what you might think. (And it isn’t what I, in my writing, call “perceptual ecology.“) It is a psychological theory that studies the perception of an organism (such […]

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Why three ecologies?

Posted in Eco-theory, Media ecology, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2021 | 1 Comment »

French philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, in his The Three Ecologies, was the first to articulate the threefold nature of ecology, but he failed to provide a clear articulation of why there should be three and only three ecologies — not two, not one, not four or more. What is the ontological justification for this […]

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Books of the decade in ecocultural theory

Posted in Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2020 | 6 Comments »

How best to characterize the past decade in books? This list focuses on three themes: attempts to grapple with the nature of the climate and extinction crises, the “ontological” and “decolonial” “turns” in cultural and environmental theory, and efforts to map out the “multispecies entanglements” that characterize our world and the acute challenges we face.

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Shadowing the Anthropocene

Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 9, 2018 | 3 Comments »

Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times arrived in the mail today. It’s published by punctum books, an open-access academic and para-academic publisher I’ve found to be a real delight to work with. Eileen Joy deserves a medal for her leadership of punctum, and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei’s cover and book design is beautiful. The book […]

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Bioregionalism primer

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 23, 2017 | 6 Comments »

When I began my involvement with environmental politics in the 1980s, the main currents of radical or critical thought were represented by deep ecologists (or biocentrists), social ecologists (gathered around Murray Bookchin and his Institute for Social Ecology), and ecofeminists, and they seemed more at odds with each other than united. Marxists and socialists (especially around […]

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What’s over that dark mountain?

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , , on March 22, 2017 | 8 Comments »

Paul Kingsnorth’s “The Lie of the Land: Does Environmentalism Have a Future in the Age of Trump?“, published in last Saturday’s Guardian, has elicited some interesting responses, for interesting reasons. Kingsnorth is a well known novelist and environmental public intellectual, a back-to-the-land “dark ecologist,” former deputy-editor of The Ecologist (which for decades played an indispensible, […]

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State of the Eco-Humanities, Take 1

Posted in Academe, Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , on June 8, 2016 | 4 Comments »

This post is the first of a series of reflections on the state of the Environmental Humanities, or Eco-Humanities, and of where this interdisciplinary field might be headed. A note on terminology: The term “Environmental Humanities” has caught on in ways that “Eco-Humanities” and other variations have not, but the debate between them has hardly occurred, […]

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Eco-humanities glossolalia

Posted in Academe, Eco-theory, tagged , on September 18, 2015 | 3 Comments »

I’ve just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I’m currently teaching (in its third incarnation), “Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.” The course has also turned into a book project I’m working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities. Both course and book have changed shape so […]

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Rethinking the ‘three ecologies’

Posted in Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 8, 2014 | 10 Comments »

Or, process-relational ecocriticism 2.0 Two of the courses I’m currently teaching — the intermediate-level “Environmental Literature, Art, and Media” and the senior-level “The Culture of Nature” — require introducing an eco-critical framework appropriate to a wide range of artistic forms, from literature to visual art, music, film and new media. The process-relational framework developed in […]

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