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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Shake-up in oil country

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , , on May 7, 2015 | 4 Comments »

There is a lot being said about the unexpected rout of the long-ruling Progressive Conservative government in the oil-rich Canadian province of Alberta by the socialist New Democrats. Some of it (on the left) is euphoric and over the top — which is understandable given the seemingly helpless state of the left across much of North […]

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The ecology of Syrian/Kurdish freedom

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 16, 2015 | 5 Comments »

Eco-theorists may recognize the title of this post as a variation on the title of Murray Bookchin’s audacious and deeply influential (for many, including myself) 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (pdf here). What’s little known to anyone following recent news about the war in Syria is that an 18,300 sq. […]

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GMO debate: New Yorker vs. Vandana Shiva

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , , , , on November 3, 2014 | 1 Comment »

With its passage of Act 120 this past June, Vermont became the first U.S. state to require mandatory labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). (This followed Connecticut’s and Maine’s decisions to require it once adjacent states do.) Since then, GMO food manufacturers have announced they will challenge that decision in court. Meanwhile, critics of GMOs […]

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Climate movement

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , , on September 22, 2014 | 7 Comments »

As I write, Bill McKibben is being interviewed left and right, Tom Ashbrook is interviewing Naomi Klein and pushing her to outline a vision that isn’t capitalism-as-we-know-it, Time magazine is saying this could be the largest march of its kind — which raises the question of what kind it is — and the People’s Climate March is […]

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Busy being born…

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , on September 17, 2014 | 1 Comment »

When humans look back on our time from the next era, they might see this weekend’s People’s Climate March as a key event in the movement that led to the next era. The alternative is a little scarier: it’s that there will be no next era, or at least no humans looking back from it. […]

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The challenge

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , on September 13, 2014 | 1 Comment »

The closing panel of this conference featured Winona LaDuke, Tim Ingold, Bron Taylor, environmental epidemiologist Colin Soskolne (who convened the preceding panel on public and environmental health regimes), and myself. We were each asked to provide five minutes of summary comments on the big issues of our concern (related to the conference). The following were […]

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Mission accomplished… not

Posted in Politics, tagged , , on February 23, 2014 | 2 Comments »

UKR-TAZ announces a new mission: The concept of the TAZ, or temporary autonomous zone, comes from “ontological anarchist” writer and poet Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson). It is intended to indicate a space of liberation, a space which is at once physical and real, if temporary, and metaphysical — a space of consciousness outside of the […]

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Ukraine & the threat of direct democracy

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on February 22, 2014 | 3 Comments »

“Power to the millions, not to the millionaires” (#Leftmaidan)   Three forms of democracy vie with each other in Ukraine today. The first of these is what we might call authoritarian democracy. This is a hybrid of democracy and authoritarian rule, in which partially developed democratic institutions can be relatively easily played off against each […]

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Apocalypstickle?

Posted in Politics, Visual culture on February 21, 2014 | Leave a Comment »

Just as environmental media have a penchant for the spectacle of “disaster porn,” so does political media reveal a strong attraction to what Politico’s Sarah Kendzior, in “The Day We Pretended to Care About Ukraine,” calls the “apocalypstickle.” An ugly word for political observers’ weird fascination with apocalyptic imagery. Brueghel, Bosch . . . and […]

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‘Country under reconstruction’: Ukraine & the society of the provocation

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , on February 7, 2014 | 14 Comments »

“COUNTRY UNDER RECONSTRUCTION. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.” (from Ukrainian anarchist group Blackmaidan) “It is as if, for a moment, the ‘projection’ of the outside world has stopped working; as if we have been confronted momentarily with the formless grey emptiness of the screen itself…”  (Slavoj Zizek, describing the scene outside a traveling couple’s window in Robert […]

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Climate denial’s “dark money” smoke machine

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, Science & society, tagged , on February 3, 2014 | 1 Comment »

Since I was traveling at the time, I failed to note an interesting story that got covered in the science press about the organizational support and funding behind the climate denial movement. As reported in articles in Scientific American, The Guardian, and elsewhere, a recent peer-reviewed study published in Climatic Science by sociologist Robert Brulle […]

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A cultural cold war wind

Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 20, 2014 | 2 Comments »

I predicted back in 2010 that globalizing and technological trends would lead disparate religious traditions to find common ground on socially divisive issues like abortion and gay rights. Just as environmentalism, feminism, and indigenous rights were partnering various more liberal church groups with environmental and social justice organizations, contributing to the development of an “eco-egalitarian” global […]

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