The Coming Ecological Epoch: Sim Van der Ryn at EDRA [Dispatches] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Down to Earth?: A Crisis of the Environmental Crisis
Down to Earth?: A Crisis of the Environmental Crisis, 2022
Are we down to earth in our connection to earth? If we are environmentalists concerned with "environmental crisis," then does our guiding notion of "environment" (and the by necessity implied notion of a center-most often with a human there) get closely enough to the earth? Departing from either localism or cosmopolitanism in thinking earth, globe, and the environment, this chapter aims at a theoretical critique of the very notion of "environment" as the guiding notion of what the expression "environmental crisis" spells. Perhaps, "environmental crisis" is less a description of "our" situation, and more an indication of a problem formulated not strongly enough? The notion of "environment" and "environmental crisis" predetermines the currently regnant approaches to global warming, air and soil pollution, nature preservation, and reducing the human impact on the environment. At the same time, the notion of "environment" steers its adherents toward the modern natural science as both () the ultimate contributor to the environmental crisis due to technology and () the ultimate instrument to save us from the apocalyptic swirl, in which technology drives humanity. Linking environmental crisis to science, which is only an instrument of both its creation and management, forecloses a more fundamental human dimension of that crisis. This essay asks to attend to one element of that more fundamental dimension.
ECOHUM I / NIES X "Rethinking Environmental Consciousness"
ECOHUM I / NIES X: "Rethinking Environmental Consciousness" symposium booklet This symposium sought to provide a fruitful series of cross-disciplinary conversations that could help suggest renewed or innovative theorizations of what it means to be environmentally conscious in the world today, as well as in our shared pasts and common futures. The symposium "Rethinking Environmental Consciousness" aimed to engage a number of provocative upheavals in and reassessments of the ways we think about ecologies, identities, communities, nationalities, borderlines, interactions, temporalities, spatiality, nostalgia, risks and agencies, to name some of the preoccupations that have driven new waves of scholarship, theory and criticism within the wider field of environmental humanities. The following three sub-themes provided a structure within which the interdisciplinary contributions to the symposium might be contained and contextualized: the Anthropocene, material ecocriticism, and transnational environmental consciousness. As the Anthropocene concept has already inspired and necessitated a thorough rethinking of environmental consciousness, this symposium sought to explore many varied and rapidly multiplying iterations of this concept. As Ursula Heise argues, the Anthropocene represents a watershed moment in environmentalism, a time in which we might cease longing for pristine situations of the past to which we hope to return, and instead begin to think about the possible futures of a nature that, for good or ill, will include the human. Other critics are more pessimistically concerned that the very vastness and vagueness of the concept of the Anthropocene may lend it too easily to usurpation into the discourse of the status quo. The central premise of material ecocriticism – the vibrancy of matter, or matter’s agency – has already inspired several ecocritics to look into underexplored aspects to the interplay between humans and the nonhuman world. Of equal importance is the dawning awareness that there are exchanges of agentic matter washing across the membranes in the cells of human bodies, as succinctly articulated in Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “transcorporeality.” Material ecocritical concepts open up for new ways of approaching issues of environmental justice, of addressing the temporal and spatial complexities of slow violence (to use Rob Nixon's influential metaphor), of understanding our porous bodies in their tactile intra-actions with our immediate and extended environment, of engaging with the particular risk scenarios of the Anthropocene, and, as Alaimo asserts, for rethinking our ethical commitment and orientation in the world in posthuman terms. In a historical perspective, the long unfolding of environmental consciousness has to a large extent taken place as a transnational exchange. Europe for its part has been home to some of the most influential philosophers inspiring environmental thought, from Heidegger to Arne Næss, whose concept of deep ecology has crossed and recrossed the Atlantic in steadily multiplying iterations and perhaps more than any other philosophical current animated the first wave of ecocritics. However, the transnational (or in these cited cases the trans-Atlantic/Pacific) must also be understood as a site of contestation and division, a space where environmental initiatives break down, and political action is as liable to founder as flourish. In recent years, while exchange of ideas concerning the environment has been substantial and ongoing internationally, so have disagreements and the divergences in environmental consciousness, behavior and policy in all hemispheres of the planet. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE CONFERENCE PLANNERS AND CONVENORS Steven Hartman, Professor of English, Coordinator of The Eco-Humanities Hub (ECOHUM) and Chair of the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) Christian Hummelsund Voie, PhD Candidate in English Anders Olsson, Docent in English Reinhard Hennig, PhD Researcher in Environmental Humanities, English and ECOHUM DOCTORAL ASSISTANTS Michaela Castellanos, PhD Candidate in English Nuno Marques, PhD Candidate in English .
“Displacing the Human: Representing Ecological Crisis on Stage”
A chapter in the edited volume "Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance", eds. . Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine. Co-authored with Kirsten Shepherd-Barr., 2022
The visual iconography of the COVID-19 global pandemic has been striking. Every night for at least eighteen months, BBC News showed an enormous backdrop graphic of the virus, blown up to grotesque proportions that dwarfed the news presenter and made its crown-like protein structures clearly visible. The image served as an instantaneous shorthand for two otherwise 'invisible', near-incomprehensible scales of existence: the microscopic virus itself, and the unprecedented worldwide health crisis it caused. Our iconography for climate change is rather different, typically resorting to the more familiar scale of animal and landscape. Several recognisable images recur on our pages and screens: polar bears stranded on shrinking ice; sea birds drenched in oil spills; vast swathes of the rainforest burned or cut down. But rarely do we see images of climate change that take place beyond the more easily conceived human scale, at the level of microorganisms analogous to the icon of the COVID-19 virus, or on the vastly larger scales of global CO 2 emissions or ozone layer depletion: 'the new kind of incommensurability that is being forced on us by our ecological predicament'. 1 Endearing, easily
Metactritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2017
Among eco studies, the Anthropocene theory is by far the most unusual in the field of humanities. First and foremost, it differs from the Eco-Marxist criticism in that that its grounding is not in critical theory, but in the scientifically traceable changes in the environment, which are then re-politicised. Secondly, its claims pose a certain pessimism, in contrast with the activist optimism that we can still change something about our future as a species. In the Anthropocene, humans have changed the face of the Earth in so much that it is irreversible, the industrial man versus nature paradigm is now obsolete and replaced by man as a force of nature. Then why is this part of the “studies” series, what critical insight can humanities impose on the gloom data?
"Ecological Thinking and the Crisis of the Earth"
Journal of Environmental Thought and Education
This text was originally written for the tenth anniversary issue of the Journal of Environmental Thought and Education (Japan). This is an expanded and revised version (June 20, 2018). Links to several earlier versions are included.
Inhabiting the Anthropocene: Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Times of Crisis
European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes, 2022
Reconciling the seemingly incompatible concepts of the Anthropocene and the everyday, this paper argues and demonstrates that (1) despite the disconcerting effects of its truly planetary scale, the Anthropocene is not absent or invisible in the realm of everyday life; (2) the everyday is not simply a neutral background solely meant for times of stability, but it is in fact a dynamic system that responds to various scales of change and absorbs the new and the unfamiliar into the familiar. Moreover, the paper also shows that the ways in which change is lived and navigated on an everyday scale, in times of the covid-19 pandemic and climate change, are a unique field for aesthetic enquiry. Everyday material objects such as tote bags, water bottles, masks, and habits like working from home and secondhand wearing are discussed as examples of the everyday experience of relating to the Anthropocene and its crises.
Ecological Art: A Call for Visionary Intervention in a Time of Crisis
Leonardo, 2012
At a time when the world is beset by ecological crises, ecological art offers inspiration, insight and innovation. This essay provides an overview of the artistic and scientific roots of the practice and illustrates the significant role that ecoart can play in the formation, development and promulgation of a culture of sustainability
Humanity at the crossroads: The globalization of environmental crisis
Globalizations, 2005
The present-day global set of local sovereign states is not capable of saving the biosphere from man-made pollution or of conserving the biosphere's non-replaceable natural resources Will mankind murder Mother Earth or will he redeem her? This is the enigmatic question which now confronts (sic) Man. (Toynbee, 1976, pp. 593, 596) The facts are plain and uncontestable: the biosphere is finite, nongrowing, closed (except for the constant input of solar energy), and constrained by the laws of thermodynamics. Any subsystem, such as the economy, must at some point cease growing and adapt itself to a dynamic equilibrium, something like a steady state. (Daly, 2005, p. 80) As described in this special issue, the world is facing a series of environmental crises that reach into every corner of the globe. This is primarily due to the unprecedented growth of the human population and the world economy over the past 60 years. In the 50 years between 1950 and 2000 the world economy grew 2.5 times in terms of GDP. This was mostly driven by the exceptional population growth pushing humanity's number from 2.5 billion in 1950 to over 6 billion in 2000 (McNeill, 2000, pp. 6-8). The environmental, social and economic challenges that this poses are all interconnected and can not be treated separately. To help to understand the profound changes that are affecting the global environment, the authors in this special issue of Globalizations provide a rich palette of topics addressing the variety of environmental crises now facing humanity. Humanity at a crossroads Humanity, and with it all life on earth, stands at a crossroads. That was the message of a recent special issue of the Scientific American (2005) devoted to the global state of the environment and the future prospect of avoiding environmental catastrophe. These authors, discussing population pressure, poverty, species diversity and environmental economics, among other issues, warn that if we continue to ignore the signs of serious