Here I go wading into a type of debate this blog does not often venture into: the debate surrounding Google employee James Damore’s firing for his ‘Ideological Echo Chamber’ manifesto. I find this to be a complicated and interesting conversation, and I’m curious to know how my thoughts align with others.
I recently visited Detroit (for the ASLE “Rust/Resistance” conference) and was interested in seeing how it’s changed since I wrote this (brief) piece. Given how little time I spent there, my impressions aren’t worth much, but here they are.
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged anarchism, car culture, cities, collapse of western civilization, decline of western civilization, Detroit, eco-anarchism, Motor City, regeneration, urban agriculture, urban apocalypse | 5 Comments »
As part of its Ford Foundation supported Inequality Project, The Guardian is providing a provocative glimpse of Oxford geographer Danny Dorling’s important research into inequality and the environment. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the complexities surrounding causes and potential solutions to the environmental crisis. Read the article here.
No surprise that the US comes out worst on practically all counts — worst levels of inequality, worst levels of overconsumption, waste, and per capita carbon emission. Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged causes of environmental crisis, Danny Dorling, economics, environmental crisis, environmental economics, equality, global justice, inequality, neoliberalism | 18 Comments »
My book Ecologies of the Moving Image provides some suggestions into how we can become better consumers and co-producers of media. But these suggestions come couched within a 400-page treatise of media (and environmental) philosophy that includes a history of cinema, analyses of various films, and much else. While the focus there is on cinema and on the cultivation of habits that could help make us better viewers of it, the arguments apply to all visual media.
Here I want to try to isolate a couple of practical pointers into “media hygiene” for our densely mediated world. But first, some off-the-cuff rules for “social media hygiene” (mostly to do with clickbait, and not about teen sexting practices or anything like that). This is an evolving list, so feel free to suggest others.
Posted in Media ecology | Tagged clickbait, digital culture, Ecologies of the Moving Image, fake news, filter bubbles, information war, media, media ecology, media hygiene, media theory, mediasphere, social media | 6 Comments »
When one of our cadre of eco-cultural theorists gets noticed — more so, fêted — by one of the leading newspapers in the world, we need to take note and celebrate with him. In this case, it’s Timothy Morton getting called “the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene” by The Guardian, in a profile titled “A reckoning for our species.”
With his dozen or so books (at least half of them monographs), Tim has been incredibly prolific as an eco-critic, literary historian of Romanticism, and theorist of the ecological crisis. Long-time readers of this blog will know my critical engagements with the OOO orientation Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Anthropocene, cultural theory, ecocriticism, Guardian, Morton, OOO, Timothy Morton | 2 Comments »
Trump’s speech on his decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord included so many questionable statements, it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, others have. Among the better fact-checks are the Washington Post’s (this one and this one), FactCheck.org’s, NPR’s, PolitiFact’s, and the Huffington Post’s.
Foreign Policy’s summary (which comes from a partisan source, but is mostly non-controversial) in Why Abandoning Paris is a Disaster for America captures the essential implications of Trump’s decision very well in these 5 points: Continue Reading »
Posted in Climate change, Politics | Tagged Nicaragua, Paris climate accord, Trump, U.S. politics | 2 Comments »
Since it’s the Holocene that has provided the conditions for the (human-led) biogeochemical experimentation that has now likely achieved a runaway state, and since “Holocene” was never anything other than a placeholder term — it only means “entirely new” — it seems inappopriate to replace it with the term “Anthropocene.”
“Holocene” begins as a leap of faith — that this interglacial may somehow be different from previous Pleistocene interglacials. Until the evidence for that becomes conclusive — that is, until planetary systems settle into a new and different holding pattern — we should just call our era the “Late Holocene” and leave it at that (i.e., ambiguous). We have no idea how it will end or what will follow; we only know it’s likely to be short. The dream of human sustainability is still mostly science-fiction. (Even if indigenous cultures have shown it’s not entirely unimaginable.)
All that said, “Anthropocene” is a good conversation starter. We’ll need a new one in a few years. (Perhaps something more apocalyptic.)
Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged Anthropocene, geochronology, Holocene, interglacial, Late Holocene | 8 Comments »
In the parallel universe where good news remains possible…
A team or 70 researchers from 22 countries and led by Paul Hawken has produced a very interesting analysis of potential climate change solutions. The analysis, released last month as a book called Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, “maps, measures, models, and describes the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming.” Continue Reading »
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture | Tagged agency, climate solutions, Paul Hawken | 3 Comments »
The recent social media meme listing 10 concerts people have attended accompanied by one they didn’t (“find the lie!”) has incited me to complete a list that started out as a “50th anniversary of the concept album” brainstorm over drinks one night last year. The question here is a little different: What are the most formative and significant albums of the album era? Continue Reading »
Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged aesthetics, album era, best albums, Bitches Brew, Bob Dylan, Can, Captain Beefheart, ecocritique, ecomusicology, Eno and Byrne, Funkadelic, Henry Cow, Incredible String Band, Magma, Miles Davis, music, musicology, process-relational thought, Radiohead, rock music, Talk Talk | 10 Comments »
I’m happy to see that The Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Knowledge in the Planetary Era, an anthology co-edited by Sam Mickey, Sean Kelly, and Adam Robbert, has finally been published by SUNY Press. It is, to my knowledge, the first scholarly anthology that both assesses the Integral Ecology developed by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman from Ken Wilber’s integral theory (examined in a series of posts and cross-blog discussions here) and, at the same time, proposes a wider set of reference points for the very idea of integral ecology (or ecologies, rather). The editors’ introduction is excellent and many of the chapters look very good. Congrats to the editors!
My own chapter is a development of a paper I had been invited to give at UC Davis’s Environments and Societies colloquium series. Much of it can be read at the book’s Google page. It’s also woven into the book I’m currently finishing up. More on that soon.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Integral Ecology, integral theory | 2 Comments »
While the French elections arguably offer little choice for those looking for radical eco-political options, there is a tendency to see in them — as in other recent political shifts — something that is altogether more negative than it need be.
Slavoj Zizek, for instance, argues that the choice between Macron and Le Pen is a “false choice” and that the reasonable thing to do is to abstain from it altogether. (Yanis Varoufakis provides a powerful response here.)
But the choice in these elections Continue Reading »
Posted in Politics | Tagged France, French elections, Le Pen, Macron, Melenchon, Sanders, Zizek | 3 Comments »
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