Tim O’Riordan and Tim Lenton
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780197265536
- eISBN:
- 9780191760327
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197265536.003.0025
- Subject:
- Political Science, Environmental Politics
The scientific world recognizes the Anthropocene, where the human hand appears to overcome natural cycles of energy, chemical processes, and land use. We may be approaching planetary boundaries of ...
More
The scientific world recognizes the Anthropocene, where the human hand appears to overcome natural cycles of energy, chemical processes, and land use. We may be approaching planetary boundaries of natural tolerance, though these may be more regional than local. Yet the floors of any safe operating space need to offer scope for redistributing dignity, income, opportunity, social rights, and capabilities in a world of limiting ceilings. This is a difficult message to deliver in a time of unprecedented austerity and unemployment, with reducing public expenditures, falling real wealth, and rising household costs. Three scenarios are offered: more of the same with an inbuilt political and technological lock-in; a mix of resilience adaptations in a wide range of institutions and technologies along with associated social value shifts as crises deepen and become more observable; and a full-throated transformation to a more socially just and ecologically robust planet based on well-being and betterment, and the profound role of investing in social capital, capability building, and individual and collective flourishing. But this vision may not be possible for the very reason that tipping points will overwhelm us when we have no learnt capacities to accommodate and to avoid.Less
The scientific world recognizes the Anthropocene, where the human hand appears to overcome natural cycles of energy, chemical processes, and land use. We may be approaching planetary boundaries of natural tolerance, though these may be more regional than local. Yet the floors of any safe operating space need to offer scope for redistributing dignity, income, opportunity, social rights, and capabilities in a world of limiting ceilings. This is a difficult message to deliver in a time of unprecedented austerity and unemployment, with reducing public expenditures, falling real wealth, and rising household costs. Three scenarios are offered: more of the same with an inbuilt political and technological lock-in; a mix of resilience adaptations in a wide range of institutions and technologies along with associated social value shifts as crises deepen and become more observable; and a full-throated transformation to a more socially just and ecologically robust planet based on well-being and betterment, and the profound role of investing in social capital, capability building, and individual and collective flourishing. But this vision may not be possible for the very reason that tipping points will overwhelm us when we have no learnt capacities to accommodate and to avoid.
John Patrick Walsh
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786941633
- eISBN:
- 9781789629200
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941633.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book argues that contemporary Haitian literature historicizes the political and environmental problems brought to the surface by the 2010 earthquake by building on texts of earlier generations, ...
More
This book argues that contemporary Haitian literature historicizes the political and environmental problems brought to the surface by the 2010 earthquake by building on texts of earlier generations, notably at the end of the Duvalier era and its aftermath. Haitian writers have made profound contributions to debates about the converging paths of political crises and natural catastrophes, yet their writings on the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism are often neglected in heated debates about environmental futures. The earthquake only exacerbated this contradiction. Despite the fact that Haitian authors have long treated the connections between political violence, social and economic precariousness, and ecological degradation, in media coverage around the world, the earthquake would have suddenly exposed scandalous conditions on the ground in Haiti. Informed by Haitian studies and models of postcolonial ecocriticism, the book conceives of literature as an “eco-archive,” or a body of texts that depicts ecological change over time and its impact on social and environmental justice. Focusing equally on established and less well-known authors, this study contends that the eco-archive challenges future-oriented, universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene and the global refugee crisis with portrayals of different forms and paths of migration and refuge within Haiti and around the Americas.Less
This book argues that contemporary Haitian literature historicizes the political and environmental problems brought to the surface by the 2010 earthquake by building on texts of earlier generations, notably at the end of the Duvalier era and its aftermath. Haitian writers have made profound contributions to debates about the converging paths of political crises and natural catastrophes, yet their writings on the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism are often neglected in heated debates about environmental futures. The earthquake only exacerbated this contradiction. Despite the fact that Haitian authors have long treated the connections between political violence, social and economic precariousness, and ecological degradation, in media coverage around the world, the earthquake would have suddenly exposed scandalous conditions on the ground in Haiti. Informed by Haitian studies and models of postcolonial ecocriticism, the book conceives of literature as an “eco-archive,” or a body of texts that depicts ecological change over time and its impact on social and environmental justice. Focusing equally on established and less well-known authors, this study contends that the eco-archive challenges future-oriented, universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene and the global refugee crisis with portrayals of different forms and paths of migration and refuge within Haiti and around the Americas.
Robert Markley
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042751
- eISBN:
- 9780252051616
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042751.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Kim Stanley Robinson is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read and influential science-fiction writers of our era. In dicussing eighteen of his novels published since 1984 and a ...
More
Kim Stanley Robinson is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read and influential science-fiction writers of our era. In dicussing eighteen of his novels published since 1984 and a selection of his short fiction, this study explores the significance of his work in reshaping contemporary literature. Three of the chapters are devoted to Robinson’s major trilogies: the Orange County trilogy (1984-90), the Mars trilogy (1992-96), and the Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-07). Two other chapters consider his groundbreaking alternative histories, including “The Lucky Strike” (1984), The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), and Shaman (2014), and his future histories set among colonies in the solar system, notably Galileo’s Dream (2009) and 2312 (2012). The concluding chapter examines Robinson’s most recent novels Aurora (2015) and New York 2140 (2017). In interviews, Robinson describes his fiction as weaving together, in various combinations, Marxism, ecology, and Buddhist thought, and all of his novels explore how we might imagine forms of utopian political action. His novels—from the Mars trilogy to New York 2140—offer a range of possible futures that chart humankind’s uneven progress, often over centuries, toward the greening of science, technology, economics, and politics. Robinson filters our knowledge of the past and our imagination of possible futures through two superimposed lenses: the ecological fate of the Earth (or other planets) and the far-reaching consequences of moral, political, and socioeconomic decisions of individuals, often scientists and artists, caught up in world or solar-systemic events. In this respect, his fiction charts a collective struggle to think beyond the contradictions of historical existence, and beyond our locations in time, culture, and geography.Less
Kim Stanley Robinson is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read and influential science-fiction writers of our era. In dicussing eighteen of his novels published since 1984 and a selection of his short fiction, this study explores the significance of his work in reshaping contemporary literature. Three of the chapters are devoted to Robinson’s major trilogies: the Orange County trilogy (1984-90), the Mars trilogy (1992-96), and the Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-07). Two other chapters consider his groundbreaking alternative histories, including “The Lucky Strike” (1984), The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), and Shaman (2014), and his future histories set among colonies in the solar system, notably Galileo’s Dream (2009) and 2312 (2012). The concluding chapter examines Robinson’s most recent novels Aurora (2015) and New York 2140 (2017). In interviews, Robinson describes his fiction as weaving together, in various combinations, Marxism, ecology, and Buddhist thought, and all of his novels explore how we might imagine forms of utopian political action. His novels—from the Mars trilogy to New York 2140—offer a range of possible futures that chart humankind’s uneven progress, often over centuries, toward the greening of science, technology, economics, and politics. Robinson filters our knowledge of the past and our imagination of possible futures through two superimposed lenses: the ecological fate of the Earth (or other planets) and the far-reaching consequences of moral, political, and socioeconomic decisions of individuals, often scientists and artists, caught up in world or solar-systemic events. In this respect, his fiction charts a collective struggle to think beyond the contradictions of historical existence, and beyond our locations in time, culture, and geography.
Frédéric Neyrat
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282586
- eISBN:
- 9780823284931
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282586.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to ...
More
The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—which takes the entire Earth—in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions—as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. Far from merely being the fruit of the spirit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative has been championed by the theorists of the constructivist turn (be them ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, or accelerationist to name a few) who have also called into question the great divide between nature and culture; but in the aftermath of the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature was built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by the technologies, human needs, and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden “a-naturalism” denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology can hardly present itself in opposition to the geo-constructivist project, which also claims that there is no nature and that nothing will prevent human beings from replacing Earth with an Earth 2.0.Less
The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—which takes the entire Earth—in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions—as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. Far from merely being the fruit of the spirit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative has been championed by the theorists of the constructivist turn (be them ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, or accelerationist to name a few) who have also called into question the great divide between nature and culture; but in the aftermath of the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature was built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by the technologies, human needs, and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden “a-naturalism” denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology can hardly present itself in opposition to the geo-constructivist project, which also claims that there is no nature and that nothing will prevent human beings from replacing Earth with an Earth 2.0.
Anson W. Mackay
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199535095
- eISBN:
- 9780191715754
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199535095.003.0001
- Subject:
- Biology, Evolutionary Biology / Genetics
The Holocene is the Earth's most recent interglacial, which began approximately 11,500 years ago. Environmental change across this interval and the preceding Late Glacial, driven by factors such as ...
More
The Holocene is the Earth's most recent interglacial, which began approximately 11,500 years ago. Environmental change across this interval and the preceding Late Glacial, driven by factors such as orbital forcing and solar variability, can be reconstructed from archives with annually-deposited layers or annual growth layers and through the use of empirical and physical models. The early Holocene climatic optimum was an interval of warmer climate than the present day, and was followed by orbitally-related cooling which began to occur in the last 4,000–3,000 years ago. Over the last c.1200 years, three distinct climate phases are apparent in palaeo-records: the Medieval Warm Period (Ad 800–1300), the Little Ice Age (14th–16th century Ad to Ad 1850), and recent warming since AD 1850. Anthropogenic influence on global ecosystems has increased steadily since the Late Glacial, culminating in a modern-day system for which few analogues for past environments now exist.Less
The Holocene is the Earth's most recent interglacial, which began approximately 11,500 years ago. Environmental change across this interval and the preceding Late Glacial, driven by factors such as orbital forcing and solar variability, can be reconstructed from archives with annually-deposited layers or annual growth layers and through the use of empirical and physical models. The early Holocene climatic optimum was an interval of warmer climate than the present day, and was followed by orbitally-related cooling which began to occur in the last 4,000–3,000 years ago. Over the last c.1200 years, three distinct climate phases are apparent in palaeo-records: the Medieval Warm Period (Ad 800–1300), the Little Ice Age (14th–16th century Ad to Ad 1850), and recent warming since AD 1850. Anthropogenic influence on global ecosystems has increased steadily since the Late Glacial, culminating in a modern-day system for which few analogues for past environments now exist.
Andrew R. H. Thompson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813165998
- eISBN:
- 9780813166698
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813165998.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This concluding chapter places the process of critical examination and transformation of imaginations in the larger context of the moral life of the church. This process is a central feature of a ...
More
This concluding chapter places the process of critical examination and transformation of imaginations in the larger context of the moral life of the church. This process is a central feature of a pattern for theocentric moral action: a set of concrete practices intended to enact and sustain the theocentric imaginations described throughout the book. The author responds to the criticism that this approach leads only to resignation and undermines any possibility of a strong prophetic challenge. He does this, first, by arguing that this criticism misunderstands key features of Niebuhr’s position and represents the absolutizing of the relative against which he warns, and second, by calling for careful and active attention to the places of Appalachia—that is, by really loving the mountains. He argues that viewing MTR as representative of a new geological epoch—the anthropocene—may be the strongest theocentric challenge to the practice. Finally, he offers some specific guidelines for an ethical response to MTR.Less
This concluding chapter places the process of critical examination and transformation of imaginations in the larger context of the moral life of the church. This process is a central feature of a pattern for theocentric moral action: a set of concrete practices intended to enact and sustain the theocentric imaginations described throughout the book. The author responds to the criticism that this approach leads only to resignation and undermines any possibility of a strong prophetic challenge. He does this, first, by arguing that this criticism misunderstands key features of Niebuhr’s position and represents the absolutizing of the relative against which he warns, and second, by calling for careful and active attention to the places of Appalachia—that is, by really loving the mountains. He argues that viewing MTR as representative of a new geological epoch—the anthropocene—may be the strongest theocentric challenge to the practice. Finally, he offers some specific guidelines for an ethical response to MTR.
Matthew C. Hunter
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226390253
- eISBN:
- 9780226390390
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226390390.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century—and how they can alter our ...
More
Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century—and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today. In the 1670s, experimental philosophers at the early Royal Society of London were studying the visual effects of dynamic combustibles. By the 1770s, that chemical volatility had become central to ambitious paintings in the circles of Sir Joshua Reynolds, premier portraitist and first president of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts. Valued by some critics for changing in time (and thus, for prompting intellectual reflection on the nature of time), Reynolds’s unstable chemistry also prompted new techniques of chemical replication among Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and other leading industrialists. In turn, those replicas of chemically decaying academic paintings were rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century and claimed as origin points in the history of photography. Tracing the arc of chemically produced and reproduced art from the 1670s through the 1860s, this book reconsiders early photography by situating it in relationship to Reynolds’s replicated paintings and the literal engines of British industry. By following the chemicals, Painting with Fire remaps familiar stories about academic painting and pictorial experiment amid the industrialization of chemical knowledge.Less
Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century—and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today. In the 1670s, experimental philosophers at the early Royal Society of London were studying the visual effects of dynamic combustibles. By the 1770s, that chemical volatility had become central to ambitious paintings in the circles of Sir Joshua Reynolds, premier portraitist and first president of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts. Valued by some critics for changing in time (and thus, for prompting intellectual reflection on the nature of time), Reynolds’s unstable chemistry also prompted new techniques of chemical replication among Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and other leading industrialists. In turn, those replicas of chemically decaying academic paintings were rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century and claimed as origin points in the history of photography. Tracing the arc of chemically produced and reproduced art from the 1670s through the 1860s, this book reconsiders early photography by situating it in relationship to Reynolds’s replicated paintings and the literal engines of British industry. By following the chemicals, Painting with Fire remaps familiar stories about academic painting and pictorial experiment amid the industrialization of chemical knowledge.
Irus Braverman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520298842
- eISBN:
- 9780520970830
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520298842.001.0001
- Subject:
- Environmental Science, Environmental Studies
Coral Whisperers captures a key moment in the history of coral reef science and of environmental conservation at large. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews,the book documents the physical, ...
More
Coral Whisperers captures a key moment in the history of coral reef science and of environmental conservation at large. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews,the book documents the physical, intellectual, and emotional plight of coral scientists and their painstaking deliberations as they struggle to understand and save corals from what many of these scientistshave come to see as the corals’inevitable catastrophic future on a rapidly warming and otherwise assaulted planet.We are here in the thick of contemporary coral science, and we can feel its urgency: the experts, who are witnessing massive coral death around the planet, both grieve for this death and must simultaneously narrate it. Yet despite the desperate realities confronting corals in the Anthropocene, coral scientists have not given up hope. Through their engaging narratives, corals emerge as a sign, a measure, and a way out of the imminent catastrophe facinglife on earth.Less
Coral Whisperers captures a key moment in the history of coral reef science and of environmental conservation at large. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews,the book documents the physical, intellectual, and emotional plight of coral scientists and their painstaking deliberations as they struggle to understand and save corals from what many of these scientistshave come to see as the corals’inevitable catastrophic future on a rapidly warming and otherwise assaulted planet.We are here in the thick of contemporary coral science, and we can feel its urgency: the experts, who are witnessing massive coral death around the planet, both grieve for this death and must simultaneously narrate it. Yet despite the desperate realities confronting corals in the Anthropocene, coral scientists have not given up hope. Through their engaging narratives, corals emerge as a sign, a measure, and a way out of the imminent catastrophe facinglife on earth.
Kari Weil
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226686233
- eISBN:
- 9780226686400
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226686400.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
The book concludes with a brief reflection on the importance of paying attention to our relationship to creatures on which we once depended, like horses, especially in the age of the Anthropocene ...
More
The book concludes with a brief reflection on the importance of paying attention to our relationship to creatures on which we once depended, like horses, especially in the age of the Anthropocene (with reference to Delacroix's depictions of horses as historical actors).Less
The book concludes with a brief reflection on the importance of paying attention to our relationship to creatures on which we once depended, like horses, especially in the age of the Anthropocene (with reference to Delacroix's depictions of horses as historical actors).
Oswald J. Schmitz
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691160566
- eISBN:
- 9781400883462
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691160566.001.0001
- Subject:
- Biology, Ecology
Our species has transitioned from being one among millions on Earth to the species that is single-handedly transforming the entire planet to suit its own needs. In order to meet the daunting ...
More
Our species has transitioned from being one among millions on Earth to the species that is single-handedly transforming the entire planet to suit its own needs. In order to meet the daunting challenges of environmental sustainability in this epoch of human domination—known as the Anthropocene—ecologists have begun to think differently about the interdependencies between humans and the natural world. This book provides the best available introduction to what this new ecology is all about—and why it matters more than ever before. It describes how the science of ecology is evolving to provide a better understanding of how human agency is shaping the natural world, often in never-before-seen ways. The book emphasizes the importance of conserving species diversity, because it can offer a portfolio of options to keep our ecosystems resilient in the face of environmental change. It envisions humans taking on new roles as thoughtful stewards of the environment to ensure that ecosystems have the enduring capacity to supply the environmental services on which our economic well-being—and our very existence—depend. It offers the ecological know-how to maintain and enhance our planet's environmental performance and ecosystem production for the benefit of current and future generations. The book shows how today's ecology can provide the insights we need to appreciate the crucial role we play in this era of unprecedented global environmental transition.Less
Our species has transitioned from being one among millions on Earth to the species that is single-handedly transforming the entire planet to suit its own needs. In order to meet the daunting challenges of environmental sustainability in this epoch of human domination—known as the Anthropocene—ecologists have begun to think differently about the interdependencies between humans and the natural world. This book provides the best available introduction to what this new ecology is all about—and why it matters more than ever before. It describes how the science of ecology is evolving to provide a better understanding of how human agency is shaping the natural world, often in never-before-seen ways. The book emphasizes the importance of conserving species diversity, because it can offer a portfolio of options to keep our ecosystems resilient in the face of environmental change. It envisions humans taking on new roles as thoughtful stewards of the environment to ensure that ecosystems have the enduring capacity to supply the environmental services on which our economic well-being—and our very existence—depend. It offers the ecological know-how to maintain and enhance our planet's environmental performance and ecosystem production for the benefit of current and future generations. The book shows how today's ecology can provide the insights we need to appreciate the crucial role we play in this era of unprecedented global environmental transition.
Benjamin H. Bratton
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780262029575
- eISBN:
- 9780262330183
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262029575.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Planetary-scale computation presents a fundamental challenge to Modern geopolitical architectures. As calculative reason and as global infrastructure, it not only deforms and distorts Westphalian ...
More
Planetary-scale computation presents a fundamental challenge to Modern geopolitical architectures. As calculative reason and as global infrastructure, it not only deforms and distorts Westphalian political geography it creates new territories in its own image, ones that don’t necessarily replace the old but which are superimposed on them, each grinding against the other. These thickened and noisy jurisdictions are our new normal. They are the scaffolds through which our cultures evolve through them, and they represent our most difficult and important design challenge. Computation is changing not only how governments govern, but what government even is in the first place: less governance of computation than computation as governance. Global cloud platforms take on roles that have traditionally been the domain of States, cities become hardware/software platforms organized by physical and virtual interfaces, and strange new political subjects (some not even human) gain unforeseen sovereignties as the users of those interfaces. To understand (and to design) these transformations, we need to see them as part of a whole, an accidental megastructure called The Stack. This book examines each layer of The Stack–Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User—as a dynamic technology that is re-structuring some part of our world at its particular scale and as part of the whole. The Stack is a platform, and so combines logics of both States and Markets, and produces forms of sovereignty that are unique to this technical and institutional form. Fortunately, stack platforms are made to be re-made. How the Stack-we-have becomes the Stack-to-come depends on how well we understand it as a totality, By seeing the whole we stand a better chance of designing a system we will want to inhabit. To formulate the “design brief” for that project, as this book does, requires a perspective that blends philosophical, geopolitical and technological understandings and methods.Less
Planetary-scale computation presents a fundamental challenge to Modern geopolitical architectures. As calculative reason and as global infrastructure, it not only deforms and distorts Westphalian political geography it creates new territories in its own image, ones that don’t necessarily replace the old but which are superimposed on them, each grinding against the other. These thickened and noisy jurisdictions are our new normal. They are the scaffolds through which our cultures evolve through them, and they represent our most difficult and important design challenge. Computation is changing not only how governments govern, but what government even is in the first place: less governance of computation than computation as governance. Global cloud platforms take on roles that have traditionally been the domain of States, cities become hardware/software platforms organized by physical and virtual interfaces, and strange new political subjects (some not even human) gain unforeseen sovereignties as the users of those interfaces. To understand (and to design) these transformations, we need to see them as part of a whole, an accidental megastructure called The Stack. This book examines each layer of The Stack–Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User—as a dynamic technology that is re-structuring some part of our world at its particular scale and as part of the whole. The Stack is a platform, and so combines logics of both States and Markets, and produces forms of sovereignty that are unique to this technical and institutional form. Fortunately, stack platforms are made to be re-made. How the Stack-we-have becomes the Stack-to-come depends on how well we understand it as a totality, By seeing the whole we stand a better chance of designing a system we will want to inhabit. To formulate the “design brief” for that project, as this book does, requires a perspective that blends philosophical, geopolitical and technological understandings and methods.
Oran R. Young
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035934
- eISBN:
- 9780262338899
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035934.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Public Policy
Governing for sustainability in a world of complex systems will require new social capital in the form of innovative steering mechanisms that differ in important respects from those familiar to us ...
More
Governing for sustainability in a world of complex systems will require new social capital in the form of innovative steering mechanisms that differ in important respects from those familiar to us from past experience. Complex systems feature high levels of connectivity, nonlinear dynamics, directional change, and emergent properties. Creating effective governance arrangements in such settings calls for an ability to combine the durability required to guide behavior with the agility needed to adjust or reform institutional arrangements to cope with rapidly changing circumstances. Success in such endeavors will depend on a capacity to supplement mainstream regulatory approaches to governance with new governance strategies. Promising examples include governance through goal-setting and principled governance. But additional innovations in this realm will be necessary to address needs for governance arising in the Anthropocene. The way forward in this effort will be to build cooperative relations between analysts and practitioners rather than treating them as separate communities that respond to different incentives and operate in different worlds.Less
Governing for sustainability in a world of complex systems will require new social capital in the form of innovative steering mechanisms that differ in important respects from those familiar to us from past experience. Complex systems feature high levels of connectivity, nonlinear dynamics, directional change, and emergent properties. Creating effective governance arrangements in such settings calls for an ability to combine the durability required to guide behavior with the agility needed to adjust or reform institutional arrangements to cope with rapidly changing circumstances. Success in such endeavors will depend on a capacity to supplement mainstream regulatory approaches to governance with new governance strategies. Promising examples include governance through goal-setting and principled governance. But additional innovations in this realm will be necessary to address needs for governance arising in the Anthropocene. The way forward in this effort will be to build cooperative relations between analysts and practitioners rather than treating them as separate communities that respond to different incentives and operate in different worlds.
David Wood
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823281367
- eISBN:
- 9780823286010
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823281367.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Deep Time, Dark Times takes its bearing from Nietzsche’s concern that a surfeit of history can extinguish the passion for life, especially when we are reminded of our capacity for cruelty and folly. ...
More
Deep Time, Dark Times takes its bearing from Nietzsche’s concern that a surfeit of history can extinguish the passion for life, especially when we are reminded of our capacity for cruelty and folly. The prospect of devastating climate change extends our sense of the past onto a geological scale, arousing debilitating passion, especially anger, ressentiment and resignation. What can Nietzsche teach us here? Hume’s sense that reason is but a slave to the passions cautions us against new utopian blueprints that fail to address the mood of today. Although climate change can rightly be laid at the feet of industrialization, corporate greed, fossil fuel companies … Deep Time challenges us to re-imagine ourselves as a species, through a geological consciousness. This expands Nietzsche’s sense of “life” to include our fellow terrestrials, and accentuates his sense of critical history, navigating between conflicting passions. Such a consciousness would be ecological (embracing yet another wound to our sovereignty), and it would acknowledge the advent of the Anthropocene. Deep Time draws on Heidegger’s call for a new attunement, one that connects contemporary anger and frustration with the agency vacuum created by the failure of global democracy. The question of who “we” are, when we imagine emergent forms of agency, or when we consider the constituencies impacted by climate change, is explicitly thematized. Information technology, for all its liabilities, offers new possibilities of group identity-formation, communication, and economic transaction that just might make a difference. We have to will the impossible to avoid the unthinkable.Less
Deep Time, Dark Times takes its bearing from Nietzsche’s concern that a surfeit of history can extinguish the passion for life, especially when we are reminded of our capacity for cruelty and folly. The prospect of devastating climate change extends our sense of the past onto a geological scale, arousing debilitating passion, especially anger, ressentiment and resignation. What can Nietzsche teach us here? Hume’s sense that reason is but a slave to the passions cautions us against new utopian blueprints that fail to address the mood of today. Although climate change can rightly be laid at the feet of industrialization, corporate greed, fossil fuel companies … Deep Time challenges us to re-imagine ourselves as a species, through a geological consciousness. This expands Nietzsche’s sense of “life” to include our fellow terrestrials, and accentuates his sense of critical history, navigating between conflicting passions. Such a consciousness would be ecological (embracing yet another wound to our sovereignty), and it would acknowledge the advent of the Anthropocene. Deep Time draws on Heidegger’s call for a new attunement, one that connects contemporary anger and frustration with the agency vacuum created by the failure of global democracy. The question of who “we” are, when we imagine emergent forms of agency, or when we consider the constituencies impacted by climate change, is explicitly thematized. Information technology, for all its liabilities, offers new possibilities of group identity-formation, communication, and economic transaction that just might make a difference. We have to will the impossible to avoid the unthinkable.
Danielle Sands
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474439039
- eISBN:
- 9781474476881
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474439039.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
The Conclusion situates the findings of the book in relation to the current environmental crisis, arguing that effective responses to this crisis demand a plurality of approaches to nonhuman life, ...
More
The Conclusion situates the findings of the book in relation to the current environmental crisis, arguing that effective responses to this crisis demand a plurality of approaches to nonhuman life, rather than an empathy which is restricted to certain living beings. It argues that literature is not a protected, apolitical space, but a world-making space, whose tools – metaphor, trope, allegory – should be evaluated as better or worse tools of being-with other forms of life, rather than merely in terms of their representational value. The Conclusion appeals to a mode of ‘noninnocent thinking’ which links the critical and imaginative, and advances ways of cultivating less violence, rather than eradicating it completely.Less
The Conclusion situates the findings of the book in relation to the current environmental crisis, arguing that effective responses to this crisis demand a plurality of approaches to nonhuman life, rather than an empathy which is restricted to certain living beings. It argues that literature is not a protected, apolitical space, but a world-making space, whose tools – metaphor, trope, allegory – should be evaluated as better or worse tools of being-with other forms of life, rather than merely in terms of their representational value. The Conclusion appeals to a mode of ‘noninnocent thinking’ which links the critical and imaginative, and advances ways of cultivating less violence, rather than eradicating it completely.
Simon Nicholson and Sikina Jinnah (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780262034364
- eISBN:
- 9780262332132
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262034364.001.0001
- Subject:
- Environmental Science, Environmental Studies
Humanity’s collective impact on the Earth is vast. The rate and scale of human-driven environmental destruction is quickly outstripping our political and social capacities for managing it. We are in ...
More
Humanity’s collective impact on the Earth is vast. The rate and scale of human-driven environmental destruction is quickly outstripping our political and social capacities for managing it. We are in effect creating an Earth 2.0 on which the human signature is everywhere, a “new earth” in desperate need of humane and insightful guidance. In this volume, prominent scholars and practitioners in the field of global environmental politics consider the ecological and political realities of life on the new earth, and probe the field’s deepest and most enduring questions at a time of increasing environmental stress. Arranged in complementary pairs, the essays in this volume include reflections on environmental pedagogy, analysis of new geopolitical realities, reflections on the power of social movements and international institutions, and calls for more compelling narratives to promote environmental action. At the heart of the volume is sustained attention to the role of traditional scholarly activities in a world confronting environmental disaster. Some contributors make the case that it is the scholar’s role to provide activists with the necessary knowledge and tools; others argue for more direct engagement and political action. All the contributors confront the overriding question: What is the best use of their individual and combined energies, given the dire environmental reality?Less
Humanity’s collective impact on the Earth is vast. The rate and scale of human-driven environmental destruction is quickly outstripping our political and social capacities for managing it. We are in effect creating an Earth 2.0 on which the human signature is everywhere, a “new earth” in desperate need of humane and insightful guidance. In this volume, prominent scholars and practitioners in the field of global environmental politics consider the ecological and political realities of life on the new earth, and probe the field’s deepest and most enduring questions at a time of increasing environmental stress. Arranged in complementary pairs, the essays in this volume include reflections on environmental pedagogy, analysis of new geopolitical realities, reflections on the power of social movements and international institutions, and calls for more compelling narratives to promote environmental action. At the heart of the volume is sustained attention to the role of traditional scholarly activities in a world confronting environmental disaster. Some contributors make the case that it is the scholar’s role to provide activists with the necessary knowledge and tools; others argue for more direct engagement and political action. All the contributors confront the overriding question: What is the best use of their individual and combined energies, given the dire environmental reality?
Barbara K. Jones
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781683401049
- eISBN:
- 9781683401728
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9781683401049.003.0002
- Subject:
- Environmental Science, Environmental Studies
By failing to assign nature value in our current Anthropocene, the opportunity costs of diminishing biodiversity are not recognized in the marketplace, leading to significant negative consequences ...
More
By failing to assign nature value in our current Anthropocene, the opportunity costs of diminishing biodiversity are not recognized in the marketplace, leading to significant negative consequences for both nature and humanity. Polluting water, destroying habitats, or exterminating species should each lessen nature’s value, but if nature has never been assigned a value, that loss is not recognized and development becomes the default. The words “wild capital” remind us that nature should be viewed as an asset like any other, and that in doing so we are better equipped to appreciate its long-term worth. Since the ecosystem services model (ES) ties together the ecological, social, and economic needs of human well-being, it is well situated to assign nature value and from that make a case for nature as natural capital. To assist in policy decisions, ES has offered a path based on the language of economics, making it appealing to economists, while to conservationists, it has turned an argument about the negative effects of development on wildlife into a more fruitful dialogue about how beneficial conservation is for human well-being. ES is also compatible with efforts at sustainability and the goals of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.Less
By failing to assign nature value in our current Anthropocene, the opportunity costs of diminishing biodiversity are not recognized in the marketplace, leading to significant negative consequences for both nature and humanity. Polluting water, destroying habitats, or exterminating species should each lessen nature’s value, but if nature has never been assigned a value, that loss is not recognized and development becomes the default. The words “wild capital” remind us that nature should be viewed as an asset like any other, and that in doing so we are better equipped to appreciate its long-term worth. Since the ecosystem services model (ES) ties together the ecological, social, and economic needs of human well-being, it is well situated to assign nature value and from that make a case for nature as natural capital. To assist in policy decisions, ES has offered a path based on the language of economics, making it appealing to economists, while to conservationists, it has turned an argument about the negative effects of development on wildlife into a more fruitful dialogue about how beneficial conservation is for human well-being. ES is also compatible with efforts at sustainability and the goals of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
Patrick D. Murphy
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252041037
- eISBN:
- 9780252099588
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252041037.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. ...
More
Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, institutional analysis, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses, demonstrating how the media pushes us to save the whales even as we are encouraged to devour all the fish. By examining this paradox through case studies of the “greening” of cable TV, online corporate branding campaigns, indigenous media, and the globalization of commercial media, he shows how today's complex, integrated media networks draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination—and influences just who benefits. Analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. Murphy identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly—and ominously—individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.Less
Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, institutional analysis, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses, demonstrating how the media pushes us to save the whales even as we are encouraged to devour all the fish. By examining this paradox through case studies of the “greening” of cable TV, online corporate branding campaigns, indigenous media, and the globalization of commercial media, he shows how today's complex, integrated media networks draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination—and influences just who benefits. Analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. Murphy identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly—and ominously—individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.
Phillip John Usher
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823284221
- eISBN:
- 9780823286058
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823284221.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Exterranean is a book about the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of specifically nonmodern texts and ...
More
Exterranean is a book about the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of specifically nonmodern texts and images, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, instead engineering conceptual clashes between the materially situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene, arguing against the omnipresence of Earthrise-like globes in attempts to think at planetary scales, and shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, this book pleads for an alertness to the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Divided into three sections (“Terra Global Circus,” “Welcome to Mineland,” and “Hiding in Exterranean Matter”), each of which approaches this entanglement from a different perspective, this book gives shape to a sense of the exterranean via readings of authors from France, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere as well as via discussion of mines, objects, engravings, and architecture. In dialogue with Michel Serres, the recent thought of Bruno Latour, and the interdisciplinary turn to the Environmental Humanities more generally, both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.Less
Exterranean is a book about the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of specifically nonmodern texts and images, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, instead engineering conceptual clashes between the materially situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene, arguing against the omnipresence of Earthrise-like globes in attempts to think at planetary scales, and shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, this book pleads for an alertness to the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Divided into three sections (“Terra Global Circus,” “Welcome to Mineland,” and “Hiding in Exterranean Matter”), each of which approaches this entanglement from a different perspective, this book gives shape to a sense of the exterranean via readings of authors from France, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere as well as via discussion of mines, objects, engravings, and architecture. In dialogue with Michel Serres, the recent thought of Bruno Latour, and the interdisciplinary turn to the Environmental Humanities more generally, both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.
Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282128
- eISBN:
- 9780823286034
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Victorian England was both the world’s first industrial society and its most powerful global empire. Ecological Form coordinates those facts to show how one version of the Anthropocene first emerged ...
More
Victorian England was both the world’s first industrial society and its most powerful global empire. Ecological Form coordinates those facts to show how one version of the Anthropocene first emerged into visibility in the nineteenth century. Many of that era’s most sophisticated observers recognized that the systemic interconnections and global scale of both empire and ecology posed challenges best examined through aesthetic form. Using “ecological formalism” to open new dimensions to our understanding of the Age of Coal, contributors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with social ones; and underscore the category of form—as built structure, internal organizing logic, and generic code—as a means for generating environmental and therefore political knowledge. Together these essays show how Victorian thinkers deployed an array of literary forms, from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance and the scientific treatise, to think interconnection at world scale. They also renovate our understanding of major writers like Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Joseph Conrad, even while demonstrating the centrality of less celebrated figures, including Dinabandhu Mitra, Samuel Butler, and Joseph Dalton Hooker, to contemporary debates about the humanities and climate change. As the essays survey the circuits of dispossession linking Britain to the Atlantic World, Bengal, New Zealand, and elsewhere—and connecting the Victorian era to our own—they advance the most pressing argument of Ecological Form, which is that past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.Less
Victorian England was both the world’s first industrial society and its most powerful global empire. Ecological Form coordinates those facts to show how one version of the Anthropocene first emerged into visibility in the nineteenth century. Many of that era’s most sophisticated observers recognized that the systemic interconnections and global scale of both empire and ecology posed challenges best examined through aesthetic form. Using “ecological formalism” to open new dimensions to our understanding of the Age of Coal, contributors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with social ones; and underscore the category of form—as built structure, internal organizing logic, and generic code—as a means for generating environmental and therefore political knowledge. Together these essays show how Victorian thinkers deployed an array of literary forms, from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance and the scientific treatise, to think interconnection at world scale. They also renovate our understanding of major writers like Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Joseph Conrad, even while demonstrating the centrality of less celebrated figures, including Dinabandhu Mitra, Samuel Butler, and Joseph Dalton Hooker, to contemporary debates about the humanities and climate change. As the essays survey the circuits of dispossession linking Britain to the Atlantic World, Bengal, New Zealand, and elsewhere—and connecting the Victorian era to our own—they advance the most pressing argument of Ecological Form, which is that past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.
Brian Willems
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474422697
- eISBN:
- 9781474438629
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422697.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid ...
More
A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.Less
A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.
