Heard about this last night. She died peacefully at her home in Massachusetts yesterday evening, surrounded by family.
(We had just seen her son Dorion Sagan, son of Carl, give a great talk at the anthropology conference last Friday, after which he and his partner had to speed back to Toronto to get their passports to fly to Boston.)
She was one of most important biologists of the past century, and the female face of the Gaia hypothesis, the radical implications of which have yet to be recognized. (They go beyond the popular interpretations and involve the importance of understanding symbiosis and the role of bacteria in life on Earth.)
I owe regular readers an explanation for the lengthy hiatus on this blog.
As I had predicted would happen back in the summer, this semester turned into an extremely busy one for me.
Directing the Environmental Studies program at the University of Vermont is a large part of that busyness: it’s a large, interdisciplinary and cross-college program of nearly 500 undergraduate majors, which has seen its student numbers climb consistently over several years while faculty and staff numbers have actually declined. This has led to a barely sustainable staffing situation, though we are far from unique in that respect. Directing it involves a lot of advising (those 500 students) and overseeing of a somewhat complicated and highly individualized curriculum, reading and signing off on paperwork, organizing, leading and/or attending various kinds of meetings (in three different Schools and Colleges), overseeing the teaching of courses including our Students-Teaching-Students courses, putting out little fires as these arise on a somewhat regular basis, and so on.
This list of demands is simple, yet demanding, as it should be. See below for explanatory notes.Please share these demands widely.
In recognition of the primary role played by oversized and deregulated financial institutions in causing the current economic crisis, WE DEMAND:
1) That all persons who have served as directors or chief executives of large financial institutions in the previous 10 years, and all persons who have accepted over $500,000 in campaign donations from employees of such institutions in the same period, be disqualified from running for office in Congress, Senate, and the Presidency and Vice-Presidency of the United States of America.
The metaphor of “occupation” strikes me as a provocative one not only for what the activists in Manhattan and elsewhere are doing, but for what they are struggling against.
Some, and perhaps many, of these are people without traditional “occupations,” so they are occupying themselves by re-occupying the public spaces that have been occupied for too long by the values, habits, and appeals of the Occupation Force — the whole industry of slogans, gestures, come-hither looks, sales pitches, jingles, hooks, nods and winks (backed up by policies, and ultimately by laws and policing) that keep us steered into the spectacle of Politics-as-Usual-and-Consumption-Above-All.
While I’ve been too busy to follow the Wall Street occupation very closely, let alone participate in any but the most vicarious ways, I’m encouraged by the persistence of its participants. Isn’t it time Americans started saying basta! to government of the lobbyists, by the politicians, and for the corporations?
Tim Morton writes beautifully. His “Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones,” published in the most recent issue of Continent, is a beautiful illustration of this. I could say he writes poetically, but that would be suggesting that his writing is not itself poetry, but only looks and feels like poetry — which would mean succumbing to a distinction between the essence of Morton’s writing and its appearance, and to a rift between the two, that I’m not prepared to commit to (though I think that Morton is).
Why are the Wall Street protests not getting the media coverage similar events in other countries, or in Tea Party country, get? (Keith Olbermann asks this, below.) Discuss.
Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects is finally available and readable on-line, courtesy of a wonderfully innovative relationship between Open Humanities Press and the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office. The book is part of OHP’s New Metaphysics Series, edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour.
As regular readers know, Levi has been a longtime philosophical companion and frequent sparring partner to this blog. On occasion that sparring has gotten enflamed, but the heat has always, in the end, generated much light — which is what philosophical sparring is all about. I’ve read parts of the book in an earlier version and strongly recommend it; it’s an important contribution to contemporary efforts to carve out a post-anthropocentric metaphysics.
We’re been given the green light to announce the following tenure-track position in Environmental Studies and Geography. I’m chairing the Search Committee. Please pass it on to anyone you think will be interested. Review of applications will begin November 15.
The Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Vermont invite applications for a tenure-track assistant professor in Political Ecology to begin August 2012. Possible areas of expertise for this position include: critical engagements with conservation and development, ecological displacements and migration, regional and inter-regional adaptations to climate change, environmental governance/governmentality, risks and conflicts of resource extraction, impacts of ecological change on livelihoods, and contested rights to resources. We seek an individual whose primary regional specialty is Latin America/Caribbean or Africa.
