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.”
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Alfred North Whitehead, genius loci, Greensboro VT, place and philosophy, Process and Reality, Vermont, Whitehead | 2 Comments »
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
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 »
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.
Posted in Academe, Anthropocene, Eco-theory | Tagged academic initiatives, conferences, eco-arts, eco-humanities, engaged scholarship, environmental humanities | 4 Comments »
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.)
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 »
While I’ve done no formal surveys, my best guess is that about half my students here at the U of Vermont (at least those in Environmental Studies) would fit into the category of “religiously unaffiliated,” the so-called “religious Nones” — a category that now makes up almost 1 in 4 Americans and over a third of those under 25.
Many, though not all, of my students resonate with the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” If they were offered the option, I suspect they would subscribe to what Elizabeth Drescher calls “spiritual cosmopolitanism.”
Drescher writes:
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged Bron Taylor, cosmopolitanism, dark green religion, Foucault, mestizo, non-fascist life, polytropism, religion, religious Nones, spirituality, tuteishyi | 4 Comments »
With reality like this, who needs fiction?
It’s from Fort McMurray, last week. Harrowing.
While the impact of such images is undeniable, the debate over whether and how they are related to climate change is a debate the rest of us should not shy away from. Continue Reading »
Posted in Climate change, Visual culture | Tagged Anthropocene, climate denialism, climate science, environmental communication, fact, Latour, mediation, rhetoric, science studies | 7 Comments »
McKenzie Wark has written a very provocative piece on the geopolitics of the Anthropocene, or what he calls “The Geopolitics of Hibernation.”
A quote: Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics | Tagged Anthropocene, geopolitics, refugee crisis, Wark | 2 Comments »
I’ll be giving this talk at the University of Kansas on Thursday. It’ll be exactly two days after the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. And 16 days before the 30th anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech about the accident. Pravda (Truth) first reported in any detail on the accident on May 6 and 7.
The future of the Soviet Union hinged on that 18 day period between the accident and the Politburo’s admissions about it. If there was a single event that precipitated the USSR’s unraveling, it was the Chernobyl accident. Without the accident, its aftermath — Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged Anthropocene, anti-nuclear movement, biopolitics, Chernobyl, Cold War, nuclear power, Stalker, Tarkovsky, Ukraine, USSR | 4 Comments »
I’ve been using the metaphor of the Sustainability Bottleneck in my teaching, but another one that is more immediately graspable is The Bubble.
Two things landed in my in-box this morning that testify to this (but that’s a pretty daily occurrence, e.g., see this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, all from the past week). One of these is a New York Times op-ed by a meteoreological business guy, called “A New Dark Age Looms.” The second is an interesting piece by Australian eco-anarchist farmer Glenn Albrecht called “Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene” (which originally appeared on his blog in December).
Where they concur is that, as scientists have been increasingly predicting, we can expect a Coming Unraveling — an unraveling of the “established patterns and regularity of Holocene phenology” of the past 12,000 years, followed by a “new abnormal” in which
Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged Anthropocene, bubbleology, climate science, dark age, metaphors, sustainability bottleneck, Symbiocene | 6 Comments »
At long last, Shane Denson’s and Julia Leyda’s anthology Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film has come out in Catherine Grant’s Reframe Books open-access series.
This mammoth anthology features some of the leading theorists of our cinematic/media moment including Lev Manovich, Steven Shaviro, Richard Grusin, Vivian Sobchack, Francesco Casetti, Patricia Pisters, Mark Hansen, and many others. It includes an entire section on “Ecologies of Post-Cinema” (which includes my chapter on cinema “in & beyond the Capitalocene”), as well as several rich dialogues on digital and post-cinematic politics.
Posted in Cinema | Tagged digital culture, ecocinema, ecomedia, post-cinema | 6 Comments »
Some books I’ve recently received and/or am currently reading… If you’d like to review any of them for this blog, let me know. And if there are others published in the last year that should be on this list, let me know that too (in the comments).
Posted in Academe | Tagged books, readings | 2 Comments »
