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Posts Tagged ‘Anthropocene’

Beyond sustainability’s 3 pillars: an exercise in eco-political ontology

Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2017 | 9 Comments »

It’s become a cliché for people in environmental, policy, and even corporate circles to talk about the “triple bottom-line,” or the “three pillars” or “three-legged stool,” of sustainability. Those “pillars” are almost universally understood to be the economic, the environmental, and the social (sometimes rendered, more trenchantly, as social justice). Some have argued that a fourth, the cultural, should […]

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Mortonian prophecies

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on June 16, 2017 | 2 Comments »

When one of our cadre of eco-cultural theorists gets noticed — more so, fêted — by one of the leading newspapers in the world, we need to take note and celebrate with him. In this case, it’s Timothy Morton getting called “the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene” by The Guardian, in a profile titled “A reckoning […]

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The SF of sustainability

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , , , on May 18, 2017 | 8 Comments »

Since it’s the Holocene that has provided the conditions for the (human-led) biogeochemical experimentation that has now likely achieved a runaway state, and since “Holocene” was never anything other than a placeholder term — it only means “entirely new” — it seems inappopriate to replace it with the term “Anthropocene.” “Holocene” begins as a leap of […]

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Reassembling democracy?

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , on December 6, 2016 | 8 Comments »

Here’s the abstract I’ve just sent in for the keynote I’ll be giving at the Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource conference in Oslo in February:

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McKibben & the frontlines of war

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 25, 2016 | 5 Comments »

I recently found myself in a part of Mississauga, Ontario (a bedroom community of Toronto), in which more than 90% of the visible landscape (excepting the sky) appeared to consist of concrete, in the form of pavement, asphalt, buildings, and such. The remaining 5-10% — rows of evenly spaced short trees, shrubs, a few patches of […]

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Anthropocenic sublime

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , on July 30, 2016 | 6 Comments »

I’ll be giving the following talk at the “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene” workshop at the National University of Singapore this coming week. Navigating the Zone of Alienation: Chernobyl and the Anthropocenic Sublime Abstract:

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Toward telling an adequate story

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 29, 2016 | 11 Comments »

This post builds on the previous one on the state of the eco-humanities. Here I focus on the substantive elements for narratives adequate to the Anthropocene. One of the challenges of our time is to learn to tell an adequate story of humanity’s current predicament. Next spring’s Stories for the Anthropocene Festival in Stockholm aims to deal with this challenge. Numerous […]

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Fort McMurray as fictive image

Posted in Climate change, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2016 | 7 Comments »

With reality like this, who needs fiction? It’s from Fort McMurray, last week. Harrowing. While the impact of such images is undeniable, the debate over whether and how they are related to climate change is a debate the rest of us should not shy away from.

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Wark on the geopolitics of the Anthropocene

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , on May 7, 2016 | 2 Comments »

McKenzie Wark has written a very provocative piece on the geopolitics of the Anthropocene, or what he calls “The Geopolitics of Hibernation.” A quote: 

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30 Years (or 30,000): Spectral stories of Chernobyl

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 25, 2016 | 4 Comments »

I’ll be giving this talk at the University of Kansas on Thursday. It’ll be exactly two days after the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. And 16 days before the 30th anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech about the accident. Pravda (Truth) first reported in any detail on the accident on May 6 and 7. The future of the Soviet […]

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Living in a bubble

Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , , on April 19, 2016 | 6 Comments »

I’ve been using the metaphor of the Sustainability Bottleneck in my teaching, but another one that is more immediately graspable is The Bubble. Two things landed in my in-box this morning that testify to this (but that’s a pretty daily occurrence, e.g., see this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, all from the past week). One […]

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Climate Justice for dummies

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , on December 9, 2015 | 1 Comment »

Here’s how I would explain the concept of Climate Justice in four easy steps: The wealthiest 1% emit 2500 times more greenhouse gases than the poorest 1%. Those greenhouse gases are in the process of changing the Earth’s climate to render it uninhabitable for the kind of mix of human & nonhuman species that exists […]

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