Toward the Symbiocene?

This is being reposted from Immanence…

Two things to consider before your morning coffee.

1) We are living through a Holocene collapse event,* when the nearly 12,000 year old regime of relative climate stability, the "comfort zone" for most of what we know as human civilization, is beginning to tear to shreds. (Here's just one of the shreds from yesterday's news.) It’s likely that climate havoc will grow, its extreme weather events and destabilizations creating the conditions for increased hunger, drought, heat waves, mass migration, disease, and warfare on a global scale. Those species that survive will eventually see a stabilization into a new "normal," but any predictions about what that will look and feel like, or what role humans might have in it, if any, are premature.

2) Once you accept that, it should become clear that certain ways of living, and certain pursuits in life, are more worthy, more honorable, and more satisfying than others. The worthy ones will likely be focused on sharing (rather than hoarding) the joys of the world, fleeting as they are, and on devoting oneself to smoothening the ride for others. Ask yourself what capacities you can bring to easing the burden of what's to come, then apply them as beautifully as you can. 

Now, enjoy your coffee.

The background to these promptings is that for the last three days I have been visiting, speaking at, and communing with a large group of thoughtful and creative people at a symposium hosted by the Ruigoord "free cultural space" outside Amsterdam, called Towards the Symbiocene?

"Free cultural spaces" (or "cultural freespaces"; see their declaration here) are places devoted to what we might call "cultural ecstasy" -- a kind of autonomously self-organized, democratically minded, creative community life that tends to run up against the norms and regulations of states and municipalities. Ruigoord (pronounced something like "Reich-oord," where the R’s are rolled and the “reich” is Germanic but with a guttural, vocalized “gh” instead of the unvocalized “ch”) is a kind of artist village that grew from a hippieish squatter community on a patch of land defended by its denizens against the development plans of Amsterdam’s port and petrochemical industries. It just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Over those five decades it evolved as a patchwork quilt of artist studios, gardens, makeshift homes (whose legality has been contested over the years), a beautiful church repurposed into a community center, a food forest, and a regular schedule of festivals and celebrations.

Ruigoord is part of a network of mostly European "free cultural spaces" that includes Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiania (the largest and best known), Užupis in Lithuania, and several others. They represent, to me, an evolution of Europe’s very active squatting cultures, whose analogues and relatives in other places range from (self-proclaimed) "temporary autonomous zones" like Burning Man and its smaller siblings, to longstanding guerrilla gardening initiatives in cities like New York City and Los Angeles, to aspirationally permanent intentional communities like Findhorn, Auroville, and The Farm (which tend less toward the anarchistic and democratic) and culturally more traditional autonomous regions like Zapatista controlled territory in southern Mexico or Kurdish Rojava in Iraq and Syria. They also bear a strong resemblance to the two communities I studied in the work that became my first book.

For all their (huge) differences, these places constitute bubbles of cultural and ecological autonomy amidst the layer cake of municipal, national, and international governance systems within which they fit rather like round pegs in square holes. Collectively, they represent the roundness as opposed to the squareness.

As for the Symbiocene, this is Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht’s term for a future of people living in symbiotic harmony with nature. Getting there from here requires changing a great many things, but Glenn believes that it’s possible and hopes that the current generation of young people can become "Generation S," the generation that builds the Symbiocene.

Much of the symposium was devoted to exploring what the Symbiocene might mean, whether it’s in fact a good description of a viable future, and, if so, how artistic and other practices can contribute to it. A key point of debate arose between Glenn, who thinks we need to transition now, and that transition is possible; others who think his vision is unrealistic and that the future will be much less rosy; and still others who think we need a political revolution or some other kind of solution, rather than the piecemeal quests of harmony with a nature that is all too elusive and not at all reliable.

My take on the Symbiocene idea is as follows.

It’s the kind of vision that can be helpful for some, and perhaps for many people. It’s proving particularly inspiring for artists and designers, who seem to be attracted to the ways in which it suggests that humans can work with (not against) other species, and with new technologies, to develop "symbioses" that are creative, exciting, don’t produce waste, and help transform an unsustainable society to a sustainable one. In this it's not that different from Thomas Berry's idea of the Ecozoic, or the Ecocene, or any of the other ecotopian or "eutopian" (Glenn's word) visions circulating among those who work toward them.

That said, like Timothy Morton and Jem Bendell, to name two others who participated in these deliberations (both remotely), I prefer to acknowledge that the challenges to getting "there," if it’s even possible, will be steep and difficult. And like Erik Swyngedouw and Henk Oosterling, to name two others (participating in person), I tend to put more emphasis on the political dimensions of the transition. Symbiotic relations take time and effort to evolve, include a high degree of unpredictability, and are hardly guaranteed to satisfy all parties. To develop them will, in any case, require decision-making that takes place in political contexts. These contexts require forms of collective agency that we humans have yet to fully develop.

So I emphasize the historical contexts of coloniality and capitalism that shape the present, and the forms of democratic action and accountability that can shape the future. That future will have to be ecological and decolonial, or "Eco+deco," in my rendering. Or it will be a mess. It is likely to be a combination of the two, Eco+deco and a mess, at best. (And at worst a big compost heap.) That shapes my eco-realism, which defined my book Shadowing the Anthropocene and which continues in my current writing.

Perhaps more important, as I suggested at Monday's morning plenary, is that the changes we need to make are made not because of new information -- whether it be concepts like "Symbiocene" or the many other terms Albrecht invents in Earth Emotions and other writings, or the "evidence-based hope" Elin Kelsey offered and the evidence-based doom counter-offered by Jem Bendell at Tuesday's evening plenary. Rather, change occurs because of experiences that enable information to be processed and integrated.

These experiences are aesthetic, incorporating perceptions of what is beautiful and what is not; sometimes they are even "ecstatic," in the sense that they take us out of our customary awareness of ourselves and the world. They are relational, involving others, including others that can be relied on to be there with us over time. (If we don't have such others around us, then forget about changing our minds. Start instead by offering friendship.) And they are transformative, challenging concepts or identities or sensibilities that are already somewhat poised, or prepared, to be challenged, and offering ways of accepting those challenges. Information to support those experiences is important, but it's the experiences that are central to changing people's "hearts and minds," so it's better to put some effort into creating the conditions for those kinds of aesthetic, ecstatic, relational, and transformative experiences to take place. (Which is why the arts can be so important.)

Yesterday was the third and final day of the symposium and it was held at the legendary Paradiso club in central Amsterdam. While a few of the talks got to feeling a bit long-winded, and too TED talky for my taste, the artistic events were very special. In particular, last night's culminating event -- which followed a "Boat Liberation Parade" and a Free Cultural Spaces declaration/presentation to a city councilor at Amsterdam's beautiful Spinoza monument -- was a bit of a mindblower: a three and a half hour concert of dozens of musicians, some local and some international (including Indigenous elders and performers from North, Central, and South America) that left audience members, including myself, blissed out by their performative cohesion, improvisational fluidity, on-message power, and soulful genuineness. Here the symposium shed its wordcrafty intellectualism in favor of a melding of musical and inspirational elements recognizing real people's actual struggles -- for equality, autonomy, and traditions (new and old ones) of living in a "harmony" with land, with water, and with spirit that needs no new names or concepts, and that suffers nothing from the deconstructive exercises of my fellow academics. The performances made for a kind of "cultural ecstasy" that's not exactly the norm for conferences or symposia.

I'm grateful to the organizers for inviting me (especially Patrick van Ginkel, as well as Aja Waalwijk and Mira Driessen) and for driving me around (Valal du Pon especially, as well as Jefta Hoel and Patrick), to Indira van 't Klooster for her impressive panel facilitation (given the sometimes clashing views expressed), to all the members of Ruigoord for the opportunity to experience their free cultural space, and to the others whose conversations with me made this event such a pleasure. I wish I could stay for the Landjuweel festival, which starts today and is really meant to make Ruigoord's fiftieth anniversary, but it's time for me to go home.

Photo: Glenn Albrecht being introduced by host Indira van 't Klooster, in Ruigoord's "church"

*Time wrote the Holocene's obituary seven years ago. Events since then have more or less confirmed it, even if some geologists are still hesitating (since they don’t usually study anything that’s still happening).

R.i.p., Bruno Latour

Hearing the announcement of Bruno Latour‘s death earlier today, I remembered his visit to the Feverish World symposium, which EcoCultureLab organized in 2018 in Burlington, Vermont. Despite his health (which was turning for the worse at the time), he participated gracefully in this strange mixture of conference, festival, and street event, and gave a great closing keynote speech.

Until his death, Latour was one of the most widely cited living social scientists and philosophers in the world. He was often all too casually dismissed as a “social constructionist,” despite the fact that he took science more seriously than almost anyone (he devoted his life to understanding it), and that if there was anything he deconstructed, it was the social. Instead, he was a “constructionist” in the best sense of the word (the Whiteheadian sense): he believed that every thing is constructed — that is, shaped and fabricated — by the labor of all of the relational elements that went into producing it. He believed that “facts” and “fetishes” were not necessarily opposed to each other, but that all things were on a spectrum between the two — “factishes” that were real yet invested with different degrees of mythical power.

But all of that was preamble to the work of restoring genuine dialogue between the realms “the moderns” have separated: especially between the arts, religion, and the sciences, and especially around those things — like climate change and looming ecological catastophe — that our world seems least equipped to deal with despite having created them.

All of this, to my mind, is best represented by the exhibitions he co-curated: “Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art” (2002), “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy” (2005), “Reset Modernity!” (2016), and “Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth” (2020-21), which in their combined impact — as Latourian actor networks made up of artists, scientists, philosophers, and many objects of various kinds — have altered the landscape of contemporary thought more than anyone I can think of in the post-1988 climate change era (since the first major pronouncement of the reality of anthropogenic climate change).

Rest in peace, Bruno. All the debates and polemics you elicited were so very necessary.

In the picture, Latour is chatting with Rebecca Schwarz and me (Adrian Ivakhiv) at Burlington’s Hen of the Wood restaurant after a vigorous day of Feverish World.

Eco+Deco, a manifesto in progress

Some of the best art exhibitions today show that the socially engaged art world is undergoing two shifts that some of us in the environmental humanities have been advocating for some time: they ecologize and they decolonize. An excellent example of this is the second edition of the Toronto Biennale of Art, wrapping up this week at multiple venues across the city of Toronto under the theme “What Water Knows, The Land Remembers.” I recommend reading some of the documents from the Biennale to get a sense of how they do this.

Visiting the biennale has inspired me to continue formulating my “manifesto in progress” (see here, here, here, and here for a few earlier glimpses). Manifestos aren't the place to be comprehensive or to explore internal contradictions, of which there are many, so this one is obviously formulaic. It is presented on the hypothesis that formulas can sometimes be helpful for orienting ourselves.

Andrea Carlson's Cast a Shadow (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery. - Rik Sferra photo

Ecologize + Decolonize -> Reindigenize

To dwell sustainably on this planet, humans will need to recover from an era of extractive-capitalist colonialism, with its massive overproduction of harms to communities of humans and nonhumans, and of wastes and toxins inassimilable by the present (Holocene) Earth system. This recovery proceeds along three parallel and interrelated lines.

(Note that the "->" arrow sign is intended to be something between a plus sign, an equals sign, and a Shift sign, indicating a forward momentum in a convergence of the other two.)

Ecologize

1. Ecology is the study of the dynamic interrelationships between and among living beings and their environments. It informs both the possibilities and the vulnerabilities by which we sustain our collective lives within the real, material places making up this Earth.

2. Societies that dwelled sustainably in particular places dwelled ecologically by way of their traditional ecological knowledges and practices. Societies that did not dwell sustainably can and have begun to relearn the principles of ecological living through the modern ecological sciences. Traditional ecological knowledges and contemporary ecological science complement each other in informing how to live in specific places. As in the past, each of them today is a work in adaptive progress.

3. To live sustainably, in an ecological sense, requires ecologizing the economy, so that economic decisions and processes no longer exceed the capacities of ecological systems (which requires decarbonizing and deplasticizing, among other things); ecologizing politics, so that political decision-making is brought to appropriate socio-ecological scales; and ecologizing culture, so that human activities, motivations, and beliefs are brought into greater resonance with ecological realities.

Decolonize

1. Colonization is the process of “taking over.” Plants and animals colonize available environments; people have done so for millennia. Colonization can take many forms, some “softer” and including elements of commensalism, mutualism, and cooperation, and some “harder,” as with violent imposition onto others. Colonialism is the -ism of the colonizer; it is the belief, ideology, and practice of colonization as a totalistic political project by which the colonizer seeks to conquer and vanquish or assimilate the colonized.

2. The last five centuries have featured colonialism on a global scale, beginning as an economic, cultural, and biopolitical project by European imperial powers and continued today primarily in economic and cultural forms. This colonialism has been articulated as “modernization,” which has brought benefits as well as costs. These have been unevenly distributed due to their embeddedness within colonial and capitalist power relations: at one end, the benefits have been amassed into fortunes by global elites; at the other, the costs have been borne as cultural genocide, dispossession, and new forms of economic and cultural slavery (including addictions to soul-destroying substances and distractions). Somewhere in the middle, the benefits and costs have been distributed in workable variations for the global middle class, but as the climate and ecological debts have gotten more pronounced and less deniable, the benefits have been diminishing, the scramble for them intensifying, and class status becoming more precarious.

3. Economic colonialism today makes it nearly impossible not to participate in competitive, extractive-capitalist economies with their uneven distribution of risks and benefits. Cultural colonialism today makes this participation seem desirable. It is a colonialism of image, lifestyle, fashion, and mentality, promoted by systems of advertising and marketing encouraging consumption of goods representing an identity and way of life that is inconsistent with long-term ecological sustainability and social justice.

4. Decolonization means shedding colonialism physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It means decolonizing science and knowledge, politics, and culture. Metaphorically speaking, it means standing up straight and resolutely facing what colonialism has brought, what preceded it, and how its effects are to be contained and nullified. Decolonization brings a new respect for what preceded colonization (to the extent that it is known and accessible), but whatever preceded it can at best only guide, not condition and constrain, what will follow. A decolonized life is a newly open life.

Reindigenize

1. Reindigenizing means becoming indigenous once again: that is, learning to be “from” one’s place, “with” one’s place, “rooted in” and “given over” to that place. Globally speaking, that place is Earth, which we must collectively learn to “live within” and not just at the expense of. Locally speaking, that place may or may not be well defined. This places a premium on processes of “coming to know one’s place” — one’s environment(s), one's ecoregion(s), and those who know them from deeper and more embedded histories of entangled relationality.

2. Reindigenizing therefore means revaluing indigenous knowledges and practices and honoring indigenous communities and their representatives (where such communities exist). This requires, first of all, supporting processes of reckoning with and reparation toward those communities -- processes that will "unsettle" land and the property relations that have captured it. This will take persistence, struggle, and creativity, as land (considered as property) is in many ways the basis of the colonial system, and as the past is not easily exhausted by anyone's particular narrative of it.

3. Reindigenizing also, ultimately, calls for processes by which the options for indigeneity can be expanded for all. At the very least, such reindigenizing means becoming better citizens and denizens of our places. More substantially, it means developing new models for citizenship and denizenship appropriate to the ecological realities of place (a.k.a. land). This is a long-term project, to be approached with caution and care, by which humans will envision new commonalities, redraw relational networks, and learn to become kin with each other and the other others that together make up our Earthly homes.

4. Ecologizing and decolonizing combine to create a move toward reindigenizing at local scales and newly indigenizing at a global scale -- that is, at becoming "earthbound," in Bruno Latour's words (with Latour's own insights radicalized somewhat through an "expanded account of militant agency," as Martin Crowley puts it).

This post originally published at Immanence.

Youth vs. Apocalypse: or, optimism of the will

This is part of a series of posts by Adrian Ivakhiv on climate justice, the upcoming COP26 conference, and related topics, originally posted at Immanence.

It seems the world is coming to realize what Environmental Studies folks have been saying since I first became a Master’s student in that field 34 years ago: that humanity risks careening off the rails into a species-wide, if not planet-wide, smash-up unless it profoundly reorients the way it functions on this planet.

That three-decade time lag — characterized by disbelief by most, and systemic denial and obfuscation by some (especially vested interests like Big Oil) — has given much greater punch to the pessimism of that message, a pessimism that media are recognizing as “existential” for the current generation of young people. Today’s episode of On Point on “The Pessimistic Generation” was all about that. Host Meghna Chakrabarti’s response to a question about how she deals with news about climate change is revealing: “I read less of it.” That’s the response of someone whose job it is to read more than the rest of us. (Wow.) But her interlocutor turns it into the real point here: that we are all vulnerable to PTSD (exactly I’ve been saying about climate trauma) and that it’s a matter of survival to be selective about what we take in.

Given that my field has had 34 years to think about this issue (33 if we date it to Jim Hansen’s Congressional testimony about climate change) — the issue of how to come to grips with an apocalyptic prognosis for humanity — what have we come up with in response?

To answer that, I fall back on Antonio Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” To be able to move forward, we need to build the capacity to face the reality of the situation. Not everyone is in a position to do that, but even those who are will need support for doing that. The optimism arises when we come to see that there is a global movement to overcome the challenges of climate change, which are also the challenges of social injustice (that message has finally sunk in), that we can align with that movement, and that it feels good to do that.

What I’m describing can feel like a religious conversion, but a conversion that happens to be backed, in its essential contours, by contemporary science. This means it has the character of a “revolutionary beauty” (needless to say, a different revolutionary beauty from the one that drove Gramsci; the times have changed and we need no longer be haunted by the limitations of that one). But it is a beauty that requires abandoning some of the comforts and conveniences we may have gotten used to.

Fortunately, the most important of those comforts — the comforts of community, of health and sustenance, and of meaning in life (which happen to coincide with the things Epicurus argued 2300 years ago were essential for human happiness) — are all still available to us. So visions of a good life — a Buen Vivir, or Sumak Kawsay, as articulated by South American indigenous communities — can and should be part of any “willful optimization of the pessimistic intellect.”

In the On Point episode, Doug Abrams, who recently co-authored The Book of Hope with Jane Goodall, describes hope as a survival mechanism that evolved alongside language, problem solving, and prosocial morality, and that requires four things to be effective: realistic goals, realistic pathways, a sense of agency and confidence to realize those goals, and social support for that. That’s where the best Environmental Studies curricula take their students.

And it’s why the youth-based organizations that have mushroomed around the world to articulate the message of climate justice, and who are mobilizing now to bring that to policy makers at next week’s COP 26 conference — organizations like “Youth vs. Apocalypse” (thus my title) and many others — are among the most hopeful developments in today’s political landscape.

They are worth supporting as the COP 26 climate summit begins.

EcoCultureLab update... and an invitation!

Happy equinox.

It’s been some time since the last update from EcoCultureLab. The pandemic cut into our capacity to function locally over the past year and a half, and the web site and blog also took a sharp turn to the slow lane. This post will provide a personal update, followed by a shout-out and request with an eye toward the future of EcoCultureLab, which, as readers may know, aims to serve as a living laboratory for the cultivation of an ecological culture. (Or something like that.)

The Personal Update (preceded by some background)

As a professor of Environmental Thought and Culture (the title I came up with when I was hired, in 2003, and told I could label my field as suited me best), I have worked over the years to instigate collaborations between environmental scholars of all kinds, including “hard” scientists (who make up about half the faculty in my school, the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources), and artists and cultural activists. At some point, these took the form of a group called BASTA!, short for “Bridging the Arts, Sciences, and Theory for the Anthropocene,” which started organizing meetings, talks, and arts events (such as the 6X Howl).

With the help of an endowed professorship from the Steven and Beverly Rubenstein Charitable Foundation and support from the School named after that former alum (Steven), I decided, with the support of BASTA colleagues, to name this work “EcoCultureLab” in 2016. The following year, an excellent group of people including, but not limited to, those listed here began seeking funds and organizing a multi-disciplinary event, which turned into the multi-day extravaganza Feverish World: Arts and Sciences of Collective Survival. We couldn’t have done that without the support of the Gund Institute for Environment, the UVM Humanities Center, the already-mentioned Rubenstein Foundation, or several other active partners — and without many dozens of artists, speakers, students, and other participants, including folks from Champlain College, St. Michael’s College, the Generator, Burlington City Arts, and the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi (among others). It was a festive event meant to concentrate our attention creatively on the difficult times ahead. (Some of it is documented here and on this web site, with a catalog hopefully still in the works.)

We knew those times were coming, but not necessary how quickly they would be here.

We followed up Feverish World with some smaller events, initiated a regular series of gatherings in downtown Burlington and an ongoing series of “research raps” (which fizzled out with the pandemic), and continued to support other activities, including the launch of Media+Environment journal and a few other projects.

Many people have participated in these events, and in my coordination of them I’ve been helped especially by steering committee members Cami Davis, Tina Escaja, Nancy Winship Milliken, Al Larsen, and Rebecca Schwarz; by several wonderful research assistants/associates including Finn Yarbrough, Tatiana Abatemarco, Dan Cottle, Courtney Smith, and Haley Sommer; by the indefatigable Cathy Trivieres (who’s sadly moved on from the Environmental Program); and by many others listed here (and not listed). Some of those activities continue in different forms, though the core funding for EcoCultureLab has dried up.

All of that said, the Covid-19 pandemic has shown me a few things: (1) that it takes a lot of energy to carry on when there are no natural “convergence spaces” (those always take time and effort to set up, and much more of both during a pandemic), (2) that my own energy is dispersed between too many projects to do justice to the EcoCultureLab vision (those projects currently include as many as five books in progress, the aforementioned journal, and multiple other things), and (3) that this coming year is probably altogether impossible for me, since I will be traveling on a sabbatical from December into next summer (with a stint as a visiting scholar at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center, among other things).

The Request

This message is, then, a call out for those who are interested in pursuing EcoCultureLab’s vision of melding the arts (and humanities) and the sciences (and scholarship) toward the growing of an ecological culture, starting locally here in Burlington but networked outward to other places far and wide.

Specifically, it is for someone with the initiative to gather up the somewhat scattered, but still present, forces — people, organizations, desires and motivations, et al. — in the Burlington area, including among our participants who’ve been telling me they are interested in getting EcoCultureLab “back to work”; to seek out funding, as necessary; and to potentially take the helm of this quasi-entity we call EcoCultureLab.

If you are interested in this and have a bit of time, energy, and motivation to spare for this kind of work, please reach out to me at ecoculture@uvm.edu and let me know. There is, unfortunately, no salary attached to the position — finding further funding is one of the tasks to take on, but there are certainly places to start doing that.

What there is, is energy (currently somewhat dispersed, but still in circulation), a cool name (EcoCultureLab) and an articulated “ecotopian” vision, mailing lists, a listserv, many students and faculty (here at the University of Vermont, and some beyond it) with an interest in getting involved in such things, and a wide opening for possibility. Since EcoCultureLab is affiliated with the University of Vermont, and most closely with its Environmental Program, a connection to one or the other would be appropriate. But since it operates at the interface of the university and the community, and currently does not depend on funding from the university, it isn’t necessary. There’s no reason why EcoCultureLab couldn’t take on a life outside the university.

If you are the person to move this vehicle forward — or if you have ideas for how to do it — let us know!

Image source: Getty Images/iStockphoto (created by Bulat Silvia)

Events... and a pending update

It’s been some time since this space has been active, and an update is long overdue. It will come very soon.

Meanwhile, I wanted to spread the word about an event taking place today and tomorrow. The Garden and the Dump: Across More-than-Human Entanglements is a two-day conference sponsored by Aarhus University in Denmark that is featuring a wonderful roster of speakers and presenters including ecophilosophers Tim Morton and Michael Marder, Chinese speculative fiction writer Chen Qiufan, and many others.

Morton’s and Marder’s talks are today at 5 and 6 pm (respectively) Central European Time (12 noon Eastern U.S. time). I’ll be giving a short presentation — I hesitate to call it a “talk” as it’s more of a “visual-proetic” (prosaic-poetic) montage — at 3:40 pm (10:40 am Eastern) tomorrow called “Event, Time, Trauma: Perambulations In and Around the Anthropocenic Zone.”

Best of all, this entire event is free and open to the public, for those who take a moment to register for it.

Incidentally, I’ll be giving somewhat longer, more prosaic variations of this talk next month at the Vermont Humanities Conference and at the Congress of Culture in Ukraine. More information on all of these can be read here.

Please stay tuned for a longer update on EcoCultureLab.

Happy Earth Day: "Intimations [of a post-pandemic]" exhibition opens

Our annual Earth Day eco-arts exhibition, virtual once again this year and hosted by two University of Vermont environmental studies classes, is now online. It’s called “INTIMATIONS: Eco-artistic glimpses through the fog of an unwinding pandemic.”

The exhibition includes several dozen works in a multitude of media: paintings and illustrations, video and audio pieces, 3-D works (displayed in 2-D, but sometimes creatively), narrative poems, haiku, and more.

You can visit it and vote for your favorite works by going to this web site: https://ecoculturelab.net/2021-student-exhibition. Or go directly to the exhibition slideshow here. Then return to the launch page, where you can vote for your favorite artworks and provide commentary. Please vote by April 30 so that we can announce the “People’s Choice” awards on May Day!

Media+Environment at FLEFF

This year’s Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) will be celebrating open-access journal Media+Environment, which grew out of a collaboration connected to EcoCultureLab activities, at an event tonight from 5:00 to 6:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time (21:00-22:30 GMT). FLEFF, which is now in its 24th year, is one of the signature environmental film festivals around the world. This year’s festival is fully virtual and open to all registrants.

Tonight’s event will feature the journal’s three co-editors (Alenda Chang, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Janet Walker) plus contributor Christina Vagt and coordinating editor Stephen Borunda speaking on the role of open-access journals like M+E in mediating and expanding the intersections between media production and environmental action. The 90 minute panel discussion and conversation will be moderated by FLEFF's co-director Patricia Zimmermann.

Here's the registration link:

https://www.ithaca.edu/finger-lakes-environmental-film-festival/week-three-events/friday-april-9-500-630-pm

Thursday seminar series update

As mentioned earlier, the undergraduate and graduate class in Advanced Environmental Humanities, with a focus on “Thinking Through the Present (Global, Historical) Moment,” has “gone public.” Over the past few weeks, we’ve had guests from Italy, the Netherlands, Estonia, and India join us, alongside others from North America and the twenty or so students signed up for the course.

We’re loosely following the schedule announced earlier, with some variations. Meetings are from 1:15 to 4:15 pm Eastern U.S. (New York City) time, with the first half of that dedicated to discussing readings and the second to a more open-ended discussion of projects (creative, research, and applied/community projects) and introductions to the following week’s readings and themes.

Here’s the current, revised schedule of topics:

• Mar. 4 Latin American perspectives on decoloniality (readings by Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena)

• Mar. 11 African perspectives on decoloniality (readings by Achille Mbembe and others)

• Mar. 18 Black Atlantic perspectives on decoloniality (primary reading: Pauline Alexis Gumbs’s Dub: Finding Ceremony)

• Mar. 25 & Apr. 1 Indigenous perspectives on decoloniality (readings by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Kyle Powys Whyte, Eve Tuck & Yang, Zoe Todd & Heather Davis)

• Apr. 8 Multispecies entanglements: Methods (readings by Deborah Bird Rose & Thom Van Dooren, Donna Haraway, and others)

• Apr. 15 No meeting (university respite day)

• Apr. 22 Eco-Arts Exhibition (online; details to be announced)

• Apr. 29 Multispecies Entanglements in Shadow Places & Sacrifice Zones (readings TBA)

• May 6: Conclusions (readings TBA)

Most of the readings are available to participants ahead of time; a few are recommended for purchase. If you are interested in participating, please write to ecoculture@uvm.edu. It’s not too late to join.

Thinking through the present moment (Thursday seminar series)

In place of EcoCultureLab’s Research Raps series, which we held every other Friday before the pandemic hit, we would like to invite interested participants to join us for seminar-style discussions run as part of a UVM course called “Advanced Environmental Humanities.” Informally the course is being renamed “Thinking Through the Present (Global, Historical) Moment.”

The “thinking” will be an attempt to grapple, intellectually and creatively, with the current state of the world(s) we inhabit. While there is a detailed syllabus, that syllabus is more of a placeholder leaving things open for collective construction as we go, with the following bare-bones set of directions as our proposed road map:

1. How (and why) do we best characterize (and name) the present moment?

2. How (and why) do we decolonize the present moment?

3. How (and why) do we post-humanize (ecologize, de-anthropocentrize, ‘multispeciate’) the present moment?

In other words, how do we make sense of the slow-motion, multi-car crash Pandemonium (political-ecological-climatological-viral-technological) that's awaiting us in the feverish future ahead (of climate disaster infowar scramble for water land food power etc.) and move instead to collectively create more socially just & ecologically sane possibilities for the more-than-human multitudes?

Thoughts and participants welcome. Click here for a list of possible readings. The seminar begins tomorrow, February 4, and runs every Thursday until May, 1:15-4:15 pm Eastern (New York City) time. If you are interested in participating, please send us an email indicating that.

Music as ecological philosophy

This morning, EcoCultureLab Research Assistant Dan Cottle presented his Master's thesis (and defended the thesis with flying colors), just in time for Lady Gaga to sing for the presidential inauguration. The thesis will eventually be readable in the University of Vermont’s ScholarWorks online scholarship database. Here's Dan's abstract:

"The Soul is Symphonic": Lessons on Practicing Music as Ecological Philosophy from Hildegard of Bingen

In this thesis I seek to understand how music may be practiced as an embodied form of ecological philosophy; that is, how it might help us attain ecological wisdom and lead sustainable lives. In the first chapter, I explore the concept of askesis: the spiritual exercises by which ancient Greek and Roman thinkers practiced philosophy as a way of life. I introduce a simple model for the practice of askesis which is taken from accounts of ancient Stoic spiritual exercise. I also consider evidence for art as a form of askesis. In the second chapter, I describe the influence of askesis on medieval European Christianity, and examine monastic music as a form of spiritual exercise in that tradition. I show that Hildegard of Bingen's play Ordo Virtutum was derived from the Divine Office, the Mass, and the liturgical drama but ultimately surpassed all three as an example of musical askesis by striving for different spiritual goals and employing different material and psychological resources. I argue that Ordo Virtutum served as a ritual dramatization of, and support for, the daily struggles of spiritual life. In the third and final chapter, I apply the lessons of askesis to the question of how music may contribute to ecological action in the present day. I conclude that the most promising way forward for the practice of music-as-askesis lies in the ability of music to transform one's way of being in the world, and I sketch some scenarios for a transformative practice of music in the present time of ecological crisis.

Committee: Adrian Ivakhiv, Professor, RSENR, Advisor; Anne Clark, Professor, Department of Religion, Chair; Sylvia Parker, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Department of Music

Congratulations to Dan!

Ecocultural books of the decade

As each decade wraps up (at least of this century so far), it’s become my custom to review the books that have been published in the previous ten years that have contributed most to theorizing the relationship between culture and ecology. I’ve shared a list of “books of the decade in ecocultural theory” at my blog Immanence. (It’s a very personal list, with the top ten ranked. Top of the list, for those too curious to wait, is Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World.)

Here I am sharing the brief summary of the three most important “streams” of thinking indicated in that larger list…

How, then, to characterize the past decade? In the territory covered by the term “ecocultural theory” — in which I include the “environmental humanities” and the numerous fields inhabited by ecocritical approaches to recognizing the scope and scale of our ecological situation, but also the fields that aim to understand how human cultural practices intersect with and mutually affect the “more than human” world of ecological systems and biological relations (anthropology, geography, some kinds of philosophy) — this decade has been shaped by three main threads of thinking and creative practice:

1. Attempts to grasp the world-encompassing totality of the climate and extinction crises: This includes debates over the naming of the “Anthropocene,” the place of capitalism and neoliberalism within it, and articulations of the “deep time” of human relations with the geological, earthly, and chthonic beyond that preceded us and will outlast us. Here we find efforts to scope out what it means to live at, or even after, the “end of the world” (note how the phrase repeats itself in the book list below), in a time of epistemic violence, great derangement, species loss, deaths of civilization and even of the “posthuman,” and all the loss, grief, mourning, rage, and other emotions conjured up at the intersections of geology, history, and the colonial and capitalist petrocultures, militarisms, and technofutures that collectively mark the world today.

2. Debates over the ontological nature of the multiplicity of the human, and the need to decolonize our understandings of that multiplicity: Sparked in part by the previous decade’s calls for an “ontological turn,” and connected intimately to the decolonial thread in all its forms — Indigenous, anti-racist, Black, women of color, global South, transnational, et al. — that has come to define so much of the current moment, these debates have involved the recognition of differences that are not merely “cultural,” but are now taken to be something more like differences of “world” or reality itself. They are differences of “world-making” and of the “cosmopolitics” by which multiple worlds clash and intersect, not merely as subjects (agents) and objects (victims) of the present global conjuncture, but as co-agents of deeper historical entanglements with ecology, materiality, biology, and cosmology in its political, affective, and imaginal contours.

3. Finally, on the more hopeful side, there have been the richly empirical and ethnographic efforts to map out the “multispecies” “entanglements” of the cultural and natural, material and discursive, as they connect, disconnect, and reconnect: Many of these efforts have engaged with the so-called “new materialist” turn in its speculative, relational, object-oriented, animist, enactive/affective, and other forms, while others have intersected with the “posthuman” turn in both its “more-than-human” and “transhuman” varieties. Others are simply part of the long tradition by which artists and philosophers continually rediscover the sheer delight of life in its biological, animated (and animist) exuberance. The animal, viral, fungal, microbial, vegetal, bodily, crystalline, watery, oceanic, elemental, and darkly and brightly ecological — all of these and more provoke creative engagements that continue to challenge our thinking about what constitutes the world and our many possible placings within it.

The full list can be read here.

Streaming media's environmental impact

The EcoCultureLab affiliated journal Media+Environment has just published another article in its “States of Media and Environment” series, and this one should be of broad interest to environmental educators, media scholars, and environmentally concerned media users…

“Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact” draws attention to an unpopular but inescapable issue: the adverse environmental effects of streaming media. Four of the brief interventions in this multi-part article focus on streaming media’s carbon footprint, estimated by some to be 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (The Shift Project 2019). This startling figure is rising at a calamitous rate as more people around the world stream more media at higher bandwidth—now exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Another factor in streaming media’s environmental impact is even less welcome: the deleterious effects of higher levels of electromagnetic frequencies that media corporations’ turn to fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology would exacerbate. These effects are well documented yet almost universally ignored. Despite all these findings, the notion abides that digital media are immaterial.

Laura U. Marks introduces the research challenges involved in calculating the carbon footprint of streaming media and suggests actions consumers and media makers can take to mitigate this environmental threat. Joseph Clark discusses the implications of digitizing huge amounts of archival film and connects material histories of news film production, distribution, and preservation or disposal to contemporary issues of digital storage, streaming, and energy use, using the newsreel archive as a case study. Jason Livingston’s contribution expands on his droll and disturbing video lecture, which presents a speculative app for mobile phones that tracks streaming, correlates it to energy use and CO2 emissions, and suggests methods to mitigate usage. Denise Oleksijczuk introduces scientific research on the health and environmental impacts of high levels of electromagnetic frequencies and suggests ways, including creative practice, to break through the resistance to these findings among telecommunications companies, governments, and the public. Lucas Hilderbrand focuses on best practices in teaching: how to educate our students about these impacts, and how teachers can resist increasing pressures to use streaming-based pedagogical media. Many communities around the world already rely on low-tech media, of necessity, and are often extremely innovative in their use (Marks 2017). However, network and media corporations are aggressively marketing devices and streaming platforms in both “developed” and “developing” regions (Cisco 2020). Many of the latter regions depend on fossil fuels and cannot afford to prioritize renewable energy and efficient systems. Thus streaming media’s carbon footprint is not just a First World problem. 

Many thanks to the co-authors, peer reviewers, and to our editorial and production teams at the Carsey-Wolf Center and the University of California Press!

Read the article here: https://mediaenviron.org/article/17242-streaming-media-s-environmental-impact

And others in the series here: https://mediaenviron.org/section/1582

Indigenous Peoples' Day: "Amá" screening & panel discussion

Monday, October 12, is Indigenous Peoples' Day, a day that has been formally adopted in an increasing number of places including the state of Vermont over the last several years to replace Columbus Day, the holiday named after the Italian-Spanish explorer who bumped into the “new world” while sailing toward India on October 12, 1492.

To mark this day, the University of Vermont is screening the documentary "Amá" and featuring a panel discussion on it on Monday at noon. The documentary tells the story of the involuntary sterilization of Native American women by the U.S. government in the 1960s and 1970s, contextualizing this within the much longer history of forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples in this country.

The panel will feature Vermont Abenaki artist and educator Judy Dow, author Nancy Gallagher (“Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State”), and UVM professors Lacey Sloan and Adrian Ivakhiv. It will be followed by a Q & A. The film is viewable until 6pm Monday by all UVM affiliates at this link using the case-sensitive password “uV@Ma.” The panel discussion can be joined on Teams Live at this link.

Further information is available here: https://www.uvm.edu/ccp/indigenous-peoples-day-panel-and-film-discussion.

Mediating art, science, disasters, and media

The EcoCultureLab supported open-access journal Media+Environment has just launched two new “streams” (ongoing series of articles), one on “Disaster Media” and the other on “Mediating Art and Science.” The latter grew in part from a roundtable at Feverish World. Thanks to all the authors who submitted pieces for it (some are forthcoming in the next issue of the journal).

My co-editor Alenda Chang notes:

Looking back in my inbox, I just realized that Adrian Ivakhiv and I have been working on this "stream" (like a special issue but ongoing) for almost a year and a half, so it's a huge relief and joy to see some of this content published and finally seeing the light of day. These are genuinely unique essays by Ellie Irons, Danielle Christianson, and Sabiha Ahmad Khan, leveraging not just text but also photography, screenshots, video, lawn plots, red fir forests, and JELL-O, from diverse disciplinary perspectives (socially engaged environmental art practice, ecology and data science, animation/film and media studies).

All of these articles, plus Janet and Lisa's tremendous overview of the disaster media topic and Rahul Mukherjee's contribution to our "States of Media and Environment" series/stream, are open-access and readable here: https://mediaenviron.org/issue/2225

Please read, share, and teach with these as appropriate.

The crisis around us: an update

As our Earth Week events passed and the Covid-19 pandemic came to inhabit our lives a bit more thoroughly (some of us quite directly), EcoCultureLab took an unannounced hiatus from normal activities. The University of Vermont has struggled, as have other institutions, to determine how to respond to the virus’s continuing presence in our lives. Announcements of an impending return back to campus this September have been reconsidered, with the fall semester now looking more like an uncertain mix of on-campus and remote learning.

Meanwhile, life in Burlington, like life in other American cities, has also been affected, with public events at a minimum, but with the presence of a second uninvited guest taking on a sudden concreteness that few had anticipated. That uninvited guest is one that has been with us — with “America” — since its beginning. It is racism, of a deep, systemic, and traumatic sort, and it is only a “guest” in that its presence is generally unacknowledged by the majority.

The nation’s response to the George Floyd murder has been earth-shaking for many. It has pinpointed the way that issues of social justice and racial discrimination — so much a part of the impact of Covid-19 already, and of climate change and other slow disasters of our time — are front and center not only in the lives of millions of African-Americans and other racialized groups in this country, but in the lives of a majority of humanity. There’s a long history to that (which, if you’re not familiar with it, should mean some catch-up reading at the very least… among other readings I’ve been recommending are recent books by Christina Sharpe, Tiffany Lethabo King, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Neshime and Williams’ Racial Ecologies anthology, and Kris Manjapra’s Colonialism in Global Perspective for an excellent summary of the long, big picture).

In the wake of all this crisis and uncertainty, a situation in which we are all still getting our individual and collective bearings, it’s been difficult to get a clear sense of what an uncertain mobile unit of creative intelligence (we hope) like EcoCultureLab should be doing. (As I wrote elsewhere, “The machine has stopped… What now?”) So much is in motion, so much is in play. The pandemic remains as alive as ever, with lives upended in every which direction. Hopes that an impending election may change things seem all too unreliable, uncertain, or nebulous for many.

With all of that in the background, I’d like to see EcoCultureLab remaining active at least on three reasonably manageable fronts this fall. The first has to do with how we participate in the local community; the second, in the university community (while rethinking what that means); and the third, in the online world that connects us to eco-artists, scholars, and practitioners around the world.

1) Life goes on: EcoCultureLab will restart its Research Raps in September as virtual Friday afternoon gatherings exploring topics of collective interest. Suggestions for topics and readings are welcome (such as perhaps one of the above, or Kathryn Yusoff’s short but provocative A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None). Meanwhile, kindred creative souls in the Burlington area are responding to the current set of crises in creative and hopeful ways and we intend to participate in those in one way or another. Among other things, we’d like to draw attention to next month’s DegrowthFest, a community-wide series of installations and happenings reflecting on what our current crises reveal about our governments, institutions, and communities, and exploring potential futures for Burlington and beyond. That will take place August 14-16 in the Old North End and other parts of the greater Burlington area. We hope to post more about it soon.

2) Rethinking the university: The coronavirus pandemic and the crisis of race and social justice both highlight the ways in which our current institutions, including our universities, are radically inadequate to the challenges they’re going to need to address. What’s the appropriate future for higher education? How might we take advantage of the current situation to realign the university into more productive relationships with the communities around it (while avoiding the already substantial push toward “coronavirus capitalism”)? Participating in these conversations is important for faculty, for students, and for community members, and EcoCultureLab hopes to be able to facilitate some of them. More concretely, EcoCultureLab affiliates (including myself) are involved in developing a new Ph.D. program that takes its lead from the practice-based, social-justice infused, low-residency Master’s in Leadership for Sustainability program, which has made wonderful inroads into rethinking what a master’s program should be and who it should serve. We’ll share more information on that soon as well.

3) Online restart: After the summer hiatus (interrupted by this post and perhaps a few more), we hope to relaunch this online space as an arena for commentary, reflection, and discussion. One planned thread will involve asking prominent theorists and practitioners in the eco-arts to tell us what current reading is informing and inspiring their work. This will hopefully become a kind of “cooking with guests,” where the ingredients are ideas and readings from the cutting-edges of eco-cultural thought and practice. More on that soon as well.

We hope you stay with us for these activities, shower us with feedback, badger us with suggestions and critiques, and generally remember that we are here. EcoCultureLab hopes to be part of the larger ecocultural laboratory of a humanity making its way through some thick brambles towards something that is, as yet, difficult to ascertain. We are these people and others — join us with your hopes, ideas, and interventions. We look and move, ever, forward.

Photo: Found assemblage, Haida Gwaii. A. Ivakhiv

EarthDay+50 Friday: What we did, what will we do?

Some protested by art, others by sound, and others by sharing hopes and calling ourselves and others to take action on behalf of a cleaner, greener (and bluer) Earth. The fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day mobilized many to do something (mostly online) despite the lockdowns keeping most of us in our homes. Pope Francis called for ecological conversion. Bill McKibben spoke and wrote incessantly, slamming fossil fuel subsidies left and right. NASA gave us images of Earth’s observing fleet.

Who heard the calls, read the articles, saw the images? What impact will they have on the world at large?

The top news stories around the world this week were certainly not about ecology, environment, or a changing climate. They were about coronavirus, economic recovery programs (or lack thereof) for nations or the world, hoped for vaccines, international disagreements around one thing or another, the pronouncements of Donald Trump, and the other kinds of things we would expect any other week during a coronavirus pandemic.

The 50th anniversary came and went. We did our part. We look forward to doing much more in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. But what is the action that will shift things in the right direction, the straw that will break the proverbial camel’s back, the nudge and tweak that will trigger the revolution we need? What are the “social tipping points” that will set social-ecological systems onto a corrected course, stabilize the Earth’s climate, and generally fulfill the goals of the movement that started in the 1960s — of finding a new and healthy balance between human needs and the vital needs of the life systems that support us?

None of those goals are overly radical; they are as anthropocentric as any in that they place our, human needs at the center of things. They simply redefine the human in a way that understands our dependence on all the other living things and systems that make this a lively and thriving planet. (That’s a redefinition that’s necessary only because we’ve forgotten what we used to know, over millennia.) There are certainly more radical things we can say and do, some of them happening today (online, of course). There are certainly very difficult questions of justice that require resolving alongside, and quite possibly before, the other ones (of climate and ecology) can effectively be addressed.

So, here we are.

(To which one can, and should, also reply, “Who, we?”)

* * *

Join Earth Day Live today: https://www.earthdaylive2020.org/

#SoundtheCall for the 50th Earth Day: https://youtu.be/lZPg3CPbahU

Image credit: http://www.trustyourstruggle.com/a/work/public-art/ (and click below)

EarthDay+50 Thursday: Creativity is not optional

If global ecological problems fall into the category of what are sometimes called “wicked problems,” then this is all the more so with social-ecological problems, in which it’s not just the ecological questions that elude tried-and-tested solutions but also, and often especially, the social, human ones that make the combination utterly intractable. Addressing them adequately requires, at the very least, interdisciplinary methods, and more often than not transdisciplinary ones.

But if creative methods aren’t in the mix, the results are more likely than not to be disappointing. The notion of creativity has been around, in some sense, for centuries, but the word’s current use as an abstract noun arguably dates back to philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s 1929 book Process and Reality, in which he not only coined the term, but made it the core of his process philosophy. Whitehead called creativity “the principle of novelty,” but insisted that it did not stand apart from its instanciations; rather, it inhered in everything that makes up a creative universe. Every moment experienced by anyone or anything is experienced creatively.

If that seems like a low bar for the kinds of things “creative people” do (think the “cultural creatives” who “add value” to gentrifying urban neighborhoods), it’s actually more the other way around. Creativity does not set some of us apart from others, or even humans apart from ants. The bar is as high as anything is capable of, and the goal (at least for Whitehead) is to extend it, to open it up, so as to “take in the universe” in our every thought, breath, and action.

There are courses in creative thinking and creativity training, some of them more useful than otherrs. But learning is always better from example, and the best artists practice exactly this kind of creativity, taking on the “wicked problems” of our time in ways that open them up to agencies and capacities — our own, among others — that we might not have realized were even there.

Marina Zurkow belongs in that category. Her collaborative work on problems like climate change, sea level rise, invasive species, Superfund sites, and petroleum interdependence draws on digital media, animation, the life sciences, food, and software technologies to build connections between people and the nonhuman world. Her collaborator and interlocutor in her EcoCultureLab sponsored Earth Week keynote this afternoon will be Una Chaudhuri, a pioneer of “eco-theater” and a transdisciplinary thinker and artist who creatively explores the pedagogy of “ecospheric consciousness.” Join us for a presentation by and conversation with these two original and highly creative artists working at the intersections of ecology, science, and public engagement, today at 4:30 p.m. EDT.

EarthDay+50 Wednesday: The day itself

Today marks 50 years since the first Earth Day, when some 20 million Americans, or 10% of the country’s population, walked out into the streets, parks, and auditoriums to talk, listen, agitate, worry over, and celebrate our relationship to the planet that had just been seen from space (gracing the cover of the New York Times on Christmas Day) 16 months earlier.

The numbers are a little difficult to pin down, but not too controversial. Historian Adam Rome writes:

"Roughly 1,500 colleges and 10,000 schools held teach-ins. Earth Day activities also took place in churches and temples, in city parks, and in front of corporate and government buildings. The teach-ins collectively involved more people than the biggest civil rights and anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s. […] The first Earth Day had a freshness and intensity that are difficult to imagine today. […] the organizers had to plan everything from scratch, and the effort often was life-changing. Tens of thousands of people spoke on Earth Day — and many had never spoken publicly on environmental issues before. The discussions at Earth Day teach-ins sometimes were soul-searching: Many participants truly were struggling to get to the roots of “the environmental crisis.” (p. x)

All of this was accomplished with a budget of about $125,000. The Guardian’s New York based correspondent wrote,

Nothing like it in war or peace has been seen in this country. Victory parades, Fourth of July marches. and VE night orgies have been more feverish, but as visible expressions of mass sentiment they paled beside the continental scale of this demonstration.

Its success, if measured in terms of the environmental legislation passed in the United States over the next few years, was substantial: the passing of the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Air Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), and at least 25 other pieces of environmental legislation that decade.

Well, here we are, fifty years later, still “struggling to get to the roots of ‘the environmental crisis.’” (Earth Days themselves have come and gone, the largest being the 1990 one in which some 200 million participants in 140 countries took part.)

What we’ve learned on environmental issues over these years has been printed on enough paper to reach the moon and back (that’s a wild guess, but what I’ve read over my years of being a student and scholar of environmental issues goes a long way into the stratosphere, I am sure).

What’s been added to our storehouse of knowledge includes the incontrovertible evidence of anthropogenic climate change (incontrovertible, for most climate scientists, since at least 1988), the practically unanimous agreement that the relationship between humans and the Earth has changed profoundly and irreversibly — enough for geologists, the turtles of the scientific world, to designate our time with the new term “Anthropocene,” and plentiful indicators — in all kinds of places, if you know where to look — that we can resolve many of our ecological problems if we had the political will and institutional capacity to do it, but that we do not currently have either.

We are (some of us) working on it, to be sure. But we are also (many of us) working directly opposed to it. Our work is, let’s just say, cut out for us.

Collectively, the world has been through at least three distinct waves of environmental mobilization worldwide since the 1960s (four if you include the conservation and preservation movements that began in the U.S. in the late 1800s). If the 1970s were the “environmental decade” that resulted from the decade capped by Earth Day 1970, the 1980s were the decade in which reaction consolidated into in a global wave of neoliberal economic policies, spearheaded by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations (and tested earlier in Pinochet’s Chile). Environmentalism got laid by the wayside, with the nuclear standoff between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. looming much more strongly in global focus.

By the late 1980s, however, environmentalism was back on the agenda (thanks to James Hansen and many others) and, with the 1991 Rio Earth Summit, had become clearly global. But the now hegemonic nature of neoliberal economics, combined with the global lease on life it was given by the fall of the Soviet bloc, ensured that “sustainable development” — the new global catchword — would be a compromise between economic development and environmental regulation.

By the 2000s, of course, we get 9-11, the Iraq War, and ultimately the economic crisis of 2008-9, with environmental and climate activism rising again in its third, and most global, wave, but with reaction setting in even more strongly — ultimately with the elections of anti-environmental “illiberal populists” like Trump, Bolsonaro, and others.

Here we are, then, huddling together in our homes in the wake of coronavirus. The world has certainly gotten more feverish, warmed not only by global climate instability with its many attendant risks — intensified fires, storms, floodings, sinkings, and now pandemics — but also by the political and cultural instabilities marking humanity’s response to this interconnected array of strange visitors. COVID-19, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is not exactly a new global actor — viruses and pandemics do come around every so often — so much as it is a variation on a very old global actor, the planetary microbiome that generates the companion species — ‘organisms at the edge of life’ — known as viruses.”

Today (as I watch snowflakes swirling outside my window), we here at the University of Vermont host two major events relating the climate-changed environmental big picture to the ecology of pandemics, habitat loss, and deforestation: EcoCultureLab’s global check-in “When Corona Met Climate Change… What Changed?” at noon EDT, and tropical forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni’s keynote talk “Disturbance, Recovery, Discovery: Lessons from Tropical Rainforests.” And we follow up tomorrow with Marina Zurkow’s talk (with Una Chaudhuri) exhorting us to “Boil the Ocean!”

We invite you to join us at any or all of these events.