Today is National Coal Ash Action Day, as MountainJustice.org reminds us — see the information there on what you can do about it. Meanwhile, Climate Ground Zero reports on a fascinating case unfolding in West Virginia’s coal country, where tree sitters have halted blasting of a mountaintop by Massey Coal company. Climate justice folks have […]
Posts Tagged ‘ecopolitics’
“clean” coal
Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, Politics, tagged coal mining, ecopolitics, energy, Obama on January 28, 2010 | 3 Comments »
climate rage
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged Climategate, ecopolitics on January 12, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Just a quick follow-up to the previous post… After the East Anglia flare-up, Paul Krugman was right to ask what fuels the rage behind climate denialism. Anyone who has perused any popular web site on environmental and climate issues will be struck both by the numbers and the utter vehemence of the denialist community. Looking […]
“Climategate” follow-up
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged Climategate, ecopolitics on January 12, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Asked by an old and dear friend what I make of the recent “Climategate scandal,” I thought I’d do a quick check on sources summarizing the effect of the hacked East Anglia e-mails on climate change science. To my surprise, the Wikipedia article on the topic is probably as good a place to start as […]
Avatar: Panthea v. the Capitalist War Machine
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged ecocriticism, ecopolitics, film, Hollywood, ideology, paganism, pantheism on December 21, 2009 | 42 Comments »
New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat has it partly right: with its tree/Goddess-worshipping, tribal-shamanic-indigenous-hunter-gatherer-Daoist-pagan New-Age all-is-One-ism, Avatar is an expression of the longstanding American tradition of pantheist nature spirituality. Douthat thinks that that’s mainstream and that Hollywood is fully behind it, but it’s really still the insurgent religion to muscular Christianity and militarist nationalism. This is one of the rare films in which the Goddess (Mother Nature & the Natives) takes on the Capitalist War Machine and… well, you’ll have to see who wins.
But behind it all is the Spielberg factor, i.e., that the overt message (‘Man vs. Nature’, or rather high-modernist techno-capitalism vs. Body-Shop-nature-tech) is undercut by the implicit message that it is science, technology, and Hollywood magic — the Image Industry, the Spectacle — that enchants us and brings us what we really want. And they bring us new life, maybe eternal life […]
two democracies… (& planet compost)
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Politics, tagged activism, democracy, ecopolitics on December 19, 2009 | 3 Comments »
The responses to the final COP-15 “deal” from the environmental and social justice communities seem, at this point, to be largely negative. It’s a start, some acknowledge, but it’s pretty late to be starting, and it’s really pretty vacuous — a lost opportunity. My last post tried to put a positive spin on things by arguing that the events in Copenhagen reflect the tension between two models of democracy, and that there is hope for the future in the very crystallization of the second model. Let me expand on that a little.
Copenhagen: changing the climate of democracy
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged ecopolitics, Hardt & Negri, left politics, Politics on December 17, 2009 | 7 Comments »
What makes COP-15 a turning point is that a new set of connections are being forged in the heat of the confrontation of active citizens from around the world with the reality of global political-economic power structures. Paul Hawken’s “largest movement in the world,” the movement of movements made up of environmental, social justice, and indigenous rights civil society organizations — which isn’t a movement yet until it begins to move and act in a coordinated manner — and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “multitude” — the multiple and internally differentiated force that is, or that can become, capable of acting in common toward a global democracy — are both being born today, in the stark meeting of global justice activism with ecological reality.
From Cap & Trade to apocalypse
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged apocalypse, ecopolitics on December 2, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Annie Leonard’s Free Range Studios, whose viral video The Story of Stuff made some waves a little while back, has now produced a critique of the Cap and Trade system, some version of which is the most likely outcome of negotiations taking place in Copenhagen over the coming days. Over at Grist, David Roberts claims […]
radical orthodoxies, left & right. . .
Posted in Politics, tagged ecopolitics, Islam, political theory, radical orthodoxy, traditionalism, Zizek on November 13, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Slavoj Zizek’s engagement with theologians like radical orthodoxist John Milbank continues to perplex me a little bit, but having heard him speak a few days ago with death-of-God theologian Thomas Altizer at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Montreal left me reassured me that Zizek is far from the wildest (and zaniest) mind out […]
Ken Burns’ parks and nature’s nation
Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged documentaries, ecomedia, ecopolitics, environmental communication, national parks, pantheism on October 5, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Before Ken Burns’ 6-part, 12-hour series on the national parks was aired, a perceptive article by the LA Times’ Scott Timberg warned that it might be greeted by “sharp knives.” Ten years in the making, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, finally came to our television screens last week, and so far no sharp knives […]
Derrick Jensen’s Star Wars diet lite
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged Derrick Jensen, ecopolitics, media on September 21, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I agree with Mediacology‘s critique of Derrick Jensen’s ‘dark side’ — or at least of a certain linearity in his political vision — but I still find his Star Wars spoof pretty funny. And I think it’s good to have someone saying the things he says (like these). And his column does add some fire […]
pleasures of the (un)sustainable
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged Bataille, ecopolitics, hedonism, sustainability on September 2, 2009 | 3 Comments »
A propos yesterday’s post on transition culture and the Bataillian (versus Malthusian) thermodynamics of ecopolitics, the new issue of the Harvard Design Magazine, on “(Sustainability) + Pleasure,” turns out to be all over this topic. Wendy Steiner’s “The Joy of Less” introduces it well, positing a sensualism that’s quite happy with the “pleasure economy” of […]
Teddy Goldsmith & left-right ecopolitics
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged ecopolitics on September 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The obits have been coming in, albeit a little slowly, for Edward “Teddy” Goldsmith, founder of the fearless and influential British journal The Ecologist, co-founding member of Britain’s Green and Ecology parties, and publisher of the instrumental 1972 manifesto A Blueprint for Survival. Goldsmith, who died in his sleep on August 21, was a controversial […]
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