This was originally posted over a week ago, but then taken down by request as it was being considered for publication elsewhere (but not published there). A shorter version of it appeared yesterday at VT Digger. The school I work for, the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, recently undertook a […]
Search Results for 'anthropocene'
Process-relational readings
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged new materialism, Ontology, epistemology, organization studies, process research, process-relational thought, relational theories, relationalism, speculative realism, sustainability science, sustainability studies, Whitehead on March 21, 2020 | 1 Comment »
A very helpful analytical review of the “relational paradigm in sustainability research, practice, and education” has just been published online by Ambio. While it’s limited to a certain selection of key publications, the article, by European sustainabililty researchers Zack Walsh, Jessica Bohme, and Christine Wamsler, covers the terrain of “relational approaches” to ontology, epistemology, and […]
How to welcome a guest
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, tagged Alfred North Whitehead, Coronavirus, COVID-19, EcoHealth Alliance, Edward Gorey, global ecology, hyper-events, hyperobjects, One Health Initiative, pandemics, Timothy Morton, virology, viruses on March 15, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
The outbreak of Coronavirus is a good opportunity to think about how we treat guests whose novel appearance amidst us may pose hardship, but whose continuing presence is undeniable.
Sobering up…
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, Ecozoic, love, Neocene, Shadowing the Anthropocene, sustainability on August 22, 2019 | 5 Comments »
Peter Brannen’s Atlantic article “The Anthropocene is a Joke” provides a helpful cold shower for those who’ve gotten a little too drunk on the concept of the Anthropocene. The entire article is worth reading. Here are a few snippets:
The second ontological twist
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, epistemology, Huayan Buddhism, Mind-Only Buddhism, Ontology, Peirce, process philosophy, process-relational thought, semiotics, Y, Yogacara philosophy on July 10, 2019 | 2 Comments »
I keep trying to rephrase the second piece of the “double insight” — or two ontological “twists” — around which the philosophical argument of Shadowing the Anthropocene (and Ecologies of the Moving Image) is woven. The first insight is the process-relational one, which is at the core of both A. N. Whitehead’s metaphysics and many variations […]
(Mc)Mindfulness?
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, McMindfulness, mindfulness, Peirce, political ecology, practice, process-relational thought, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young on June 22, 2019 | 2 Comments »
A Guardian article making the rounds on social media argues that the mindfulness movement has become “the new capitalist spirituality” — “magical thinking on steroids,” which instead of overturning the “neoliberal order,” now “only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.” This “McMindfulness,” as Ronald Purser calls it, has been “stripped of the teachings on ethics […]
Updated process-relational theory primer
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged C. S. Peirce, process philosophy, process-relational thought, Whitehead on June 2, 2019 | Leave a Comment »
I originally presented a “primer” to process-relational philosophy on this blog back in 2010. A substantially updated version of it is part of my book, Shadowing the Anthropocene. Here it is as a stand-alone, 10-page PDF file.
The urgency of slowing down and stopping
Posted in Manifestos & auguries on April 18, 2019 | 4 Comments »
Like many, I’ve been finding it difficult not to feel an upwelling of anxiety as the scope and scale of the climate emergency has become more and more obvious, as Trump-style political (non-)responses — precisely the kinds of responses that will only make things much worse — have scaled themselves up around the world, and […]
P-N transition, or, toward the Neocene
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, Ecozoic, geology, Neocene, sustainability, sustainability bottleneck, Transition Culture on March 17, 2019 | 2 Comments »
It’s nice to see archdruid John Michael Greer’s proposal for a “Pleistocene-Neocene transition” get a little traction in the science press — specifically, in a Science Alert article by psychologist Matthew Adams. Greer, whose writings on religion and ecology are respectably out-of-the-box, advocates against the Anthropocene label on the basis that a geological epoch — […]
Pronoun statement
Posted in Uncategorized on January 1, 2019 | 2 Comments »
As more people attach pronouns to their names (“she/her,” “they, their,” et al.), both in print and when speaking — intended as a way of respecting and “normalizing” pronoun preferences beyond the simple binary of “he” and “she” — I’ve come to recognize a certain awkwardness in one of the common variations: the use of […]
Koinocene (or Cœnocene)?
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene, C. S. Peirce, categories, Christianithy, commons, Cœnocene, geological designations, geology, Holocene, kainos, koinocene, koinos, Peirce, Pleistocene on November 7, 2018 | 2 Comments »
Peircian thinker Gary Fuhrman has posted an interesting piece on the naming of the Anthropocene, entitled Holocenoscopy. Noting that the word Holocene means nothing more than “entirely recent,” as opposed to the Pleistocene, which means “most recent,” so there’s really nowhere left to go with naming geological periods after their recentness, Fuhrman suggests we look to another […]