One of the most frustrating things about losing a family member during this pandemic has been the mandatory self-quarantine — the one that’s been imposed on me for crossing a national border to get here (to the Toronto area where my father was living up until a few days ago), and on my sister who is Covid-positive and who lived with and took care of my father over his final week of life, and on everyone else, who should be doing their best to stay away from us. When you lose a father and then cannot even see your siblings, let alone spend time with them to tell stories and comfort each other, the loss leaves an unusual hole to be filled by other means.
I have been filling it by writing about it. And by visiting a place where I can extend myself into the world a little, and to breathe into that extended space — which I can’t do with other people at a time of quarantine.
I’ve been haunted by Ed Yong’s description of science from the Atlantic article “Why Coronavirus is So Confusing,” which I shared a few days ago:
“This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our understanding oscillates at first, but converges on an answer,” says Natalie Dean, a statistician at the University of Florida. “That’s the normal scientific process, but it looks jarring to people who aren’t used to it.”
The problem with this line, I now realize, is that it’s a good description of how “frontier science” becomes “consensus science” except for the fact that the oscillations sometimes settle around multiple competing perspectives (nowadays we might call them “basins of attraction,” using complex systems terminology).
This past week has seen a firestorm of reaction among environmentalists and climate and energy scientists to the online release of the film Planet of the Humans. Written, directed, and produced by first-time director Jeff Gibbs, but — much more importantly — executive-produced and actively promoted by Michael Moore, the film is incendiary and intentionally controversial. Since it falls squarely into the confluence of interests I study and teach about (ecology, film, social critique, cultural perceptions of the future, the impact of images and image production, et al.), I decided I should see it for myself despite the criticisms and calls for it to be withdrawn. Here are some thoughts on it, still somewhat inchoate and fluid from having just watched it last night.
One of the silver linings about the coronavirus pandemic is that it has made some people, and even institutions, more generous (at least temporarily). Among them are popular and academic journals that have removed their paywalls and offered their publications for free. (I shared one of my own articles in that category yesterday. The irony, as my colleague, UVM dean of libraries Bryn Geffert, points out, is that right-wing disinformation tanks that have long flooded the internet with their free “studies,” while legit academics get paywalled into marginalization by their profit-seeking publishers.)
Then there are popular magazines that have made their coronavirus coverage freely available. The Atlantic Monthly has had some excellent coverage, and Ed Yong’s “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing” is especially helpful in mapping out exactly what its title asks. The epistemological issues the pandemic has raised — about how science and medicine work, whom we should trust, what sorts of interests are at play, and why this issue is different from others — make it an important and valuable case study.
An article of mine by that title has appeared in a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture on “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene.” The article contains the theoretical core of the book I’m currently writing on image regimes. It builds on my work in cinema and media studies, philosophy and sociology of religion, and process-relational ontology. As such it packs a lot in, and I would welcome any feedback on it (by email or comments below). As the book won’t be finished for a while, this piece is a good reflection of one of my current research directions.
I’ve been posting short pieces all this week in connection with EcoCultureLab‘s EarthDay+50 events, which include talks and a student arts exhibition. You can read the posts here:
I dreamt that Leonard Cohen appeared by my bedside. He smiled and reassured me that things will be alright: “They will all have been beautiful in the end.” I wanted to ask him something, but wasn’t sure what. Then he was gone.
The radio (it was Radio Moskva, from back when I spent a fall in Kyïv in late Soviet days, with the radio wired directly into the communal apartments so that all you could do was turn it down or let it play) announced that the Catholic Church had recognized him as a saint, and I imagined him and Pope Francis talking in a bar together, or strolling across a golf course in heaven. Saint Leonard of Westmount, the headlines said.
They were building a temple for him outside Kyïv and pilgrims were starting to filter into the city. There was a rumor that Irving Layton was arriving by train. I tried to get to the station, but the (super-long) metro escalators were all tangled and people were reporting flooding on the tracks below. We all had to walk. The botanical gardens were in full bloom and I thought I heard the Vydubychi monastery bells ringing.
Part Two of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene (open access to all) outlines a system of “bodymindfulness” practice rooted in the mindfulness meditation system of Shinzen Young, but extended triadically to account for the active nature of living. Here are a couple of comments on and tweaks to that system, which I’ll refer to as pre-G practice, short for “process-relational ecosophy-G” practice.(Note: This is my post for Orthodox/Byzantine Good Friday… Now I will go listen to my favorite Vespers, Michael Fortounatto’s on Ikon Records (IKO 9), which I am still awaiting the digital release of. Someone please convince Musica Russica to do that.)
On sitting
Sitting practice is generally thought to be something like the baseline, the exemplar, and perhaps the “gold standard” of meditation practice. Pre-G practice resists that notion.
With New Yorkers forced to stay home, and arts organizations getting creative in how they are making available their offerings, The New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section has suddenly become more relevant to the rest of us, whose visits to the city were previously so infrequent as to make reading it a form of masochistic eavesdropping.
But with NYC now the epicenter of coronavirus, it’s the “Talk of the Town” section that’s become the pulse of life for the rest of us too, especially David Remnick’s reports from whatever-story apartment he lives in. (I used to think New Yorkers lived “out of” their apartments, but now that’s not exactly the case.)
(Update: The magazine’s “Dispatches from a Pandemic” tag collects the many wonderful, heartfelt, depressing, insightful, and entertaining-despite-it-all musings from their city-dwelling writers.)
To those environmentalists among us (who include both ecomodernists and ecocentrists) who look favorably upon the way New Yorkers (and Hong Kongers and others) have devised eco-efficient ways to live on top of each other so as to unintentionally free up chunks of the rest of the world for wildlife to recover, NYC has become all the more the world’s downtown.
And so we wonder what will happen to downtowns in a pandemic-laden world. If we are to give wildlife the space that it needs — and that will protect us from its viruses and other risks — by moving into higher-density living arrangements, won’t that also put us at risk of becoming tinderboxes for the viruses that do get released from the grips of any such socio-natural “contract“?
It’s wonderful to see that process-relational theory is getting noticed in the study of social-ecological systems. A new article in Ecology and Society, Garcia et al’s “Adopting process-relational perspectives to tackle the challenges of social-ecological systems research,” argues that a process-relational perspective, “which focuses on nonequilibrium dynamics and relations between processes,” can help the field of social-ecological systems research (SES) overcome several challenges that currently face it. These challenges include the integration of the social and the ecological, the understanding of complex interactions and dynamics, issues of scale, and the integration of different knowledge systems.
From my perspective, the article provides a useful overview of these challenges and of the responses that a process-relational paradigm offers them. But it spends less time than it could defining key terms and, as a result, leaves room for some clarification of concepts, which I’ll try to do here.
I have many friends who are despairing that, with Bernie Sanders’s exit from the presidential race, the United States has lost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to elect a leader who is honest, reliable, and completely untethered to the vested interests that keep our whole system careening towards catastrophe (climate change, ecological collapse, mass extinction, out-of-control AI, an authoritarian global security state, and the inequities that breed the conflicts and terrorisms that engender wars both conventional and nuclear, chemical, biological, and cybernetic — we haven’t seen anything yet, folks). Bernie’s style was not for everyone, granted, but Joe Biden seems like yet another DNC loser to these people (I share their skepticism), promoting a “back to normal” that is neither realistic nor convincing in the face of these challenges.
The illiberal right knows all these things and knows how to win elections in their midst: by stoking the fears of disasters to come (real or unreal), they know their followers will see no way out except through building border walls and shutting the floodgates. In the short term they will likely continue winning.
A series of live, short (under 3 minutes), and creative responses to the intersection of coronavirus and climate change, 50 years after Earth Day and 50 years before Ecotopia Day (EarthDay+100).
