The journal Science has just released more news of planetary boundary transgression. (This is related to my post from a few days ago.) Specifically, of nine such boundaries connected to “processes and systems [that] regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth System,” four have been crossed. Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are […]
Archive for the ‘Science & society’ Category
More transgressions
Posted in Anthropocene, Science & society, tagged Anthropocene, planetary boundaries, Will Steffen on January 16, 2015 | 1 Comment »
Dupré on process biology
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Science & society, tagged biology, John Dupré, philosophy of science, process philosophy on September 1, 2014 | 1 Comment »
Writing in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science blog Auxiliary Hypotheses, widely published University of Exeter philosopher John Dupré recently announced a project entitled A Process Ontology for Contemporary Biology (PROBIO). According to Dupré, who is director of Egenis, the Center for the Study of the Life Sciences (formerly the ESRC Center for Genomics and Society), […]
Anthropocene: Too serious for postmodern games
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Philosophy, Science & society, tagged Anthropocene, Clive Hamilton, environmental humanities, geology on August 18, 2014 | 6 Comments »
The following is a guest post by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. It continues the Immanence series “Debating the Anthropocene.” See here, here, and here for previous articles in the series. (And note that some lengthy comments have been added to the previous post by Jan Zalasiewicz, Kieran […]
Humming the new earth
Posted in Science & society, tagged acoustic ecology, Anomalies, anomalistics, Anthropocene, conspiracies, global hum, Greensboro, hum, radio waves, rumble, soundscape, UFOs, Vermont, vlf on August 10, 2014 | 20 Comments »
[Note: This post has been edited slightly since it was first published, to clarify the difference between sound waves and radio waves. I have also posted several updates in the Comments section of this post, where I present my reconsidered views of what the “Global Hum” may be. I recommend reading those updates after you […]
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 […]
Objectivity 2.0?
Posted in Philosophy, Science & society, tagged cosmology, objectivity on October 14, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Continuing on the “sciencey” thread from this post… (I’ll come back to the “14 billion years” issue, since it’s been pointed out to me that my criticism of the concept of measuring time would only apply — if the scientists are correct — to the first few seconds or so of the universe.) […]
SAR “Nature, Science, Religion” volume out
Posted in Eco-culture, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged anthropology, cosmopolitics, nature, religion on May 20, 2012 | 1 Comment »
I received my copies in the mail this week of the book that arose out of the School of Advanced Research seminar on “Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment.” It’s a handsome volume, whose contents provide a level of cross-cutting conversation that, I think, is rare among edited collections. Catherine Tucker […]
Ecology-ontology-politics (1): Pickering’s cyborgs
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Science & society, tagged Bateson, cybernetics, ecology, Ontology, epistemology, Pickering, Politics, science studies on April 4, 2011 | 9 Comments »
Ecology, ontology, politics: These three terms are among the most common themes of this blog, but their intersections deserve a more sustained exploration. This is the first of a series of posts that will do that through critical discussion of various readings and concepts. This first post reviews and reflects on some of the questions […]
spiritualizing science
Posted in Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged pantheism, Sagan, spirituality on March 4, 2010 | 1 Comment »
or, Carl Sagan rides again, and again… Prometheus Unbound raises questions about the atheist spirituality of Symphony of Science‘s star-scientist-studded videos (pun only slightly intended — they are mostly men, yes, but drumming on djembes (!), and it’s well worth waiting to see Jane Goodall tell us about the “wuzzy” line between humans and the […]
climate denialism as hysteria?
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Science & society, tagged sociology of science, symptoms on February 15, 2010 | 6 Comments »
Dipping once again into the public debate around climate change science — today it’s in the responses to MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel’s op-ed in the Boston Globe, to which no less than 15 comments were added in the couple of minutes it took me to write these first couple of sentences — I’m realizing that it’s not enough to refer to a “climate denial machine” (as I’ve done here before). There is certainly an organized, machinic quality to denialism, with well-funded nodes of misinformation generating the talking points disseminated across the internet/mediasphere by climate denialists. But the intensity of many of the comments has made me think about the virtues and pitfalls of another frame, that of “hysteria,” since it really seems akin to the kinds of hysterias chronicled by historians like Norman Cohn and the more familiar territory of conspiratorial claims and counter-claims around such issues as alien abductions, satanic ritual abuse, or JFK and 9-11 conspiracy theories.
At the same time, there’s a risky irony in suggesting that climate change denial is a hysteria, since to deniers it’s precisely the claim of anthropogenic global warming that appears hysterical and millennialist. Hysteria, both the diagnosis of it and the thing itself, relies on a reading of “signs” or “symptoms” as indicative of a cause much larger than what one can easily deal with. There’s a monster lurking behind those markings on one’s skin, or in the body politic. And just as conspiracy theories aren’t wrong by definition (and my listing of those in the previous paragraph wasn’t intended to suggest that those ones were), so hysterical reactions aren’t necessarily unproductive — they are a response to something that one cannot respond to in a more direct and appropriate way. The politics of climate change, in any case, carries something of the “paranoid style” that Richard Hofstader identified in American politics back in the 1960s. But since then, we’ve moved more deeply into a kind epistemologically unmoored world, a world in which we rely on experts to inform us about basic risks that are not directly perceivable by us (such as those from nuclear radiation, environmental contaminants, and the like) but in a context where the structures of epistemic authority are no longer holding up well at all, in which common sense is undecideable and skepticism extends “all the way down”, as Jodi Dean has put it. This is especially the case in societies characterized by wide cultural divides, such as that of post-Bush II America. [. . .]
Kauffman, Shaviro, Goodwin, et al.
Posted in Philosophy, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged biology, complexity, emergence, immanence on February 23, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann recently gave a talk here from his book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, which is getting more press these days than most books with a Spinozian/Whiteheadian take on the emergent nature of intelligence, complexity, spirituality, and all that. Talking to him afterwards, I was a […]
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