Tag Archives: habitability

Urban Metabolism and Degrowth, part 1

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TITLE
Democracies with a future: Degrowth and the democratic tradition
CITATION:
Marco Deriu. 2012.  Futures vol. 44, pp. 553–561.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT (partial):
The interrogation of a possible connection between degrowth and democracy inspires some questions of political epistemology. Is degrowth a socio-economic project which can be simply proposed as an ‘‘issue’’ and a ‘‘goal’’ in the democratic representative system, without discussing forms and processes of the political institutions themselves? Continue reading →

Et in Arcadia ars: Thoughts on Volcanism and Urbanism in Southern Italy, Part One

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In Homer’s Odyssey (9.443), Polyphemus cries out “Nohbdy, Nohbdy’s tricked me, Nohbdy’s ruined me” after Odysseus, his captive and prospective meal, blinds him and eventually flees from his lair. Continue reading →

Prospection and the Anthropocene

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I’d like to share two recent items from the news that make a sobering pairing.

The first is an opinion piece in the New York Times by psychologist Martin Seligman and Times science writer John Tierny summarizing a new theory about human beings that emphasizes our orientation toward the future. Continue reading →

Loving the Anthr*pocene

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My previous post was a provocation on refusal.  How, I asked, might the Anthr*pocene concept naturalize and even magnify the violent, dispossessionary forces it purports to describe?  And how might refusing this concept relate to Continue reading →

Historicizing the Anthropocene: A Peek at Paris

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Historians love questions of dating and chronology, and there are two questions about dating the Anthropocene. First, stratigraphy and other sciences have been searching for physical evidence for when Continue reading →

“The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis: A Biography of an Ingenious Species”

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CITATION:
R. DeFries. 2014. New York: Basic Books.
BOOK WEBSITE:
ABSTRACT:

The human species has long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food so that all 7 billion of us could eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing transformation as to Continue reading →

Seeing the Anthropocene in something good

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Lake Whitney Water Purification Facility, Hamden, CT. Google Earth. Imagery date 9/19/2013. URL: http://goo.gl/maps/ZfQWL

Lake Whitney Water Purification Facility, Hamden, CT. Google Earth. Imagery date 9/19/2013. URL: http://goo.gl/maps/ZfQWL

Recently someone asked me to point to something good in the Anthropocene. That can be a hard one. The Anthropocene narrative, to the extent that there is a single story there, is typically Continue reading →

“Efforts to monitor and characterize the recent increasing seismicity in central Oklahoma”

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CITATION:
D. E. McNamara et al. 2015. The Leading Edge, June 2015, pp. 628-639.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
The sharp increase in seismicity over a broad region of central Oklahoma has raised concerns regarding the source of the activity and its potential hazard to local communities and energy-industry infrastructure. Efforts to Continue reading →

“A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene”

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CITATION:
J.K. Gibson-Graham. 2011. Gender, Place & Culture. Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 1-21.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both Continue reading →

Storytelling & Practices of Habitation (Pt. II)

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Last summer I rode 2,500 miles across the country, interviewing people about “the sacred” and our human connection to land and place. This is the second of two posts about my experiences–if you want to start with the first one click here.
Continue reading →

“Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home”

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CITATION:
Pope Francis. 2015. Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home [Encyclical].
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
The Encyclical takes its name from the invocation of Saint Francis, “Praise be to you, my Lord”, in his Canticle of the Creatures. It reminds us that Continue reading →

“A Manifesto for Abundant Futures”

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CITATION:
Rosemary-Claire Collard, Jessica Dempsey, and Juanita Sundberg. 2015. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 105, No. 2, pp. 322-330.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, Continue reading →

Gendering the Anthropocene

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Last October, Oxford economist Kate Raworth wrote an op-ed criticizing the Anthropocene Working Group, an international team of scientists charged with determining whether the Earth has, in fact, entered a new geologic epoch. Raworth wrote that, whatever their intellectual merits, “[leading scientists] still seem oblivious to Continue reading →

“Justice and the Environment in Nussbaum’s ‘Capabilities Approach’: Why Sustainable Ecological Capacity Is a Meta-Capability”

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CITATION:
Breena Holland. 2008. Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 2, pp. 319-332.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
What principles should guide how society distributes environmental benefits and burdens? Like many liberal theories of justice, Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach” does not adequately address this question. The author argues that the capabilities approach should be extended to Continue reading →

Toward a More-Than-Human Anthropocene

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THIS POST IS PART OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT—SEE THIS DESCRIPTION OF OUR SUBMISSION.

By exploring habitability in the Anthropocene, we imply that a human-dominated world can still be a world that supports thriving human populations.  This orientation holds a certain appeal, but it is, I contend, in need of serious interrogation.  Continue reading →