So, sitting with two very clever friends this morning, spit-balling ideas of where the whole Extinction Rebelliion thing might go, this came up: It's possible that Extinction Rebellion, if it keeps the same set of repertoires (blocking roads, disrupting meetings etc), may end up not moving beyond the students and retired who seem (I have... Continue Reading →
Dear ‘new’ #climate activist. Unsolicited advice, #oldfartclimateadvice
Dear ‘new’ climate activist, Thanks for your efforts so far and "welcome" (or of course “welcome back”). You find the “climate movement” in the UK in a pretty dismal state, to be honest. There’s a fierce battle going on about fracking, but elsewhere the Tory government has been able to get away with stripping support... Continue Reading →
Book Proposal – “Anthropocenism, or the Ecological Logic of it’s-later-than-you-think Capitalism”
Went to a reading group. The article under discussion was Jason “Capitalism in the Web of Life” Moore's 2014 article on the End of Cheap Nature.. It got a bit of a kicking from a couple of people (me, I thought it was okay). The convenor of the group introduced the paper and pointed out... Continue Reading →
Is Capitalism unsustainable? The jury’s out-ish. Is ego-fodderfication unsustainable? Sadly not/hell yes.
I don’t know how much rethinking economics is actually going on (I have my suspicions, but no hard data). I do have a good idea of how much rethinking politics/academia/civilsocietying is going on, and it’s not much at all/zero. The latest piece of hard data came tonight, at the University of Manchester. The debate/discussion was... Continue Reading →
More apocalyptic word salad
A species corsuscating on thin ice, Snap, crackle, pop. Faster faster (or else), kill (the) pussycat. How I wonder what you’re at. Kill them all Let the gods we kept creating in our own image sort them out. A fetish for fish, a fetish For bondage, human bondage. Ah, a sondage would show -has... Continue Reading →
Event: “The Resilience of Unsustainability: Cultural Backlash, Authoritarian Reflex and the Great Regression” #TransitionImpossible
After last night’s keynote, tonight it was the turn of Professor Ingolfur Blühdorn, Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, WU Vienna to deliver a talk. His title was “The Resilience of Unsustainability: Cultural Backlash, Authoritarian Reflex and the Great Regression,” which is academic-speak for “Dudes, lemme say, we’re, like, totes fubarred” This blog post gives... Continue Reading →
Excellent Event: Ambiguous Transformations: Governance, Democracy, #Climate Transitions
Here’s the gist of a very long blog post. A senior academic (Professor Karin Bäckstrand) gave a very clear summation of the relative importance of the Paris Agreement, the distinctions between ecological democracy and environmental democracy and the (possible) path of transformation that Swedish society is undergoing. She did this in the context of an... Continue Reading →
Strange poem
On the Chaos of the Disciplines and the disciples Academic stars, they flash like a comet As the mangy dog returns to its vomit Deja vu - nihil novi sub sole We lie and die in a darkening hole.
Lenore Taylor, Mike Seccombe & Australian #climate politics – institutional memory
Australian content alert: Yeah, this is a bit of geekery. There's a Sunday morning politics show called Insiders, which is a ritual thing I do with my mum and her next door neighbour. The format is solid (stolid?)- a host (usually Barrie Cassidy) and three hacks, sorry, journalists. There's a long interview with a pollie,... Continue Reading →
Another #climate warning from 1969. #Australia
On 25 June 1969 Ralph Slayter, an Australian scientist, gave one of the first (but not the first - that's for another time) warnings of the dangers of the build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Slayter was talking at the Australian National University, as part of a lecture series on 'Man and the New... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 