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 […]
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Climate movement
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged Bill McKibben, ClimateJustice, Naomi Klein, People's Climate March, UN Climate Summit on September 22, 2014 | 7 Comments »
Busy being born…
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged ClimateJustice, ecopolitics 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. […]
The challenge
Posted in Politics, tagged ClimateJustice, ecopolitics, environmental crisis, Under Western Skies 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 […]
Mission accomplished… not
Posted in Politics, tagged Maidan, TAZ, Ukraine 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 […]
Ukraine & the threat of direct democracy
Posted in Politics, tagged anarchism, direct democracy, Politics, revolution, Ukraine 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 […]
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 […]
‘Country under reconstruction’: Ukraine & the society of the provocation
Posted in Politics, tagged activism, post-Soviet, provocation, revolution, Russia, Ukraine 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 […]
Climate denial’s “dark money” smoke machine
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, Science & society, tagged climate denialism, global warming 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 […]
A cultural cold war wind
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged cultural values, environmentalism, fundamentalism, gay rights, liberalism, Olympics, religion, Russia, Sochi 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 […]
The groundlessness of revolution
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged Eastern Europe, Europe, Politics, post-Soviet, revolutions, Ukraine on December 12, 2013 | 3 Comments »
Every violent suppression of dissent is violence against the humanity that is being born. The world to come is at stake in these encounters. That’s what I tweeted last night while watching what looked like the squashing of a revolution, when riot police appeared by the thousands and began moving in on the territory held […]
Documenting the act of killing
Posted in Cinema, Politics, Visual culture, tagged atrocities, documentary, Indonesia, Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing on October 23, 2013 | 4 Comments »
The following is reblogged, excerpted and modified, from e²mc. How do films deal with historical atrocities? And how might they enable them in the first place? The Act of Killing is Joshua Oppenheimer’s chilling documentary about the perpetrators of the mass murders committed by the Suharto regime’s paramilitary death squads in mid-1960s Indonesia. The filmmakers […]
Take Back the Economy interview
Posted in Politics, tagged Gibson-Graham on February 23, 2013 | 1 Comment »
Society & Space has an interview with the authors of Take Back the Economy, the final book co-written by the geographical-political theory duo J. K. Gibson-Graham, this time with co-authors and Community Economies collaborators Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy. Gibson-Graham were Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, authors of The End of Capitalism (As We Know […]