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Posts Tagged ‘Anthropocene’

As the world’s refugee crisis builds — reminding us that much worse movements of people loom ahead, and much worse wars, as climate systems destabilize and the capitalist world-ecology unravels in the decades and centuries ahead — I can’t help asking myself what, if anything, philosophy can offer in response. It depends on which philosophy, of course. But […]

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Bandwagocene

These days, it takes a course release for an academic to keep up with the avalanche of books being published with titles that feature the word “Anthropocene.” To read them would take a sabbatical. Doing anything approximating a “slow read” would require, well, retirement. But that’s no reason not to try. Here’s just a quick sample […]

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I’ve reported previously on how critics see the “Anthropocene” concept as overgeneralizing from the causal nuances of actual responsibility for climate (and global system) change. In an excellent summary of recent writing on the topic, ecosocialist climate observer Ian Angus answers the question “Does Anthropocene science blame all humanity?” with a definitive “no.” That doesn’t mean that the term […]

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The video of my talk on “Speculative Ecologies of (Post)Cinema: Cinema In and Beyond the Capitalocene,” is now up on Vimeo and at Shane Denson’s web site. It is from the SCMS panel “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory,” featuring Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, and Mark Hansen. I discuss the archive, the cloud, the common, the slippery morphing image […]

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Some 2500 years ago, a man named Siddhartha Gotama articulated what have come to be known as the “4 Noble Truths”: the truth of dukkha, or fundamental suffering (that there is a basic unsatisfactoriness to life), the truth of its causes (that it arises from an ignorance and misperception of the nature of things, which are […]

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In an article in Nature entitled “Defining the Anthropocene,” geographers and climate scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin provide a new approach to dating this era that focuses on an event they call the “Orbis spike,” a dip in atmospheric CO2 occurring around 1610. Effectively, what their proposal does it to allow geologists to harmonize their work […]

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Astrophysicist and NPR blogger Adam Frank writes about the “sustainability bottleneck” as the state faced by technological civilizations like ours, which have learned how to “intensively harvest” energy, but not how to sustain themselves through the crisis this harvesting sets off. It turns out there may be millions of planets that give rise to life in our galaxy alone. Frank […]

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With environmental and eco-political news in the front pages daily, it’s easy to get back into the swing of regular, even daily, posting after the winter holiday lull. Here’s more on the “dating the ecocrisis” theme… Andy Revkin is reporting that the Anthropocene Working Group has concluded that the middle of the twentieth century makes […]

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The journal Science has just released more news of planetary boundary transgression. (This is related to my post from a few days ago.) Specifically, of nine such boundaries connected to “processes and systems [that] regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth System,” four have been crossed. Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are […]

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Academic trend watchers will be interested to see how the digital and the Anthropocene have catapulted to the top of hot topics at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference. (A few others are mentioned here and here, Bruno Latour’s keynote being one of them. Here’s a collection of tweets on Latour’s talk, most of them by Jenny Carlson. […]

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The following is a guest post by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. It continues the Immanence series “Debating the Anthropocene.” See here, here, and here for previous articles in the series. (And note that some lengthy comments have been added to the previous post by Jan Zalasiewicz, Kieran […]

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[Note: This post has been edited slightly since it was first published, to clarify the difference between sound waves and radio waves. I have also posted several updates in the Comments section of this post, where I present my reconsidered views of what the “Global Hum” may be. I recommend reading those updates after you […]

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