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 | Comments Off on The I=PAT of mass murder, and its antithesis — joy
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 »
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