{"id":1007,"date":"2008-12-01T02:36:23","date_gmt":"2008-12-01T07:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/01\/the-idea-behind-this-blog-original-version\/"},"modified":"2008-12-01T02:36:23","modified_gmt":"2008-12-01T07:36:23","slug":"the-idea-behind-this-blog-original-version","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/01\/the-idea-behind-this-blog-original-version\/","title":{"rendered":"the idea behind this blog (original version)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every blog has its reason for being. The idea behind this one was originally to serve as a forum for thinking in and around the Environmental Thought and Culture Graduate Concentration<\/a>, which I coordinate at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont.<\/p>\n

But that idea mutated as I realized that there isn’t yet a place that acts as a forum for a kind of alternative tradition of thinking about nature, culture, process, politics, and the spiritual (in the broadest sense of the word) that William Connolly<\/a> calls “immanent naturalism”<\/em><\/b> and that he, among others, associates with innovative activity in environmental and political theory and activism today. That’s part of the inspiration for this blog, so some of the thinkers and ideas that make up that loose “tradition” may be popping up a lot, if not in person at least in reference.<\/p>\n

(For definitions of terms used here, see “Immanence” and the other links under “About” at the top of the right column on the Main page of this blog. Connolly’s own writings on immanent naturalism include sections of Neuropolitics <\/a>and Capitalism and Christianity, American Style<\/a>; follow the highlights in the linked book excerpts. The general idea is that the world itself is richer, more mysterious, and more radically open – to change, emergent complexity, and innovation – than we tend to think, and that by opening ourselves to that richness and mystery, we extend our capacities for deepening the experience of life for ourselves and those we interact with. In a sense, immanent naturalism is another term for an earth- and life-embracing ethic that conceives of the universe as fundamentally open and pluralistic, and that refrains from any form of closure including the closure that thinks it’s figured it all out. Connolly writes of being guided by a “visceral gratitude” and “care for a protean diversity of being,” and his various writings work out the implications of what that might mean for politics and culture.)<\/p>\n

But the more practical goal of this blog is to be a means of communication about issues at the intersection of environmental, political, and cultural theory<\/strong>, especially in the disciplinary interstices inhabited by such fungal intellectual growths as ecocriticism <\/a>, political ecology<\/a>, green cultural studies, eco-poststructuralism, environmental communication<\/a>, and so on (biosemiotics, geophilosophy<\/a>, animist liberation theology — invent your own neologisms). Where culture meets nature meets consciousness…<\/p>\n

So I think of it as a resource: for grad students, for fellow scholars working in these areas, for lay folks interested in these ideas (the boundary between scholarship and the wider world of public thinking gets ever more more blurred thanks to the internet), and for myself – to keep working and communicating outside of the usual framework of publishing, research, etc. A blog is, understandably, more laid-back, unrefereed, and stream-of-consciousness than other forms of intellectual work, so this one may get bulletin-boardy and diaryish, or just inactive, at times.<\/p>\n

A blog also, like an idea, is only successful to the extent that it grows, connects, germinates, and takes on a life of its own. This one will start out as just me posting, and we’ll see what happens next. The internet is littered with the detritus of dead blogs and broken links, and if this one goes that route, so be it. But hopefully it won’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every blog has its reason for being. The idea behind this one was originally to serve as a forum for thinking in and around the Environmental Thought and Culture Graduate Concentration, which I coordinate at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont. But that idea mutated as I realized that there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688385],"tags":[201,4410],"class_list":["post-1007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog_stuff","tag-immanence","tag-immanent-naturalism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-gf","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1034,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/26\/immanent-naturalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":1007,"position":0},"title":"Immanent naturalism","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Immanent naturalism\" is political theorist William E. Connolly's term for a tradition of thought that doesn't seek ultimate explanations, ahistorical forces, or transcendental frameworks to give meaning to the world; rather, it finds meaning enough in the world as it is experienced by mortals like us. The general idea is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1033,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/26\/about-this-blog\/","url_meta":{"origin":1007,"position":1},"title":"About this blog","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"An online space for environmental cultural theory, this weblog has two primary objectives: (1) To communicate about issues at the intersection of ecological, political, and cultural thought and practice, especially at the interdisciplinary junctures forming in and around the fields of ecocriticism , green cultural studies, political ecology, environmental communication,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1025,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/26\/to-come-on-this-blog\/","url_meta":{"origin":1007,"position":2},"title":"to come on this blog…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Over time, I\u2019ll be posting snippets of work-in-progress here that arise from the two manuscripts I\u2019m currently working on. The first of these manuscripts pulls together cultural case studies I\u2019ve done over the years into a conceptually unified argument for an immanent-naturalist \u201cmulticultural political ecology,\u201d while the second examines cinema\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1015,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/05\/book-list\/","url_meta":{"origin":1007,"position":3},"title":"book list","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"In \"immanent naturalism\"","block_context":{"text":"immanent naturalism","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/tag\/immanent-naturalism\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1153,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/11\/14\/stuart-kauffman-coming-to-vermont\/","url_meta":{"origin":1007,"position":4},"title":"Stuart Kauffman coming to Vermont","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm happy to share the news (a little belatedly) that complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman will be leaving his position as director of the University of Calgary's Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics to take a position here with the University of Vermont's Complex Systems Center, which, according to Grad College dean\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1105,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/07\/28\/spinozas-parakeets-sparrows-roses\/","url_meta":{"origin":1007,"position":5},"title":"Spinoza’s parakeets, sparrows, & roses","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 28, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Today, my last day in Amsterdam, I finally made it to the monument unveiled last year honoring Baruch de Spinoza. Since the talk I gave at the ISSRNC conference here was on immanence (specifically, Charles Taylor's concept of the 'immanent frame' and William Connolly's and others' immanent naturalism), there was\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"3272263118_c6ff7e5b8c.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/07\/3272263118_c6ff7e5b8c.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}