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 »
The American Anthropological Association’s publication yesterday of guidelines on public scholarship marks a significant advance in the recognition of public scholarship within academe.
Anthropology may have good reasons to be in the forefront with this, but it is not the only field in which public scholarship and community engagement are valued and recognized. Numerous efforts have been made toward this end, particularly in the field of community engaged research, which is arguably more advanced in gaining recognition in the tenure and promotion process than the kinds of public outreach referred to in the AAA’s guidelines.
Some useful resources for publicly engaged scholars include Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe | Tagged AAA, academia, community engagement, engaged research, engaged scholarship, public outreach, public scholarship, tenure and promotion | 9 Comments »
May Day (Beltane, Walpurga’s Day, et al.) is a good time for reflecting on politics, ecology, and possibility. The following can be considered part of a series on this blog.
When neoliberalism is understood as the alliance between economic liberalization and social liberalization — that is, between those who would “liberate” capitalist markets (who sometimes get called fiscal conservatives, but who are always economic globalists) and those who would liberate us, individually, from the rigidity of communal social norms — then it becomes understandable why the primary popular alternative on offer today is the kind of “populism” that would defend “traditional” social values while claiming (even if mostly just pretending) to also want to reign in market forces. Thus the popularity of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, and their ilk.
The left’s decline is due in no small part to Continue Reading »
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics | Tagged Beltane, green movement, green politics, labor, labour, left, May Day, neoliberalism, revolution, revolutions, right livelihood, Walpurgis Day, Walpurgisnacht | 4 Comments »
Paul Kingsnorth’s “The Lie of the Land: Does Environmentalism Have a Future in the Age of Trump?“, published in last Saturday’s Guardian, has elicited some interesting responses, for interesting reasons.
Kingsnorth is a well known novelist and environmental public intellectual, a back-to-the-land “dark ecologist,” former deputy-editor of The Ecologist (which for decades played an indispensible, if politically ambiguous, role in global environmentalism), and co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project. The article includes a public admission of his pro-Brexit stance.
Some of the reactions I’ve seen to it are typified by novelist Warren Ellis’s “Poisonous Little England” rejoinder, where Ellis equates Kingsnorth’s eco-localism with a
“creepy Heideggerian dasein that… actually means being in a familiar landscape surrounded by lovely white people with no connection to the wider culture, preferring localism over multiculturalism and not being disturbed in your eternal idyll in the black forest (or on the dark mountain) by any of those nasty foreign types.”
Whoa. Let’s start from the beginning.
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory | Tagged eco-justice, eco-nationalism, ecofascism, globalism, globalization, Heidegger, localism, Paul Kingsnorth | 8 Comments »
Not that this blog has been very active recently, but with Inauguration Day upon us, a little reflection on our situation seems warranted…
So, here’s where I see us.
If a Clinton-led Democratic administration would have brought to power a coalition of neoliberal plutocrats and social and environmental progressives (with the balance probably tilting towards the former group), a Trump administration is bringing us a coalition of neoliberal plutocrats, right-wing populists (like Trump himself), and social and environmental radical regressives, with the balance leaning towards the latter group. Those who fail to see the difference are a good part of the reason for how we got here.
Posted in Politics | Tagged Aleksandar Hemon, catastrophe, CIA, classified documents, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, hope, Inauguration Day, ontological destruction, Politics, William Connolly, X-Files | 12 Comments »
Here’s the abstract I’ve just sent in for the keynote I’ll be giving at the Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource conference in Oslo in February:
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged Anthropocene, Chernobyl, democracy, ecopolitics, Reassembling Democracy conference, sacrifice zones, zones of alienation | 8 Comments »
Three things have drawn me repeatedly to the red rock landscape around the small north-central Arizona city of Sedona.
First, and most obvious, is the landscape itself, which counts among the most distinctive and stunningly beautiful in the world. Second is the set of processes that landscape has set in motion in the conditions of late capitalist modernity — specifically, these include the recreational and spiritual impulse among those who visit it, with earth- or land-based spirituality being a crucial part of that; the voracious appetite of the tourism and real estate industries, which have dominated politics in the city for decades; and the various conflicts these have set the town up for. It is this concatenation of forces that were the primary focus of my book Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (and see update here).
Posted in Eco-culture, Science & society, Spirit matter | Tagged Arizona, Claiming Sacred Ground, Coconino National Forest, eco-pilgrimage, ecological management, environmental management, heterotopia, landscape, National Forests, political ecology, Red Rock Country, sacred landscapes, Sedona, Sedona Verde Valley Red Rock National Monument, U. S. Forest Service, vortexes, vortices | 1 Comment »
