Those interested in the Anthropo(S)cene thread (technically, a “category”) of this blog may be interested in the call for proposals for a special issue of Radical History Review on Alternatives to the Anthropocene. (Hat tip to Jeremy Schmidt at The Anthropo.Scene.) The call reads, in part:
Continue Reading »Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged Alfred Crosby, Anthropocene, calls for proposals, Columbian invasion, ecological imperialism, environmentalism of the poor, Foucault, Manthropocene, Martinez-Alier, multiple modernities, Orbis spike, Planthropocene, pluriverse, Radical History Review | Leave a Comment »
When we look back at this time a few decades hence, what changes will we take the pandemic of 2020-21 to have ushered in? How will it have transformed work, recreation, travel and transportation, food, politics, and everything else? The following are some initial thoughts toward a hopeful eco-justice based perspective on how the world might have begun changing.
Despite the expectation of an impending return to normalcy, many observers are recognizing that the post-Covid world will be in some ways very different from what came before. Judging by the spate of recent prognostications (for instance, here, here, here, and here), it will be less open and global, more multipolar, and probably more unstable; less growth obsessed, and more cautious and conservative in its expectations; less individualist and more collectivist, more concerned with security and with local resourcefulness; but also more virtual.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Media ecology, Politics | Tagged ClimateJustice, COVID-19, ecojustice, environmentalism, futurism, globalism, green cities, green politics, international green movement, localism, media ecology, optimism, pandemic, post-pandemic, predictions | 2 Comments »
To say that Billie Eilish’s “Your Power” video is intended to get under your skin (as many online commenters have suggested) is understating things.
First, there the topic of the song itself (which I won’t comment on). Then there’s the interspecies intimacy (which I also won’t comment on, except to say, I can’t imagine doing this myself).
Then there’s the video itself, but here I’ll issue a spoiler alert and just say: watch the video, from start to finish. Watch it full-screen. Pretend you are the camera. What are you feeling? What are you doing?
Continue Reading »Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Music & soundscape | Tagged anaconda, animal cinema, animal studies, animals, Archie the Anaconda, Billie Eilish, camera movement, cinema studies, ecocinema, film theory, music videos, objectivation, power, predators, process-relational thought, sexual abuse, subjectivation | Leave a Comment »
On the fifty-first Earth Day (this past Thursday), two of my classes premiered a virtual exhibition of environmentally themed art. Called “Intimations: Eco-Artistic Glimpses Through the Fog of an Unwinding Pandemic,” the exhibition features several dozen works in a multitude of media including paintings and drawings, digital images, collages, narrative poetry and haiku, 3-D works (displayed in 2-D, but sometimes creatively), and audio and video pieces. (I recommend giving the videos their full viewing time, with the sound turned up.)
The exhibition is co-hosted by the undergraduate “Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media” class, the undergraduate/graduate “Advanced Environmental Humanities” class, and EcoCultureLab. (Note that with one or two exceptions, the students are not studio art students; almost all are Environmental Studies majors. Some are being challenged to “make art” for the first time in their university career.)
You can view the walk-through exhibition here or start from the launch page, then return to it after viewing the exhibition so that you can vote for your favorite artworks and provide any other comments you may have. The exhibition will be up for at least a few weeks. We plan to announce the “People’s Choice” awards on May 1, so vote before then.
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged Earth Day, Earth Week exhibition, eco-arts, EcoCultureLab, environmental art, environmental studies, Rubenstein School, student work, University of Vermont | Leave a Comment »
Fans of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings frequently comment on the spaciousness, immersiveness, and liminality of those works: the way you can stand in front of them and feel as if you are being bathed in some transcendent force that is irreducible to anything else. Great art is (supposed to be) like that: it simply is what it is, and it takes you somewhere else, different from where you start.
This is what I meant by the Zone in my book Ecologies of the Moving Image, except that with Rothko and his kin (Hilma af Klint comes to mind), the Zone itself is stable — it is simply there in its presence and its vibrant materiality — even while its effect is destabilizing. In the open alterity of its static image, a Rothko painting (or one of the more geometically pure af Klint works) beckons the viewer into itself, where it stands without deviation. Any motion in the image is something that happens in the relation between image and viewer; it occurs at the level of vibration, not of narration. You stand there, and you begin to vibrate with it. It opens you.
In perilous times — times, for instance, of a destabilizing pandemic (with intimations of worse things to come; more on those things below) — artistic works and/or spaces that provide that kind of “transcendent stability” can be reassuring and comforting. The best such works do not simply reassure us in the status quo; they take us out to a place different, from which we can get a different glimpse at the present. The pandemic is like that: if we think we will simply go back to “normal,” we’ve missed what it brought us.
Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries, Music & soundscape | Tagged ambient music, Brian Eno, climate crisis, COVID-19, Global Trends 2040, hyper-events, hyperobjects, industrial ambient, Mark Rothko, Morton Feldman, National Intelligence Council, pandemic, Peter Gabriel, The Real, William Basinski | Leave a Comment »
The following distills the essence of my responses to questions from a vaccine (and Covid) skeptical friend. I share it in case it’s useful for others (and because it updates a few things I’ve written before on the topic). I’m not an epidemiologist and the comments on the science of the pandemic are those of an informed lay person. The comments on media, politics, and the culture of science are more directly connected to my research areas.
Why such a draconian response to this virus? Aren’t mortality rates from Covid-19 much lower (less than 3%) than for so many other infectious diseases?
It’s true that Covid-19 mortality rates are much lower than some epidemics have had, but there are many factors that play into mortality rates, including treatment, societal responses, general hygiene and immunity levels, and the like. There have been many viral pandemics in the past, some of them killing millions of people. Covid is out of the ordinary mostly in its rapid spread and highly contagious nature, and in the lack of a vaccine against it. Given the conditions for the emergence of zoonotic viruses — the last pockets of wild animal refuges being decimated around the world, climate change setting off more movements of refugee human and animal populations — we can expect more viruses like it to emerge, so whatever we learn from this encounter will be valuable moving forward. The only large-scale protections we have against the worst of these virueses are (1) living healthy, immuno-protective lives (which we should all be trying to do) and (2) developing vaccines (which modern science does better than any traditional medicine did).
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics, Science & society | Tagged Anomalies, anti-vaccination movement, anti-vaxx, climate crisis, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, conspiratistics, conspiratology, COVID-19, emergency brake, Letters to..., pandemic politics, pandemic response, vaccine science | 1 Comment »
Happy to share that I’ll be participating in a panel/conversation at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), in a celebration of open-access journal Media+Environment, today from 5:00 to 6:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time (21:00-22:30 GMT). FLEFF, which is now in its 24th year, is one of the signature environmental film festivals around the world. This year’s festival is fully virtual and open to all registrants.
Tonight’s event will feature the journal’s three co-editors (Janet Walker, Alenda Chang, and myself) plus contributor Christina Vagt and coordinating editor Stephen Borunda speaking on the role of open-access journals like M+E in mediating and expanding the intersections between media production and environmental action. The 90 minute panel discussion and conversation will be moderated by FLEFF’s co-director Patricia Zimmermann.
Here’s the registration link:
Posted in Media ecology | Tagged ecomedia, ecomedia studies, environmental communication, environmental journalism, journals, media studies, Media+Environment, open access | Leave a Comment »
Theory has a mobile army of metaphors that account for its own importance. The vanguardist notion of a “cutting edge” has long served as a paradigmatic metaphor for theoretical innovation, and it’s one I take issue with in my article “Is the Post- in Posthuman the Post- in Postmodern? Or What Can the Human Be?,” which has just come out in a special issue devoted to posthumanism of the Shanghai Academy-based, bilingual Chinese journal Critical Theory. (The issue, which is focused on posthumanism, features a significant new piece by N. Katherine Hayles, alongside work by several Chinese scholars.)
A more helpful metaphor for theoretical novelty is Jacques Rancière’s “redistribution of the sensible,” which can also be applied to the literature on the “post-human” and on posthumanism. By the “distribution of the sensible,” or portage du sensible, Rancière means
Continue Reading »Posted in Philosophy | Tagged alternative humanisms, Chinese humanities journals, critical theory, distribution of the sensible, extinction, humanism, humanities, Jacques Rancière, post-human, posthumanism, posthumanities, theory | 3 Comments »
Equinoxes and solstices are geometrical phenomena. They mark the passage of time in ways that are easy to understand and more or less universal. I understand people’s desire to watch for them, to mark them out, and to even reclaim them as somehow more primordial than other kinds of temporal passage points.
But changing seasons involve much more of a multi-layered confluence and conflagration of elements. And they are specific. This place has its seasons. They vary in their timings and specificities, and their variations provide for talking points because of the background of consistency those variations revolve around. When the consistency reasserts itself, we are satisfied.
Continue Reading »Posted in Climate change, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged Bill McKibben, bioregionalism, equinox, seasons, Vermont, weather | Leave a Comment »
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