I’ve written about ethical witnessing before — both in the eco-trauma chapter of Ecologies of the Moving Image and in my reflections on Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. Seeing Serhii Loznitsa‘s latest film, Austerlitz, at Kyiv’s Molodist Film Festival a few days ago, prompted me to think some more about how a seemingly neutral camera, viewing the world but not commenting on it, can enable such a witnessing. (The film’s title is an oblique reference to the W. G. Sebald novel of the same name; there is no mention of the book in the film.)
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture | Tagged Auschwitz, Austerlitz, concentration camps, death camps, documentary, eco-trauma, ethical witnessing, Holocaust, Holocaust tourism, Serhii Loznitsa, tourism, Ukrainian cinema, W. G. Sebald | 3 Comments »
Since my review of urban geographer Roman Cybriwsky’s excellent book on Kyїv, Ukraine, has not been published yet by the journal I wrote it for, though a second edition has already come out, and since I’ll be visiting the city in a couple of days, I thought I might as well share that review, here.
(I’ll be giving a talk on Chernobyl and the Anthropocenic sublime at the Visual Culture Research Center on Oct. 25, and another, on the environmental humanities and the Anthropocene, at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University this coming Friday.)
Given what has happened in the city over the two years since the book first came out, Continue Reading »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Chernobyl, Kiev, Kyiv, Slavic, Ukraine | 2 Comments »
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 »
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:
Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged Anthropocene, Chernobyl, sublime | 6 Comments »
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 »
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 »
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.
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged Bookchin, Damian White, eco-anarchism, Janet Biehl, Kurdish revolutionary movement, libertarian municipalism, Murray Bookchin, Rojava | 5 Comments »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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