Posts tagged Anthropocene

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‘Lets be clear -The Anthropocene is the ‘age of the sociopath’

“All of this is crucial, because perpetrators of atrocity so often attempt to convince themselves and everyone else that what they’re doing is natural or right. The word “Anthropocene” attempts to naturalize the murder of the planet by pretending the problem is “man,” and not a specific type of man connected to this particular culture.

The name also manifests the supreme narcissism that has characterized this culture from the beginning. “

Derrick Jensen, 2013. Earth Island Journal

This is a follow on post regarding my interest in the developing geological/cultural term ‘The Anthropocene’. It’s my way of keeping up-to-date with the key people in the humanities and sciences who are meeting to talk about the devastating ecological affects developing across the earth (biosphere), that have exponentially accelerated since the industrial revolution. Understanding the grave ecological realities we are facing is the key premise to my own studies in thinking about/practising deep sustainability (I’ve also this week just been asked to co-author a research paper, particularly contributing a visual culture perspective on the new holistic piechart of the planetary tipping points that was accepted at the UN Rio summit last year, (more…)

ecopornography and a review of the ecocinema enquiry over 2012

Still from Africa (2012) trailer

see Africa trailer here http://vimeo.com/56367550

‘Nobody, nobody, nobody (not even myself, my supervisors, and my assessor) is seriously going to want to read my thesis.’

Research blogger, ‘NottinghamFlorist’
Guardian Higher Education Network on Academic Blogging, Oct, 19, 2012

This website is hosted by WordPress, the largest online blogging platform and they recently sent out stats for the year on how well my site was working for me. I wasn’t that surprised to see my article on Ecopornography, slow violence and the slow deep art of place has been the most popular (the article is due to be published in a modified form later this summer in the Earthlines magazine).

The main reason of doing this blog was initially to serve as a journal for my own journey through these ideas and media and to host the various works I’m undertaking during a creative (practice and theory) PhD enquiry. To my surprise, I have developed a steadily growing audience for what I thought was quite a small, overly academic endeavour and it has led me to connect with leading peers in my field from afar (I’m now part of the Assoc. Study of Literature and Environment and Culture Australia-New Zealand ASLEC-ANZ committee) and equally important to me, develop a more general audience for this new topic.

Note: This is a long post, reviewing how I have use this site over the last year, so it might be only of interest to others undertaking a creative practice and theory PhD. (more…)

The Anthropocene Project 2013-14

An ambitious initiative ‘The Anthropocene Project’ opens this week involving leading thinkers, scientists and artists, from a range of disciplines coming together for an innovative two year study 10.01.2013 – 31.12.2014, curated by the House of World Cultures (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) in Berlin. This is an important, albeit overdue, initiative in that significant cross-disciplinary activity across the humanities is finally linking with science at such a high level. Sociologist William R. Catton Jnr, who as early as the mid 1980s established that humanity was ‘overshooting’ its planetary boundaries (in his highly regarded book of the same name), also identified as a chief difficulty of our age the ‘cultural lag’ of contemporary society in realising the urgent necessity to engage in overshoot concerns, despite decades of scientific information supporting such views (Jensen, 2004). Robust eco-literacy in the humanities is also overdue, if only to facilitate the beginnings of understanding that the Earth’s degradation is not just a result of resource exploitation or humanity’s large numbers, but ultimately driven by the anthropocentric-dominant, cultural paradigms of industrial society, that have greatly blinded our acknowledgement of the intrinsic values of, and interconnected dependencies we have, with other non-human species and elements*.

A comprehensive online document of the The Anthropocene Project on ISSU is available to study and see the huge array of people involved;