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:
Posts Tagged ‘Anthropocene’
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 »
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 — […]
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 […]
I am a conservative
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, tagged Anthropocene, community values, conservatism, Donald Trump, elections, family values, pro-life, values-based on November 2, 2018 | 2 Comments »
I am a pro-life, values-based conservative. I wish and act to conserve the conditions that have allowed human life to flourish on this planet for the past 12,000 years, conditions whose continuance today is threatened. I wish and act to conserve the values — of cooperation, respect, and physical and emotional sustenance — that have […]
Shadowing the Anthropocene: a reader’s guide
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, Alfred North Whitehead, Anthropocene, books, Charles Sanders Peirce, epistemology, Ontology, process-relational thought, Shadowing the Anthropocene, writing on October 13, 2018 | 8 Comments »
Here’s the “reader’s guide” I promised for Shadowing the Anthropocene. It begins with a quick summary of the book’s main contribution — a kind of “master key” to what it tries to do. It then lays out a set of paths one can take through the book, which would be useful for readers with an […]
Welcome to the… Meghalayan?
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene, Anthropocene Working Group, controversies, geology, geosemiosis, Holocene, Meghalayan Age, semiotic Earth, stratigraphy on August 12, 2018 | 8 Comments »
Geology watchers were more than a little surprised last month to learn that we are living in a new age called the Meghalayan, which apparently began about 4200 years ago. After all the excitement over the Anthropocene, it seems that a rival group of geological stratigraphers — one tasked with naming the sub-parts of the Holocene — has […]
Lyme & beyond: a bibliographic resource
Posted in Science & society, tagged alternative health, Anomalies, anomalistics, Anthropocene, bugs, chronic Lyme disease, complementary health, conspiracies, ecological syndrome, fear of nature, global hum, health scares, hysteria, infectious diseases, institutional trust, Lyme disease, Lyme wars, medical establishment, medicine, modern syndromes, public health wars, scientific controversies, uncertainty on July 31, 2018 | 7 Comments »
Last updated on November 11, 2018 Immanence sometimes dips into areas of controversial or “boundary” science, which means areas of science whose interpretation is both publicly and scientifically contentious. While I don’t consider climate science to be all that scientifically controversial (though it is certainly politically controversial), and the general topics of “fake news,” “information war,” and […]
10 years (of Late Holocene life)
Posted in Anthropocene, Blog stuff, tagged anniversaries, Anthropocene, blog, Critical Holocene, David Bowie, immanence, Late Holocene on June 20, 2018 | 4 Comments »
(Or twice the video below.) Immanence passed its tenth anniversary last month and somehow failed to celebrate it. (The actual anniversary, May 11, marks the posting of this two-line fragment. Regular posts took another seven months to appear, or at least to take on a permanent form.) To celebrate, I recently re-did the Primer page, which collects […]
Skipping an Earthbeat
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Science & society, tagged Aaron Wildavsky, Anthropocene, Bill McGuire, dynamic earth, Earthbeat, earthquakes, environmentalism, fragile Earth, Gaia, geology, Mary Douglas, risk as culture, volcanoes on June 15, 2018 | 4 Comments »
Reading Bill McGuire‘s 2012 book Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes, I came across this description of the annual “pulse” called an “Earthbeat,” which is supposedly responsible for Earth’s preference for volcanic eruptions between November and April (also known as “volcano season”): rather like a beating heart, the Earth changes […]
Anthropo(s)cenic Chernobyl* in image & text
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged Anthropocene, Chernobyl, Chornobyl, Four Noble Truths, Gund Institute, Herzog, images, nuclear accidents, nuclear power, sacrifice zones, Shadowing the Anthropocene, slow violence, socio-ecological suffering, Ukraine, University of Kansas on April 15, 2018 | 6 Comments »
My Gund Institute research talk from a few months ago, on “Navigating Earth’s ‘Zone of Alienation’: Chernobyl and the Search for Adequate Images of the Anthropocene,” can now be viewed online (see link below). It consists mostly of out-takes from my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, forthcoming later this year from Punctum Books.
Rant for the day
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, tagged agency, Anthropocene, climate solutions, ClimateJustice, Ecozoic, fossil fuel era, global justice, good Anthropocene, sustainability transition on December 14, 2017 | 6 Comments »
Let’s face facts: Life in such cold climates as the one I live in (it was 8°F/-14°C here this morning) would hardly be possible, for us in such numbers as we are, without fossil fuels. The harnessing of fossil fuel energy has enabled tremendous innovation — innovation that, if managed well, could help us get […]
Beyond sustainability’s 3 pillars: an exercise in eco-political ontology
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, tagged Anthropocene, decoloniality, ecology, environment, environmental sociology, environmental thought, four pillars of sustainability, governance, governmentality, land, markets, Marshall Sahlins, Ontology, epistemology, people, political sociology, state, sustainability, sustainability science 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 […]