It’s not surprising that the Trump administration would wish to bury the nearly 1700-page Fourth National Climate Asessment, Volume 2: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States, a report written by over 300 scientists representing 13 federal agencies, by having it released on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when most Americans are too […]
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Heads in the sands
Posted in Climate change, Politics, tagged Fourth National Climate Assessment, National Climate Assessment, NCA, reports, United Statesm Trump administration on November 25, 2018 | 1 Comment »
Koinocene (or Cœnocene)?
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene, C. S. Peirce, categories, Christianithy, commons, Cœnocene, geological designations, geology, Holocene, kainos, koinocene, koinos, Peirce, Pleistocene on November 7, 2018 | 2 Comments »
Peircian thinker Gary Fuhrman has posted an interesting piece on the naming of the Anthropocene, entitled Holocenoscopy. Noting that the word Holocene means nothing more than “entirely recent,” as opposed to the Pleistocene, which means “most recent,” so there’s really nowhere left to go with naming geological periods after their recentness, Fuhrman suggests we look to another […]
Welcome to the… Meghalayan?
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene, Anthropocene Working Group, controversies, geology, geosemiosis, Holocene, Meghalayan Age, semiotic Earth, stratigraphy on August 12, 2018 | 8 Comments »
Geology watchers were more than a little surprised last month to learn that we are living in a new age called the Meghalayan, which apparently began about 4200 years ago. After all the excitement over the Anthropocene, it seems that a rival group of geological stratigraphers — one tasked with naming the sub-parts of the Holocene — has […]
Skipping an Earthbeat
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Science & society, tagged Aaron Wildavsky, Anthropocene, Bill McGuire, dynamic earth, Earthbeat, earthquakes, environmentalism, fragile Earth, Gaia, geology, Mary Douglas, risk as culture, volcanoes on June 15, 2018 | 4 Comments »
Reading Bill McGuire‘s 2012 book Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes, I came across this description of the annual “pulse” called an “Earthbeat,” which is supposedly responsible for Earth’s preference for volcanic eruptions between November and April (also known as “volcano season”): rather like a beating heart, the Earth changes […]
The I=PAT of mass murder, and its antithesis — joy
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged anti-liberalism, Bill Chaloupka, ClimateJustice, Dugin, fundamentalism, global solidarity movement, green left, I=PAT, LGBTQ, liberalism, movement of movements, Naomi Klein, Omar Mateen, Orlando shootings, war and peace on June 15, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
Just as I=PAT serves as a handy, if problematic, formula for thinking about the causes of environmental impact, so I think there is a similar formula underlying tragedies like the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. It goes something like this: Hate + Technology + Distress = Carnage/Chaos
State of the Eco-Humanities, Take 1
Posted in Academe, Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged academic initiatives, conferences, eco-arts, eco-humanities, engaged scholarship, environmental humanities on June 8, 2016 | 4 Comments »
This post is the first of a series of reflections on the state of the Environmental Humanities, or Eco-Humanities, and of where this interdisciplinary field might be headed. A note on terminology: The term “Environmental Humanities” has caught on in ways that “Eco-Humanities” and other variations have not, but the debate between them has hardly occurred, […]
Post-Paris thoughts: The beginning of the end?
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics, tagged carbon capitalism, ClimateJustice, COP21, fossil fuel era, international agreements, Paris climate summit on December 13, 2015 | 7 Comments »
The Paris climate talks were successful in that they resulted in an agreement that is both better than nothing and better than most of us expected. They were a failure in that even if they are followed to the letter — and there’s no provision for enforcing whether anyone follows them or not — they would […]
Wark on Moore’s Capitalocene
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged Anthropocene, capitalism, capitalocene, Jason Moore, Mackenzie Wark, Peirce on November 6, 2015 | 5 Comments »
McKenzie Wark gets at some very important issues in what we might call “the ontology of the Anthropocene” in this review of Jason Moore’s book Capitalism in the Web of Life. Moore’s work, as he acknowledges (and as I have argued here before), provides an important contribution to rethinking the relations between humanity, the nonhuman world, and […]