{"id":7814,"date":"2014-09-13T00:15:26","date_gmt":"2014-09-13T05:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=7814"},"modified":"2014-09-13T00:15:26","modified_gmt":"2014-09-13T05:15:26","slug":"the-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/09\/13\/the-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"The challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

The closing panel of this conference featured Winona LaDuke, Tim Ingold, Bron Taylor, environmental epidemiologist Colin Soskolne (who convened the preceding panel on public and environmental health regimes), and myself. We were each asked to provide five minutes of summary comments on the big issues of our concern (related to the conference). The following were the notes I prepared. <\/em><\/p>\n

We all have issues to concern ourselves with — individual, local, community, regional, national, and global issues — and I don’t want to be the one to tell people that their issues are less important than a\u00a0global issue defined by a distant group of scientists. They are not. But in some sense, it’s precisely such an issue —\u00a0climate change and its associated social and ecological disruptions (biodiversity loss, massive social dislocation, and so on) — that is the one that we all face\u00a0in our near future, and that will serve as a globally unifying issue for decades to come.<\/p>\n

The challenge is for those of us who are aware of this to articulate a coherent and enabling,<\/em>\u00a0not disabling, understanding of it: a vision\u00a0of what we can do — politically, economically, technologically, culturally, and spiritually — to deal with it. This involves three things:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ceasing the activities that create it.<\/em>\u00a0Most immediately and directly, this means bringing an end to the profligate and increasingly desperate forms of fossil fuel use. The extreme-extraction phase of carbon capitalism is, as Winona LaDuke argued today, the option of an addict gone haywire. It needs to be stopped.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Enabling the alternatives<\/em> that will make\u00a0survival more likely. This means building the\u00a0infrastructure for a smart, renewable, ecological, humane, and just society. There are plenty\u00a0of good ideas and practices we know about here; the will to put them into practice is curtailed by the will to stick to business-as-usual.<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Enabling social responses<\/em> to the crisis, specifically through rectifying the social and political injustices and inequities<\/em>\u00a0that disable<\/em> appropriate responses in the world today, and through crafting and communicating an attractive vision<\/em> of the result.<\/p>\n

Those are immense challenges, and it’s up to everyone to determine (and to teachers and academics to help their students determine) what they do well — well enough for it to make for a satisfying life-path\u00a0— that would be congruent with these three shifts and not run against them.<\/p>\n

My own particular interests\/contributions run along three lines:<\/p>\n

1) \u00a0 \u00a0The philosophical,<\/em> which I would characterize as\u00a0unthinking<\/em> the problematic paradigm, which we can characterize in different ways, e.g., as carbon capitalism, Tim Ingold\u2019s History of the West, etc.; and, contrarily, thinking<\/em>\u00a0a more appropriate paradigm, one that recognizes and values the agency and relationality of all things and our appropriate place among them.<\/p>\n

2) \u00a0 \u00a0The communicative<\/em>, which for me means understanding and developing the most appropriate use of available media: through such things as media democracy efforts, but also through the search for what Werner Herzog calls \u201cadequate images\u201d for the situation, including images of the crisis and images of the possibilities for addressing it.<\/p>\n

3) \u00a0 \u00a0Action<\/em> within the specific contexts in which we’re involved — in which we have a citizenly capacity — toward building the political and cultural will and capacity to make these changes.<\/p>\n

These strategies, and the images and narratives that would communicate them, don’t really have a name. For the moment at least, I believe that “climate justice”<\/em> comes closer than any other. I’m not sure that it conveys the sense of hope and vision that is needed, but it’s a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The closing panel of this conference featured Winona LaDuke, Tim Ingold, Bron Taylor, environmental epidemiologist Colin Soskolne (who convened the preceding panel on public and environmental health regimes), and myself. We were each asked to provide five minutes of summary comments on the big issues of our concern (related to the conference). The following were […]<\/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":[691215],"tags":[399,4448,123531,123518],"class_list":["post-7814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics_postpolitics","tag-climate-justice","tag-ecopolitics","tag-environmental-crisis","tag-under-western-skies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-222","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2971,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/03\/17\/international-association-for-environmental-philosophy-cfp\/","url_meta":{"origin":7814,"position":0},"title":"cfp: Int’l Assoc. for Environmental Philosophy","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 17, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The IAEP picks a nice image for this conference... Spirit tracks on Mars DEADLINE EXTENDED: The International Association for Environmental Philosophy has extended the deadline for submissions proposing papers and panels for its fifteenth annual meeting, to be held October 23 and 24, 2011 at the Sheraton Society Hill in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/03\/MER_A_Sol62-275x166.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5742,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/04\/12\/iaep-call-for-papers\/","url_meta":{"origin":7814,"position":1},"title":"IAEP call for papers","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"CALL FOR PAPERS Meeting of The International Association for Environmental Philosophy at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association\u2014Eastern Division December 27-30, 2012, Marriott Atlanta Marquis, Atlanta, GA The International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP) invites paper proposals in the form of full (1-2 page) abstracts. Proposals for either\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":5128,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/08\/01\/environmental-humanities-the-challenge-of-multidisciplinarity\/","url_meta":{"origin":7814,"position":2},"title":"Environmental Humanities & the Challenge of Multidisciplinarity","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 1, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"CALL FOR PAPERS: Environmental Humanities and the Challenge of Multidisciplinarity A Workshop at the 13th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, \u201cThe Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling \u2018The Three Narratives\u2019\u2014Art, Science, and Philosophy\u201d University of Cyprus, Nicosia July 2 \u2013 6, 2012 THEME OF\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":2894,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/03\/08\/cfp-rethinking-time-ecology\/","url_meta":{"origin":7814,"position":3},"title":"cfp: Rethinking Time & Ecology","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 8, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue of Environmental Philosophy THEME: Temporal Environments: Rethinking Time and Ecology Details: GUEST EDITORS: Jacob Metcalf (UC Santa Cruz) and Thom van Dooren (University of Technology, Sydney) Place and space have received substantial attention in environmental philosophy in recent decades. Theorists from a variety of fields\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7425,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/03\/23\/scms-media-environment-group\/","url_meta":{"origin":7814,"position":4},"title":"SCMS Media & Environment group","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 23, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The Media and Environment Scholarly Interest Group\u00a0just won the prize for best attended business meeting at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Or\u00a0so we were informed by the SCMS interest group liaison present at the meeting. This year's SCMS featured what to my mind was by far the largest\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8049,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/03\/09\/appearances\/","url_meta":{"origin":7814,"position":5},"title":"Appearances","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"My review of Graham Harman's recent book\u00a0Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, has been published online in the journal\u00a0Global Discourse. It's part of a book review symposium, which will be accompanied (in the print issue) by the author's reply to his\u00a0interlocutors. 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