Vegetarianism has been part of my identity for the last 25 years (thanks to arguments like this one and this one), but I’ve been increasingly recognizing the term’s limits.
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged diets, food ethics, freeganism, locavorism, mammalism, mammals, veganism, vegetarianism | 24 Comments »
Posted in Visual culture | Tagged Bowie | 4 Comments »
This article has been revised since it was first posted. It consists of a list of useful sources providing ongoing coverage of, and initial post-conference reactions to, the COP21 conference and mobilizations in response to it. Please suggest any other helpful sources and links in the “Comments.” (Previously suggested links have been added and the comments removed.)
Originally published: Dec. 3. Last (& probably final) revision: Dec. 16
Posted in Climate change, Politics | Tagged 350.org, ClimateJustice, COP21, Paris climate summit, UN climate change conferences | 5 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 still likely result in changes to the world climate that will bring tremendous hardship to millions, possibly billions, of humans and countless other organisms.
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics | Tagged carbon capitalism, ClimateJustice, COP21, fossil fuel era, international agreements, Paris climate summit | 7 Comments »
Here’s how I would explain the concept of Climate Justice in four easy steps:
- The wealthiest 1% emit 2500 times more greenhouse gases than the poorest 1%.
- Those greenhouse gases are in the process of changing the Earth’s climate to render it uninhabitable for the kind of mix of human & nonhuman species that exists today.
- The poorest & most vulnerable will suffer the worst & the soonest from that change; many are feeling it already.
- This sucks & needs to be remedied.
A few years ago, the concept was largely unknown; a few years from now it will have become the reason for the next global revolution. Climb aboard now or run for your lives later.
This interview with climatologist Kevin Anderson gets at a few of the pieces.
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics | Tagged Anthropocene, carbon capitalism, ClimateJustice, environmental justice | 1 Comment »
Writing in The Independent, “Left accelerationists” Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek make the case that we need not bother protesting the Paris climate summit. There are better things to do than that.
They argue, first, that the negotiators won’t change anything under pressure, and probably won’t even notice that pressure coming from the streets. (Especially when street demonstrations are banned.) And second, they argue that the tactics, whether it is marches or gamified street actions, are ineffective — they may be fun photo-ops that make sense during earlier phases of a movement, but they are too little, too late, for climate change.
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged COP21, global climate change, Paris climate summit, protest, Srnicek and Williams | 2 Comments »
How connected are the recent Paris attacks with the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 21 (Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)?
At first glance, the targeting of Paris for ISIS’s act of war on civilian populations would seem to be motivated by other things: France’s role in the war in Syria, the high proportion of Muslims in France, challenges in integrating both immigrant and refugee populations, the symbolic resonance of the city itself, and so on.
A growing sentiment among climate change activists, led by Britain’s The Ecologist magazine, is the suspicion that the upcoming climate change conference may be more than just coincidentally related to last week’s events. ISIS, or Daesh (as critics are increasingly calling it), may have motivations that coincide with the protection of the oil industry that they, in fact, depend on. And the militaristic and security-obsessed response of France’s Hollande government would seem to play right into the objectives that ISIS may share with others in the fossil fuel industry.
Posted in Climate change, Politics | Tagged climate culture, Climate Games, ClimateJustice, Paris climate summit, terrorism, UN Climate Summit | 1 Comment »
Sometimes discussions in social media feel like the internal conversations of a person with severe multiple-personality disorder trying hard to give equal voice, or at least free rein, to their many voices. And I find I can agree with all or most of those voices; and at the same time disagree.
In a facebook debate over whether or not it’s okay to grieve more for Paris than for the victims of similar events in Beirut or elsewhere, someone wrote, “How much better off could the world be if we were not wired to respond more viscerally to that which is close and familiar to us, or could reprogram ourselves to feel equally for strangers, and places we’ve never been?”
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics | Tagged Beirut, fear, geopolitics, global civil religion, globality, hope, media, Paris, political left, terrorism | 1 Comment »
The beginning of COP 21, the UN Conference on Climate Change, is three weeks away. So what else is happening, you ask?
1) The Campaign Against Climate Change‘s Time to Act! campaign, 350.org, Reclaim Power, and various other formations are preparing actions around the world on the eve of the summit (November 28-29) and a huge demonstration in Paris on its last day, December 12.
2) The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, which had been responsible for some creative disruptions at the Copenhagen climate summit and whose previous involvements include instigating the Reclaim the Streets movement, have announced the creation of The Climate Games, a video game styled “Disobedient Action Adventure Game” to take place in the streets of Paris and around the world during the final days of the summit.
3) Adbusters, which had initiated the call that led to the Occupy Wall Street protests, have called for a Billion People March to take to the streets of the planet on December 19, a week after the conclusion of the conference.
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged Adbusters, Billion People March, Climate Games, ClimateJustice, COP 21, Paris climate summit | 2 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 the techno-economic formations (such as capitalism) that have mediated those relations. But for Wark, Moore’s dialectical approach goes too far in the direction of social construction, whilst retaining the basic binary of nature and society that Moore critiques as “Cartesian.”
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy | Tagged Anthropocene, capitalism, capitalocene, Jason Moore, Mackenzie Wark, Peirce | 5 Comments »
The following is something I wrote a while back that I have not had a chance to do anything with. I’m sharing it here simply because it will otherwise languish. It is a reflection on the political left and its failings in a changing global situation, a situation marked by inequality on a global scale, by increasing, if sometimes inchoate, demands for democracy — from the “color revolutions” of the post-Soviet world to the “Arab Spring” and beyond — and by a shift from a unipolar political economy to something more ambiguous and uncertain.
It is in part a reiteration of the argument against “economistic Marxism,” but it goes beyond that to articulate a revised vision of democracy that comes from the Peircian process-relational philosophy I have been developing on this blog (and in print). It is work in progress; comments are welcome.
Posted in Cultural politics, Manifestos & auguries, Politics | Tagged cultural left, global disorder, hegemony, leftism, political left | 1 Comment »
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