Happy May Day, Beltane (see my original post on the two), and Open Access Anthropology Day!
Here’s a great open access book to read today (though I’m hoping the emotional geographies folks will get together with the animal geographies folks to produce some interesting symbioses):
Posted in Philosophy | Leave a Comment »
WorldChanging shares Joe Romm’s “The Green FDR: Obama’s First 100 Days Make – and May Remake – History,” which compiles a nice account from Climate Progress of the good things the Obama administration has done on the environmental front. According to Romm, “three game-changing accomplishments stand out:”
“1. Green Stimulus: Progressives, Obama keep promise to jumpstart clean energy, economy — conservatives keep promise to jumpstop the future
“2. Sustainable Budget: The first sustainable budget in U.S. history.
“3. Regulatory breakthrough: EPA finds carbon pollution a serious danger to Americans’ health and welfare requiring regulation.”
Romm goes into details around several developments, including Obama’s steps to block new coal plants and his signing into law a massive investment in public transit, train travel, and renewable energy and efficiency technologies. It’s an impressive list and a convincing argument — one that balances out some of the less sanguine assessments of critics on the left who’ve been focusing (understandably) on the financial crisis and the administration’s seeming deference to Wall Street.
WorldChanging has been posting other insightful takes on ecopolitics in the age of Obama, including on swine flu, geoengineering (as a form of climate denialism), and Toronto’s (my hometown’s) efforts to green its deadly-sprawling suburbs. Sarah Kuck’s article on Swine Flu is a particularly nice demonstration of how the growing shift, in some parts of the environmental sustainability discourse, towards a focus on “resilience,” can provide a nice way to bring social justice and environmental concerns into the same frame. Kuck writes:
“The Swine Flu is just one of many events highlighting our interconnectedness and responsibility to each other, reminding us that our global resilience is only as effective as the resilience at the base of the pyramid. Events like this are magnifying our connectivity, and further emphasizing the great need for those with the means to empower the impoverished, to work toward a world free of suffering, and to create a model of prosperity worth having. […] The health of someone in a Mexican shop or a Chinese farm now directly relates to the health of us all. We’re all in this together.” (emphasis added)
Unfortunately, events like Swine Flu, SARS, and other viral emergences in the global body politic more commonly tend to evoke a policing reaction, with its military metaphors and calls to prop up defensive walls against the intruding agents, who are associated with “dark” outposts in the white imagination (in this case, Mexico). The flap in Israel over changing the name of the “swine flu” to “Mexican flu” is a case in point. Let’s watch how this plays out… We can be sure at least that Obama’s international sensibilities are much better poised to create a conducive landscape for a globally just eco-resilience movement.
Photograph by Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images, from Guardian.co.uk
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged ecomedia, ecopolitics | 2 Comments »
Today was the 23rd anniversary of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine. I had been invited to give a sermon at a nearby Unitarian church connected to both this anniversary and the May Day (Beltane) that’s coming up in a few days, and my thoughts, in preparation, revolved around how both of those dates, along with Earth Day four days earlier, combine a significance in cyclical time — the ritualized time by which people shape their daily, monthly, and annual life rhythms — and in world-historical time, that is, the time of events that have redefined humanity’s relationship to the world at large.
Earth Day 1970 and the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986 both served as moments of recognition of environmental risk and hazard. Earth Day instituted the practice of large-scale political demonstrations and teach-ins on the environment. The 1970 Earth Day involved about 20 million people in the US; the 1990 Earth Day, at the peak of the ‘second wave’ of environmental activism, is thought to have involved 200 million participants in 140 different countries. Earth Day’s evolution thus offers a kind of gauge of the popular pulse of environmental awareness, and with its institutionalization into childrens culture, a gauge for the struggle over how our kids’ attitudes towards nature develop and, in turn, for how they may put pressure on us to change our ways.
Chernobyl, on the other hand, was the single most important shock to a system (the Soviet) that was eventually brought down by the events it triggered. This was especially the case in Ukraine, where it catalyzed an environmental movement that ultimately mutated into the national independence movement. More so than most environmental disasters, Chernobyl remains mired in debates over its impacts. The International Atomic Energy Association’s 2006 report (co-authored with the World Health Organization and the UN Development Program) cited data suggesting that no more than 4000 cancer deaths can be traced to the radioactive release from the Chernobyl accident. In response, Greenpeace International produced a report citing scientific data that the number is really between 100,000 and 200,000. Victims’ groups, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and even previous WHO reports appear to line up on the side of Greenpeace in this debate. Critics on both sides dispute the other side’s research methods, their use of epidemiological data, estimates for escaped nuclear fuel (which the IAEA puts at 3-4%, while others have claimed that 50% or even almost all of the reactor’s fuel escaped into the environment). See here , here, and here on the “body count” and other controversies.
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Spirit matter | Tagged environment, eventology, imagination, paganism, religion, revolutions | 34 Comments »
Last week’s “Green Mind” issue of the New York Times Magazine shows how behavioral science is making an impact on environmental policy and decision-making. In particular, Jon Gertner’s “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?” provides a useful summary of how the trendy fields of behavioral economics and ‘decision science’ are being applied to thinking about climate change. Gertner discusses the differences between analytical and emotional responses to risk; how the ordering of options shapes our choices; the ways that “frames” and “nudges” can be used to shape policy debates; and the effects of group dynamics on shaping individual decision-making. (It’s not that hard to get random individuals to cooperate in groups, and individuals in fact find it easier to think about long-term impacts of decisions when they are in face-to-face groups; but the article doesn’t get into how individuals, in a highly individualistic society like ours, can be encouraged to follow up on what they agreed to when they were making decisions in groups.)
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged ecomedia, environmental communication, neuropolitics | 1 Comment »
Greenpeace International’s Earth Day video looks like a recruitment ad for an army of media-guerrilla climate warriors. From the techno-martial drumming, rapid-fire camera movement, shots of the troops in action, eco-doomsday imagery (including an image of the sun rising over the Earth looking like a mushroom cloud), and Christ the Redeemer flying over Rio de Janeiro draped in a Greenpeace poster by GI’s (?) culture jammers — it touches on all the buttons that have been attracting working-class American youth to the US army, and more. And what is that shot of naked humans who look like they’ve risen out of their graves on the day of the Rapture… on a melting glacier? Brilliant. Now if they can get their recruiters to American campuses the way the US army does, and offer scholarships too…
Thanks to Mediacology for sharing this.
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged ecomedia, environmental communication | 4 Comments »
One of the more oblique threads I’ve been pursuing on this blog has to do with what new media are doing to aural and musical information. Music is, of course, much more than information: it is embodied affect (in a Deleuzian sense) that carries, channels, activates, mobilizes (sets into motion), transforms, and disseminates cultural meanings as well as culturally imbued bodily affects. In the process music imprints feelings, sensations and meanings into our bodies and, at the same time, outwards into the world that it describes, inscribes, and infuses with rhythm and aural texture. It fills and organizes the spaces of resonance between bodies, but also ‘spaces’, or reterritorializes, our own sense of ourselves – as Deleuze and Guattari’s oft-quoted opening lines to “Of the Refrain” suggest.
Dan Visel’s piece on music & metadata has gotten me thinking about how musical metadata — “things that are outside of the text, but still of primary importance to how we read a text”, which in the case of music includes titles and information about the performers — are becoming part of a more fluid and oceanic datasphere. When I was growing up, the access points to the musical universe were radio stations (a few, like the original CFNY, among the dozens available in the Toronto area), record stores (a few, like the Record Peddler, whose employees I could trust for their cool tips), and a handful of magazines (like Toronto’s Shades and a few of the other free art and music zines, most of which have left not a shred of evidence behind themselves in the digital era). I used to have to keep listening, sometimes for half an hour or more, to find out what it was that I liked on my favorite college radio station, and if I wasn’t listening closely I could miss it — the metadata were so scarce. But once I heard it I knew what to look for (on a trip downtown to the Peddler), and once I bought the album, and maybe a copy of New Musical Express or Trouser Press that featured an interview with the band, I was as metadata-rich as anyone I knew.
Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape | Tagged affect, cultural geography, cultural policy, Deleuze, geography, Iceland, imagination, music, visual culture | 5 Comments »
Thanks to Mediacology for sharing this presentation on “Green Culture” by Lawrence Lessig from the recent Green Festival in Seattle. Lessig is the guru of the creative commons movement, and his talk, on what he calls “cultural environmentalism,” is really on media ecology, i.e. the “ecology” of cultural production and creativity, and especially on the differences between the “read-only culture” of contemporary copyright law and the “read-write” and “remix” cultures that an open and democratic public sphere should be making possible today. But since he’s talking to an audience of environmentalists, he makes some pointed references to global warming and the (non-existent) state of regulatory law surrounding it, as compared to the draconian regulations surrounding copyright. (Although he’s a bit grumpy about it, I love the clip of the “cheat offsetters” who, like carbon offsetters, are developing an emerging market in trading the right to cheat on one’s spouse.)
The lecture, if we can call it that, is a brilliant example of Lessig’s famous (infamous?) Power Point presentation style (which I’ve tried emulating occasionally, and which is a hell of a lot of work — we need better software for it), and is one of the most entertaining lectures I’ve ever sat through. Interestingly, Lessig posits Aldous Huxley (who I’ve discussed a couple of times here before) and John Philip Sousa, of all people, as predecessors of the cultural commons. But where Sousa had defended “young people” getting together “singing the songs of their day” against the consumerist media culture that was rising in his time, Lessig defends on-line remixers, Anime music video makers, and others — he shows us some excellent and entertaining examples of all of these — against the vested interests constraining cultural creativity today.
The increasing cross-breeding between environmentalism (of the old, new, and open varieties) and the free culture/open source movement is, to my mind, one of the points of light on the horizon — a harbinger, I hope, of the “liberation ecology” that would bring cultural, media, democracy, and ecology activists into sync in issues and struggles around the world.
Posted in Academe, Cultural politics, Eco-culture | Tagged Creative Commons, cultural environmentalism, ecology of culture, ecomedia, Lessig, media ecology | 1 Comment »
As goes Motor City, so should go the world – or at least eco-activists might like to argue that. The archetypal home of American car culture, Detroit, has been decaying for years. It’s now collapsed from a city of two million to less than half of that, and in the process it has opened up dramatic possibilities for regeneration.
Photo District News has collected some glimpses of the ruins. Kevin Bauman’s Abandoned Houses , from which the above photo is taken, are akin to real estate sales photos gone wild, while Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s “Ruins of Detroit” series include some stunners, like this photo of the United Artists Theater:
These, like Timothy Fadek’s industrial ruins and Sean Hemmerle‘s Time magazine photo essay, include many that seem as if they’re right out of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Bruce Gilden’s photo-essay on Detroit Foreclosures includes a poignant soundtrack reminding us what the current economic crunch feels like to some.
The Time article that accompanies Hemmerle’s and Marchand/Meffre’s photos reports that among the ideas proposed for redevelopment of Detroit are “the reforestation of the city’s dead zones” and “the planting of large-scale networks of parks and commercial farms.” While there’s plenty of room for visionary public policy, Detroit doesn’t exactly have a long history of that kind of thing, so, if it was up to me, I would leave a lot of room for the anarchists and artists to get things going. Unfortunately, since Fifth Estate, the longest-running anglophone anarchist periodical in North America, moved out of Detroit in 2001, the local political scene seems a little less prepared for this kind of thing. Artists, however, have been busy making the urban landscape theirs.
The price for grassroots eco-regeneration is certainly right: Jennifer Lance at environmental blog Red Green & Blue reports that you can buy a foreclosed home in Detroit for $40 these days. She even volunteers to do that and to donate it to any organization that would turn it into a park, wildlife sanctuary, or urban garden. Any takers?
The kicker is that this might not even be necessary. Rather like the Chernobyl exclusion zone or the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge — formerly a toxic chemical dump — Detroit is, in places, already reverting back to nature. (Though, on Chernobyl, there has been some controversy about reports that it’s become a wildlife haven.)
Describing the city as a “Wild Kingdom,” Detroitblog.org describes whole neighborhood blocks reverting to prairie, alleys resembling hiking trails, roving packs of wild dogs, feral cats taking over entire buildings, and a resurgence of pheasants, foxes, opossums, turkeys, roosters, and raccoons, along with imported “ghetto palms” (Ailanthus altissima) spreading through the city like weeds and, by their height — sometimes reaching several stories — offering a gauge for how long particular parcels have been neglected.
More photos of Detroit reverting back to nature can be seen here and here. The Greening of Detroit is an institutional non-profit working on urban eco-regeneration, while Motor City Blog keeps tabs on interesting goings-on.
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Visual culture | Tagged anarchism, landscape, mortality, nature, ruins, urban blight, urban studies | 20 Comments »
Maybe part of the reason I’ve been writing more on philosophical themes here than on ‘ecoculture’ is the simple fact that I’m surrounded by environmental themes on a daily basis – in my teaching, reading and writing, in discussions with students and colleagues. But not a single one of my colleagues here is a philosopher (UVM’s philosophy department is very traditional and, as far as I can tell, exclusively analytical). When I do discuss philosophy with colleagues, in any depth, it’s with a handful of humanists or social scientists who are passionate about their positions (which range from Marxist and feminist to ecofeminist and political-ecologist to Lacanian and poststructuralist) but whose knowledge of the theories I’m working with – especially the the postconstructivist, process-relational – is limited. (Well, there is the cognitivist performance theorist next-door-neighbor whose friendship I treasure, and a few others I wish I’d see more often, but those conversations don’t happen often enough.) So this is what comes out when I sit down to write and feel a need to say things louder than paper can handle… That said, the coming days will be hellishly busy, so posts might be slower in coming.
Posted in Blog stuff, Philosophy | Leave a Comment »
Keith Robinson’s introduction to the collection Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, just published by Palgrave Macmillan, provides an excellent and much needed overview of the reception histories of these three thinkers. Robinson’s contextualization of them within the analytical and continental philosophical traditions makes clear why each has been marginalized or misunderstood to varying degrees in recent decades. Bergson had been extremely popular in the early years of the last century, but became almost a non-entity in the Anglo-American world until Deleuze revived him in the 1970s, while Whitehead, an acknowledged founding figure of twentieth-century analytical philosophy alongside Bertrand Russell, became an object of suspicion after his metaphysical ‘turn’ (represented in part by the mammoth Process and Reality).
Robinson argues that Russell played a key role in marginalizing both and, in the process, in reducing analytical philosophy to the logically and mathematically oriented philosophical style it has become. Deleuze, meanwhile, was welcomed as part of the wave of French poststructuralists and ‘postmodernists’ — not so much by Anglo-American philosophers as by social and cultural theorists — but, in the process, his thinking was misunderstood and caricatured as a form of psycho-political anarchism, and the nuanced thinking about science, time, metaphysics, life, organism, and all manner of other traditional philosophical themes was largely left aside.
Now, Robinson argues, as the distinction between the analytical and continental traditions is becoming increasingly irrelevant, with each caving in under the weight of its own limitations and of internal and external critiques, this threesome is finally being seen as representative of a process philosophical tradition that offers much-needed alternatives to some of the philosophical conundrums we’re facing (such as the mind-body problem, the relationship between philosophy and science/technology, life and the biopolitical, etc.). This shared focus on process — a term most closely associated with Whitehead, though it’s often taken by Whiteheadians in religious/theological directions that many would find less germane — is, according to Robinson, combined with a “methodological constructivism” that seeks to create concepts with which to think experience and life in novel ways.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged analytical philosophy, Bergson, complexity, Continental philosophy, Deleuze, Whitehead | 6 Comments »
There’s a wealth of material in post-marxist and poststructuralist political philosophy to be found at the After 1968 web site, which documents a series of seminars and lectures held in Maastricht over the last few years. You can find texts by Agamben, Deleuze, Badiou, Ranciere, Baudrillard, Negri, Derrida, Nancy, and others there, though it will take some scrolling, clicking, and poking around to locate them.
One of the more interesting finds there is a link to the translated notes from a lecture by Deleuze on Spinoza’s concept of affect. It’s arguably this concept and its transmission through Deleuze, together with the more recent upsurge of research in the neuroscience of affect and emotion (by people like Antonio Damasio), that underlies the fairly dramatic upwelling of interest in all things ‘affective’ in recent social and cultural theory.
The site also provides links to Deleuze’s last published piece of writing, the brief, lyrical “Immanence: A Life…”, and to Giorgio Agamben’s insightful, meditative dissection of it (which, thankfully, is only slightly marred by Agamben’s own obsessions with sovereignty, “bare life”, biopolitics, etc.). Agamben spends three whole pages analyzing the punctuation – colon, ellipsis – of the title alone, and though that may sound overindulgent, it’s well worth reading.
Deleuze’s notion of immanence changed over the years and, as Christian Kerslake argues, left questions and inconsistencies in its wake. But it remains very evocative and, in this final version at least, sounds to me completely resonant with the (Madhyamika) Buddhist ontology I’ve been exploring.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter | Tagged affect, Agamben, Buddhism, Deleuze, Dzogchen, Madhyamika, mindfulness, political theory, post-marxism, poststructuralism, Spinoza | 2 Comments »
I’ve been perusing Kvond’s wonderful Spinozist blog Frames /Sing, which synthesizes in-depth readings of Spinoza alongside a broad interest in ontology, biology, semiosis (including biosemiotics), Deleuze, Latour, Heidegger, and much else, and generates insightful discussion with a coterie of other bloggers. For anyone interested, here’s a short list of some possibly entry points into his thinking, which resonate with some of what I’ve been trying to get started here:
Why Spinoza? A historical, sociological argument – A good place to start.
Deleuze on Spinoza and Plotinus and luminosity
The problem with Spinoza’s panpsychism – I’m working on figuring out the relations and distinctions between panpsychism or panexperientialism (in their different forms, including Whitehead’s), pantheism, panentheism, poly-isms of various sorts (polytheism, polypsychism), and systems theories ranging from Gregory Bateson’s semiotics, Joanna Macy’s (and others’) Buddhist ontology, Manuel DeLanda’s Deleuzianism, et al., so expect more on all these topics.
Is Latour an Underexpressed Spinozist
Latour’s inconsistency, “Start in the middle”
In praise of scholarly enemism: People are animals too
Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics: The braids of reason and passion
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged panpsychism, Spinoza | 2 Comments »
