I have many friends who are despairing that, with Bernie Sanders’s exit from the presidential race, the United States has lost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to elect a leader who is honest, reliable, and completely untethered to the vested interests that keep our whole system careening towards catastrophe (climate change, ecological collapse, mass extinction, out-of-control AI, […]
Posts Tagged ‘sustainability’
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 »
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:
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 — […]
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 […]
Sustainability bottleneck (or, No one here gets out alive?)
Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries, tagged Anthropocene, astrobiology, Buddhism, cosmology, sustainability, sustainability bottleneck on January 22, 2015 | 10 Comments »
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 […]
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 […]
more on complex sustainabilities
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged ecology, sustainability on February 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The “Complex History” mentioned below was published on Archis.org, which also features an interesting essay on architecture’s “Counter-Histories of Sustainability”. Meanwhile, on the eve of the Oscars it’s interesting to note that globe-trotting green architect Bill McDonough has been making inroads with the Hollywood eco-set, all the while losing some of his sheen as a […]
a pretty complex history of sustainability…
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged ecology, sustainability on February 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Every grad student in environmental studies (and related areas) should be quizzed on this map: The Complex History of Sustainability. Departments could be evaluated based on how well they cover the spectrum portrayed in it… Within reason, of course — we don’t really need an eco-Nazi, a global warming conspiracy theorist, or even a libertarian […]