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Search Results for 'climate change'

Ken Burns’ parks and nature’s nation

Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , on October 5, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Before Ken Burns’ 6-part, 12-hour series on the national parks was aired, a perceptive article by the LA Times’ Scott Timberg warned that it might be greeted by “sharp knives.” Ten years in the making, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, finally came to our television screens last week, and so far no sharp knives […]

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Mars attacks Sydney!

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged , , on September 23, 2009 | 7 Comments »

The photos are a bit too beautiful to resist sharing. And the stories taken from the archive of the already screened: “like scenes from Mad Max,” “like waking up on Mars,” “like a nuclear winter morning”. . . White urban Australia’s dreamtime apocalypse of being taken over by the Outback, the uncanny aboriginal sacred that […]

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transition culture, ecology, & Bataille’s glorious excesses

Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on September 1, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Reading about the growing “transition towns” movement back to back with a read-through of Design Philosophy Papers’ latest issue on Bataille and “Inefficient Sustainability” has gotten me thinking about some of the unspoken premises that make their way into environmentalists’ prognostications of the future. The transition towns movement began in Totnes, England, home of the […]

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walking on the moon

Posted in Philosophy, Visual culture, tagged , on July 16, 2009 | 10 Comments »

This image of Buzz Aldrin on the moon, photographed forty years ago by his Apollo 11 spacemate Neil Armstrong, has haunted me for decades. Not so much because it’s taken on the moon, as because of the image on his helmet, a mirror image that suggests there’s nothing behind the mask, inside that cavernous helmet, […]

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earth songs: Michael Jackson’s cultural ecologies

Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged , , , on June 30, 2009 | 13 Comments »

The death of Michael Jackson has prompted eco-bloggers to take another look at Jackson’s 1995 “Earth Song“, which some consider the most popular environmentally themed song ever produced. The song remains Jackson’s biggest seller in the U.K, having sold over a million copies there — more than either “Thriller” or “Billie Jean” — but it […]

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Lakoff’s environmental frames vs. Connolly’s resonance machines

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 20, 2009 | 6 Comments »

In Why Environmental Understanding, or “Framing,” Matters, published today on the Huffington Post (and on AlterNet), liberal framing guru George Lakoff provides a useful critique of a forthcoming EcoAmerica report on the framing of environmental and climate change issues. While his conclusions are perceptive and make the article a valuable read — I’ll get to […]

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Earth breathing

Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged , on May 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

I’m not quite sure what to make of this real-time simulation of the Earth’s CO2 emissions and birth and death rates (by country)… But I find myself mesmerized, in particular, by the soundtrack and the way it adds rhythm, along with a sort of creepy (-crawly) beauty, to the map. It is, of course, a […]

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green frames & nudges

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , on April 26, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Last week’s “Green Mind” issue of the New York Times Magazine shows how behavioral science is making an impact on environmental policy and decision-making. In particular, Jon Gertner’s “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?” provides a useful summary of how the trendy fields of behavioral economics and ‘decision science’ are being applied to thinking about climate […]

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trusting Obama or not

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , on April 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

With protests gearing up today to push the Obama administration away from its current timidity with its economic policies (see A New Way Forward and Democracy Now’s broadcast on it), it seems apropos to ask whether and to what extent the Obama administration should be trusted by progressives. Open Left, one of the better progressive […]

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Anthropocene dust-up: what it means

Posted in Anthropocene, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , on March 22, 2024 | 1 Comment »

The recent International Union of Geological Sciences decision to reject the proposed “Anthropocene epoch” might seem confusing. Here’s a piece of draft material from my forthcoming book-in-progress, The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds, that attempts to bring the situation up to date. Comments welcome! Please note that the […]

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Why religion isn’t (coherent)

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on February 29, 2024 | 4 Comments »

Language is an instrument for dealing with the details of reality. All of our words, along with the ways we string them together, contain or reflect concepts — signs or semiotic constructs – by which we refer to elements of a dynamic world. Because they are essentially pragmatic and context-specific, if we scrutinize any of […]

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Ontology 101

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 9, 2024 | 5 Comments »

The word ontology comes up a lot in the fields I work in (loosely speaking, the environmental humanities and social sciences), especially among scholars grappling with cultural differences and “decolonial” thinking. Here’s a crack at a 5-minute introduction to it for newbies. Ontology is commonly defined as something like “the philosophical study of being” or […]

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