September 30, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
It gives me pleasure to share the news that I’ve been named the Steven Rubenstein Professor for Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. The position provides some teaching release and a budget enabling me to work on my proposed project of developing a new center for eco-arts, media, and culture (or something of the sort), to be based here at the university.
While it’s an outgrowth of things we have been doing for a while here (such as the recent Sixth Extinction Howl), the center is a few years away, and its ultimate form will be dependent on various contingencies. But I take the committee’s decision as welcome recognition that the arts and humanities are — and ought to be — central to environmental scholarship and action today. Those of us in the environmental humanities have long argued that, but its recognition in a school of “environment and natural resources” is unusual.
There’s irony in that term “natural resources” for me. Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe | Tagged John Livingston, Neil Evernden, personal, resourcism | 21 Comments »
August 25, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I recently found myself in a part of Mississauga, Ontario (a bedroom community of Toronto), in which more than 90% of the visible landscape (excepting the sky) appeared to consist of concrete, in the form of pavement, asphalt, buildings, and such. The remaining 5-10% — rows of evenly spaced short trees, shrubs, a few patches of mowed lawn, and windows — looked like one could easily peel them off to reveal the concrete beneath them.
It had been a while since I’d found myself in such a scene, so there was some aesthetic and emotional revulsion to the experience. But what it reminded me of is that our entire social and technological order — from buildings and infrastructure to art forms, values, and religious and family planning practices (or lack thereof) — needs to be reinvented from the ground up so as to accommodate ecological principles. And very soon. Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics | Tagged Anthropocene, Bill McKibben, Blockadia, climate communication, ecology as war, ecopolitics, environmental communication, green left, metaphor, New Republic, North Dakota, pipeline protests, Politics | 5 Comments »
July 30, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I’ll be giving the following talk at the “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene” workshop at the National University of Singapore this coming week.
Navigating the Zone of Alienation: Chernobyl and the Anthropocenic Sublime
Abstract:
Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged Anthropocene, Chernobyl, sublime | 6 Comments »
July 23, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Lexington’s Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series just got its own catalogue, which tells us the series is doing well.
As is Wilfrid Laurier’s Environmental Humanities series, Routledge’s series of the same, Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures, and others in the same vein. I can hardly keep up.
Note: The original post included an incorrect link to the Lexington series. That has been corrected.
Posted in Academe | Tagged book series, Ecocritical Theory and Practice, environmental humanities | 26 Comments »
July 18, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Today is World Listening Day, a global event held annually to
- Celebrate the listening practices of the world and the ecology of its acoustic environments;
- Raise awareness about the growing number of individual and group efforts that creatively explore Acoustic Ecology based on the pioneering efforts of the World Soundscape Project, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, La Semaine du Son, Deep Listening Institute, among many others;
- Design and implement educational initiatives that explore these concepts and practices.
This year’s theme is “Sounds Lost and Found.” Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape | Tagged acoustic ecology, ecomusicology, global hum, soundscape, soundscape ecology, World Listening Day | 3 Comments »
July 12, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Damian White has posted an excellent review of Janet Biehl’s book Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin at the Jacobin blog. Bookchin’s legacy has undergone something of a revival of late thanks to the efforts of Kurdish eco-socialist communitarians in Rojava.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged Bookchin, Damian White, eco-anarchism, Janet Biehl, Kurdish revolutionary movement, libertarian municipalism, Murray Bookchin, Rojava | 5 Comments »
July 6, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
This post follows up on my previous note about Alfred North Whitehead’s time spent in Greensboro, Vermont. It was updated on July 7, 2016, thanks to information obtained from the Mitchells’ descendants.
I have found out where the Whiteheads stayed when he was writing his philosophical magnum opus, Process and Reality. It was in a two-story cottage owned by economist Wesley Clare Mitchell and progressive educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell. The cottage Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Alfred North Whitehead, Greensboro, Greensboro VT, place and philosophy, Process and Reality, Vermont, Whitehead | 3 Comments »
June 29, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
This post builds on the previous one on the state of the eco-humanities. Here I focus on the substantive elements for narratives adequate to the Anthropocene.
One of the challenges of our time is to learn to tell an adequate story of humanity’s current predicament.
Next spring’s Stories for the Anthropocene Festival in Stockholm aims to deal with this challenge. Numerous books and statements, from Bill McKibben’s Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet to Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene to Ian Angus’s about-to-be-released Facing the Anthropocene to the Breakthrough Institute’s Ecomodernist Manifesto (and its critiques), vie for the right mix of pessimism and optimism, technical realism and motivating vision. These latter-day efforts add to existing “big story” narratives, like David Christian’s “Big History” and Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme’s “universe story” (see here for a discussion of their limitations), injecting urgency from recent science into the mix.
My own sense is that there are at least three key elements that should be part of any such narrative: Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change | Tagged Anthropocene, Big History, Bill McKibben, climate science, ecomodernism, environmental humanities, greenhouse, humanity, icehouse, metanarrative, narrative, Roy Scranton, Thomas Berry | 11 Comments »
June 20, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I was astounded to read the following passage as I sat in a cottage on the shore of Caspian Lake in Greenboro, Vermont, earlier today:
“Work on ‘The Concept of Organism’ began with the summer of 1927, which the Whiteheads spent in a cottage on the shore of Caspian Lake, in Greensboro, Vermont. It was there that Whitehead’s metaphysical system was created and his magnum opus, later named Process and Reality, was shaped.”
Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Alfred North Whitehead, genius loci, Greensboro VT, place and philosophy, Process and Reality, Vermont, Whitehead | 2 Comments »
June 15, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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
Continue Reading »
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 | Leave a Comment »
June 8, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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, so I will use those two interchangeably in what follows. The abbreviation “EH” works for both. I’ll leave open the question of whether the Eco-Arts deserve more explicit recognition, as in “Eco-Arts and Humanities” or “EAH,” or if they are a separate entity. I’ll also leave aside the fact that one could say all the same things about “Anthropocene scholarship” — which is even more interdisciplinary in its roots and scope.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Anthropocene, Eco-theory | Tagged academic initiatives, conferences, eco-arts, eco-humanities, engaged scholarship, environmental humanities | 4 Comments »
May 31, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Interviews are funny things: you have to think on the spot, but later realize how deeply and profoundly imperfect (!) was your choice of words.
The Imperfect Buddha Podcast has an interview with me in which host Matthew O’Connor (of Post-Traditional Buddhism) and I talk at length about Buddhism, process-relational metaphysics, panpsychism, social constructionism, cognitive science, meditation (including process-relational analytic meditation, but much later than when he asks me about it), emptiness, subjectivity, Dzogchen, enlightenment, and ecological crisis, plus a host of thinkers from Whitehead and Peirce to Naess, Guattari, Harman, Zizek, Lacan, and meditation teacher Shinzen Young.
Writing, on the other hand, allows for the kind of reflective consideration of one’s words that I’m more accustomed to. The Pomegranate, a peer-reviewed journal of Pagan studies, has published a special issue incorporating autobiographies of some scholarly leaders within that field, and it turns out that I qualify among them. (I’ve been on the editorial board of the journal for many years.)
Continue Reading »
Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, autobiography, Buddhism, Dzogchen, interviews, Lacan, meditation, pagan studies, paganism, Peirce, post-traditional Buddhism, religion, Shinzen Young, spirituality, Whitehead, Zizek | 4 Comments »
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