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Posts Tagged ‘ecology’

Eco+Deco, a manifesto in progress

Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-theory, Manifestos & auguries, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 31, 2022 | Leave a Comment »

Some of the best art exhibitions today show that the socially engaged art world is undergoing two shifts that some of us in the environmental humanities have been advocating for some time: they ecologize and they decolonize. An excellent example of this is the second edition of the Toronto Biennale of Art, currently wrapping up […]

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In defense of ecological metaphor

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

In my writing about media, I’ve been using the words “ecology” and “ecosystem” fairly liberally. In a new piece called “The Limitations of the ‘New Ecosystem’ Metaphor,” The Columbia Journalism Review’s Lauren Harris argues that this metaphor is misguided. She interviews media scholar Anthony Nadler, who has claims that the metaphor “naturaliz[es] current trends in the diffusion and development of news practices.” Its use “suggests ‘spontaneous, self-ordering principles’ in the news market obscuring all the social, political, and economic decisions that undergird the status quo.”

I want to respond to that argument here by presenting the case that “ecology” is not a metaphor imported from biology, but that it’s more like the other way around: “media ecology” is a description of the world of media as much as it is a description of the world of biology. Both media and biology are constituted by the actions and processes of their constituents. In this sense, it is not a metaphor but a way of seeing, and it’s more important to ensure we understand what it is we are looking at.

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Eco-ethico-aesthetics and George Floyd

Posted in Cultural politics, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

As I explain in Shadowing the Anthropocene, process-relational philosophy in a Peircian-Whiteheadian vein takes aesthetics to be first, ethics to be second, and logic (which, in our time, we need to think of also as eco-logic) to be third. This is not a temporal sequence, but a logical one: aesthetics is found in the response […]

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What’s the big deal? Or, whither universities…

Posted in Academe, Cultural politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 23, 2018 | 14 Comments »

A post-Commencement pep talk for myself (& academic friends who care to listen) It should be pretty obvious by now that predatory, extractive capitalism is not working, and that we need to move swiftly to a regenerative mixed economy grounded in a respect for living systems. The implications of that are pretty simple, but also […]

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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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This IS nature, guys…

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged , , , , , , , on October 16, 2017 | 21 Comments »

There is an irony in The Nature Conservancy’s headline heralding a “new study” that “finds nature is vital to beating climate change.” The sub-title adds that “Nature could cost-effectively deliver over a third of greenhouse gas emissions reductions required to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.” For one thing, what is the “nature” that would […]

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Toronto talk: Ukraine’s anomalous Zone

Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2013 | 6 Comments »

My upcoming talk at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs comes from the East European strand of my research. The talk will be called “Becoming Tuteishyi: Peregrinations in the Zona of Ukraine, with Walter, Gloria, Andrei, Bruno, and Other Explorers.” The description reads as follows: Drawing on the author’s research and travels, […]

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Tim Ingold & the liveliness of the living

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on June 14, 2011 | 6 Comments »

A new book by Tim Ingold is always good news, especially one that — like his 2000 collection Perception of the Environment — brings together several years’ worth of work into one volume. Ingold describes Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description as “in many ways” a “sequel” to that earlier book, and it’s […]

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What a bodymind can do – Part 3

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 30, 2011 | 1 Comment »

This is the concluding part of a three-part article. Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 here. They should be read in the sequence in which they were published.   The True, the Good, and the Beautiful All of this can be related to the triad of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful […]

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For a moratorium on “constructivism”

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on April 30, 2011 | 8 Comments »

I’d like to call a moratorium on the use of the word “constructivism” (or “constructionism”) to refer only to social constructivism. (This post was prompted by Tim  Morton’s Object-Oriented Strategies for Ecological Art, but his point there is somewhat differently directed and mine addresses a more general issue that can still be found in a […]

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Year 25 A.C. (after Chernobyl)–a love letter

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , , , , on April 26, 2011 | 1 Comment »

I was going to post something to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but Sarah Phillips has already posted something so good, saying many of the things I would have wanted to say, that I will simply link to her article at Somatosphere and add some personal notes of my own. The […]

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Ecology-ontology-politics (1): Pickering’s cyborgs

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , on April 4, 2011 | 9 Comments »

Ecology, ontology, politics: These three terms are among the most common themes of this blog, but their intersections deserve a more sustained exploration. This is the first of a series of posts that will do that through critical discussion of various readings and concepts. This first post reviews and reflects on some of the questions […]

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