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Hiring…

December 11, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Note: This is an updated version of a previously posted notice.

Our Environmental Studies program has announced a cluster hire — a search for three new tenure-track professors, at multiple levels from Assistant Professor to Program Director, under the overall umbrella of “Sustainability Studies and Global Environmental Equity.”

Details on the cluster hire can be read here. Details on the Program Director position can be found here. A list of potential courses to be taught by the new faculty can be found here. And here is a list of members of the search committee (we value transparency).

For full consideration, applications should be received by January 5.

The program web site is here. These three positions are being hosted by the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. (The Environmental Program is a cross-college, interdisciplinary environmental studies program, but it is administered through the Rubenstein School.)

Posted in Academe | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

Notes from Underground (ASLE) CFP

November 12, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The deadline for proposals to next year’s Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference — arguably the largest and leading ecocritical conference in the world — is coming up in a few weeks.

The conference theme is “Notes from Underground: The Depths of Environmental Arts, Culture and Justice.” Keynotes will include Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Linda Hogan, and a host of others.

Details below and here.

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How to stop a pipeline

November 8, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

More information here and here.

Not all Wet’suwet’en agree. See here and the video here.

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GMO debate: New Yorker vs. Vandana Shiva

November 3, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

With its passage of Act 120 this past June, Vermont became the first U.S. state to require mandatory labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). (This followed Connecticut’s and Maine’s decisions to require it once adjacent states do.) Since then, GMO food manufacturers have announced they will challenge that decision in court. Meanwhile, critics of GMOs have come under fire from some surprising places.

Vandana Shiva is probably the best known critic of genetically modified foods. The prominent environmentalist, who was critiqued in an August article by Michael Specter in the New Yorker, spoke here (in Burlington, Vermont) over the weekend.

For those interested in following the debate that’s followed Specter’s article, I’ve compiled the main sources on it below.

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Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The semio-ethics of Coke’s polar bear mascots

October 16, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

A journalist asked me to say something about the use of animal mascots for commercial purposes. In an email, she wrote:

“What does a brand owe an animal mascot, especially one at risk? For instance, polar bears face rapid habitat loss, yet Coke has only donated $2 million to the WWF for conservation efforts. There’s also Kellogg’s Tiger, or Tony the Tiger, yet there are only 3,200 tigers left in the wild.”

Here are my thoughts.

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Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Upcoming: ecomusics, climate change culture, etc.

September 30, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I am about to travel to Asheville, North Carolina, for the Ecomusics and Ecomusicologies conference, to be held from Thursday through Monday at the University of North Carolina Asheville. The international conference, which has become an annual event (it met previously in Brisbane, Australia, and in New Orleans), brings together theorists and researchers with performers and practitioners. Panels on topics including “musical collaboration, improvisation, green industry practices, acoustic ecology, ecopoetics, soundscapes, sustainability, contemporary composition, musical activism and other fields” will be complemented by concerts, performances, and sound installations. Details can be found here.

In the meantime, several other things in my In-Box deserve sharing:

Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Climate movement

September 22, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

As I write, Bill McKibben is being interviewed left and right, Tom Ashbrook is interviewing Naomi Klein and pushing her to outline a vision that isn’t capitalism-as-we-know-it, Time magazine is saying this could be the largest march of its kind — which raises the question of what kind it is — and the People’s Climate March is propelling reactions by politicians, oil tycoon heirs, churches and academic organizations, and others in advance of the UN Climate Summit.

The questions now are:

  • What is this movement (of movements) that is taking shape, and how will it grow? Is it the Climate Justice movement, or the People’s Climate movement, or something else? Or will it just be branded as environmentalism redux, with all the attendant limitations of that terminology and tradition?
  • Will the centrality of social justice concerns and its critique of neoliberal capitalism get diluted as the movement goes mainstream (if it does that)?
  • Will it build the momentum that’s needed to spill over into effectiveness the way environmentalism did 40-some years ago, launching a decade of legislation that helped respond to the most serious ecological problems of the time?
  • Will it become truly global, not just in its inclusion of solidarity events in 166 countries, but in activating and effectively politicizing the billions of people whose future is at stake as deregulated carbon capitalism pushes us all off a global climate cliff?

Time to watch, act, think and rethink, define our terms carefully, and shape the images that will motivate change.

More images here.

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Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments »

Apocalypse mashup

September 18, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This week’s theme in my “Environmental Literature, Arts, & Media” class is apocalyptic rhetoric. (I’m loosely following Greg Garrard’s list of tropes in Ecocriticism, but adding, amplifying, and amending to be more artistically inclusive.)

Because it’s a fun topic (and deadly serious, too), I thought I’d post a few of the videos we’ve been watching and discussing.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

Busy being born…

September 17, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

When humans look back on our time from the next era, they might see this weekend’s People’s Climate March as a key event in the movement that led to the next era.

The alternative is a little scarier: it’s that there will be no next era, or at least no humans looking back from it.

I’m afraid this is one of those times when, as Bob Dylan once put it, “he not busy being born is busy dying.”

For further information, see http://peoplesclimate.org/. Here’s the lineup. And some viewing, for those who need more information: http://watchdisruption.com/

pcm-route-lineup-v6

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

EMI on Enviro Humanities Book Chat

September 15, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The third edition of the Environmental Humanities Book Chat features a discussion of my Ecologies of the Moving Image. Discussants include the Royal Institute of Technology’s Anna Åberg, organizer of the “Tales from Planet Earth” film festival and conference, Seth Peabody of Harvard University (and a Rachel Carson Center fellow), and moderator Hannes Bergthaller of National Chung-Hsing University (Taiwan) and Würzburg University (and EASLCE Past President).

 

 

Further details about the discussants can be read at the YouTube site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU4LVa39ZlI

 

Posted in Cinema | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

The challenge

September 13, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The closing panel of this conference featured Winona LaDuke, Tim Ingold, Bron Taylor, environmental epidemiologist Colin Soskolne (who convened the preceding panel on public and environmental health regimes), and myself. We were each asked to provide five minutes of summary comments on the big issues of our concern (related to the conference). The following were the notes I prepared.

We all have issues to concern ourselves with — individual, local, community, regional, national, and global issues — and I don’t want to be the one to tell people that their issues are less important than a global issue defined by a distant group of scientists. They are not. But in some sense, it’s precisely such an issue — climate change and its associated social and ecological disruptions (biodiversity loss, massive social dislocation, and so on) — that is the one that we all face in our near future, and that will serve as a globally unifying issue for decades to come.

The challenge is for those of us who are aware of this to articulate a coherent and enabling, not disabling, understanding of it: a vision of what we can do — politically, economically, technologically, culturally, and spiritually — to deal with it. This involves three things:

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Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Winona LaDuke at UWS3

September 12, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Winona LaDuke’s talk (at Under Western Skies 3) was, as always, powerful and empowering. Here are some quoteworthy lines from it.

“I’ve lived my entire life in the fossil fuel era. I’d like a graceful exit out of it.”

“I want to be able to walk out of my teepee into a Tesla.”

Continue Reading »

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