All the reviews I’ve seen so far are fairly detailed, for which I’m grateful, and I think that all appreciate the ambition, complexity, and nuance intended by the film’s theoretical model (which more than one reviewer calls “compelling”) and by the recursive method of its delivery. It appears from these readings that my strategy for overcoming binaries — through a layered, interactive, and dynamic “triadism” — seems to work, even if it takes patience to figure out and remains difficult to summarize.
The 40-minute EH Book Chat goes into the greatest depth at critiquing the book, and I’ll address one of the recurrent points raised in that video presentation here.
Academic trend watchers will be interested to see how the digital and the Anthropocene have catapulted to the top of hot topics at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference. (A few others are mentioned here and here, Bruno Latour’s keynote being one of them. Here’s a collection of tweets on Latour’s talk, most of them by Jenny Carlson. And for those with more catching up to do, see the series on the ontological turn last year, and my own account of missing Latour then.)
John Hartigan has an interesting post on Somatosphere that compares the suddenly off-the-scale theoretical cachet attained by the term “Anthropocene” against the funkier, more earthbound, and more discipline specific term “multispecies” (its disciplinary specificity still mostly confined to anthropologists and STS folks).
“What just happened in Anthropology?” Hartigan asks.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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:
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.
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.
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/
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).
