Join the Dots, Spot a Hyperobject

Another great link from Joe Romm's Climate Progress, this time we have a stunning video by Stephen Thomson (of Plomomedia). Stephen has added some powerful images to Bill McKibben's recent piece in the Washington Post. McKibben is critical of the ongoing failure of the media to join the dots between extreme weather events, and Stephen Thomson's video brings McKibben's narrative to life in a very effective manner.

Interactive History of Climate Science

Just came across this wonderful interactive history of academic climate science papers, divided into skeptic, neutral and pro-global warming categories. Move the slider along the bottom to pick the year, click the bubble to get a list of the papers in the respective category and year. Beautiful.

Oil Oriented Ontology

I particularly enjoyed this object-oriented litany from David Strahan’s (2007) The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man.

It’s amazing how relatively little oil makes so much stuff: not just surfboards but cameras, telephones and gadgets of all sorts; anti-freeze, pipes and plumbing supplies; car tyres (each contains seven gallons of oil), and asphalt to build the roads they roll on; polystyrene insulated cups; X-ray negatives, catheters, stethoscope diaphragms, oxygen tents and medical gloves; packaging (2 million tonnes in Britain alone); window frames; nappies; furniture; paints, dyes, inks and solvents; acrylic fibres for sweaters, acrylic resin for lenses for lenses and light fittings; PVC for raincoats and toys; plastic bottles (11 billion a year in Britain alone); food colouring, stabilizers and antioxidants; detergents; golf balls; shoe soles and entire trainers; TVs and computers (not just the plastics but also – ironically – flame retardant chemicals); bathtubs and shower curtains; parts for fridges, cookers and washing machines; tights; carpets; rubber gaskets, seals and hoses; plastic bags (17 ½ billion in Britain alone, 100 billion in US); bedding; electrical cable sheathing; pharmaceuticals; adhesives; cosmetics and hygiene products; Wellingtons; paddling pools; polyurethane foam for cavity insulation; CDs and DVDs (20 billion a year the legal market alone); rope and twine; footballs; the fleece I’m wearing now; and – my favourite, this – the chemical they sluice around the inside of wine bottles to make them shiny before the wine goes in. In fact, most ‘man-made’ materials you can think of are nothing of the sort; they are ‘oil-made’.

Oh yes, by the way, the entire economy runs on the stuff; it’s a finite resource; it’s likely to pass peak production between 2006 and 2015 (yes, most of those years are in the past); and we have no equivalents or good replacements. Enjoy.

"We're Doomed"

Broadly coextensive with my engagement with Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, for the last eighteen or so months I have been slowly (re-)immersing myself in ecological philosophy and environmental ethics. Initially this was with the aim of exploring the connections, continuities and possible alliances between some of my earlier research interests and the metaphysical oeuvre of SR/OOO. However, I must confess that this hasn’t quite played out in the way I intended. Rather perversely, either my ecological philosophy has finally gone dark, to appropriate Tim Morton’s term, for reasons that may have everything to do with the alchemical wedding between it and SR/OOO, or else I have simply had a "moment of clarity", "got real" and/or finally stopped denying what, on some level, I have known for some time. Standing in solidarity with many environmentalists, I can now confidently say “we’re all fucked” (or, in the words of Private Frazer of Dad’s Army fame, “we’re doomed”). I’m also prepared to take a hatchet to hope, optimism and positive thinking; but I’ll bypass those for the moment as mere corollaries of the main event.

While I have been teaching ecological and environmental philosophy for the better part of a decade, and been studying it for more than double that, I have also been doing a good job of (a) maintaining some comforting conceptual blind spots, (b) failing to correlate a lot of what I know and believe in a coherent, meaningful and practical manner, and (c) not fully, or perhaps sufficiently, emotionally engaging with what I know and believe. Now there are many increasingly well-understood psychological and evolutionary explanations and excuses for all of these failures (not least of which is the inability of our poor Stone Age, flight-or-fight wired brains to apprehend long term threats or hyperobjects like climate change). However, I’m still more than a little shamefaced that, while I’ve been able to academically babble on about animal rights, ecocentrism, ecological degradation, intrinsic versus instrumental value and species extinction for the past decade, I’ve also been able to carry on with the usual business of life without too much discomfort. Oddly, I was able to recognize and get moving with this kind of problem with regard to my gender identity and my relationship with feminism quite some time ago, but following through with regard to ecology seems to be something I’ve been able to resist, repress and ignore with some tenacity. This, at least, is now changing.

Where now? Obviously the blog is serving more as a confessional at the moment. I never seem to have the time for the mini-treatise of Levi Bryant or others. Most spare moments of writing time, amidst family or academic commitments and piles of administrivia, always seem better directed towards book projects or sleep. These sporadic blog entries are at best side comments for anyone who might be interested or memos for my future self. The favourite blogs list to the side is perhaps indicative of a migration in my thinking. For example, Climate Progress, the Oil Drum and Real Climate are recent additions.

What of OOO? Sometime in the last year I remember one of Anthony Paul Smith’s comments on OOO at An und für sich striking me quite hard. Paraphrasing, I remember him saying that he didn’t have any major problems with OOO, except that he couldn’t see the pay off. I’ve thought about that quite a lot since then. Now clearly one could question the need for demonstrable pay offs (impact assessments anyone?), or else interrogate precisely what paying anything off could mean? Minimally, though, I was more concerned with what I was expecting to get from OOO. What value did it have for me? Simple answer: new/innovative (qua better) conceptual and theoretical tools/lenses for doing non-anthropocentric metaphysics. I won’t belabor or defend whether OOO succeeds in this – the commitment and effort alone remains sufficient. But the pay-off? Why should I want OOO to succeed in this endeavour? My answer of a few months ago would have been that better theories of non- and inhuman agency, actants, matter/nature, objects, the things-in-themselves etc. are one amongst many necessary conditions for escaping the mess that we are in and the crises we are moving towards. Now, though, I’m not so certain. An awful lot of these activities feel increasingly like navel-gazing. Don’t get me wrong, I love philosophy and theory, but of late I’m really starting to focus, with painful intensity, on which theories are, or might be capable of being, applied to, or translated into, some world-changing praxis (the Marxist refrain with regard to the purpose of philosophy loops in out of my consciousness with some regularity here). Indeed, it is with some regret that Graham Harman’s writing has taken a backseat in my thinking of late. Despite the pleasure I gain from reading Harman and his championing of Latour, metaphysics and weird realism, I am finding it difficult to build bridges between his work and the more ecocentric and systems-based theories with which I am most familiar. It is Levi Bryant’s work that is more clearly pointing towards what I need OOO to be, and where I need it to move. Recent posts, such as his Materialism of Onticology, are keeping me very attentive. The following quote usefully captures the trajectory my philosophizing needs to take.

As we watch the nuclear meltdown at the Fukishima power plant, here are some questions we might ask: What difference does an earthquake make? What difference does a tsunami make? What differences do nuclear power plants make? What do all of these things do in their specific affective circumstances? The point is not to deny the role of things such as capital, capitalism, and interests, but to understand these things as genuine actors in these societies or assemblages of association. For example, what new possibilities arise as a result of people’s encounters with all these agencies?

What of me? Well the bookshelves near my desk are divided between an array of academic and diagnostic texts that encompass such pessimistic/realistic terms as collapse, crisis, decline, descent, end-times, last and extinction in their titles (two thirds) and practical, self-help books, featuring some rather more hopeful/necessary descriptors as self-sufficiency, survival, sustainability and transition (one third). To this one may add the pile of undergraduate dissertations and projects in front of me and the sounds of my wife and kids playing in the next room. I think that is a pretty accurate snapshot of where I am and what matters at the moment.

And Another One ...

This is turning into an unpleasant litany.

Closure of Philosophy at LMU

A meeting of London Metropolitan University’s Academic Board yesterday approved proposals for the closure of Philosophy, along with its fellow Humanities subjects, History and Performing Arts – that is to say, it decided that they will not recruit from 2012/2013. This decision was extremely sudden. Until Tuesday evening of this week, when colleagues on Academic Board received papers for the coming meeting, it seemed that these courses were to be preserved. This was not the decision of the Faculty, which proposed to continue these courses, but of central management.

The ground for the decision was ostensibly that of prospective profitability. However, neither Faculty nor central management have been willing to divulge the figures or the modelling methods used to reach this decision. Crude calculations on the basis of existing student numbers suggest that the University actually will lose more income than can be possibly saved in redundancies. This supposition is supported by the fact that when asked at the sub-committee of the Board of Governors meeting last night how much the cuts were expected to save, the Director of Finance replied that they had not yet made that calculation.

Philosophy has been taught at LMU and its predecessor institutions (the University and Polytechnic of North London) since the 1960’s, and has offered a Single Honours degree since 1973. Since the 1980’s, the course has been distinguished by the fact that it provides equal coverage of both Analytic and European philosophy. Although it is now smaller than in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, it still maintains this breadth of coverage.

Philosophy is extremely popular among its students and in last year’s Guardian student satisfaction survey came 29th out of 47 – far higher than the University overall.

The decision to close History and Performing Arts is just as shocking as the decision to close Philosophy. History also achieves a far better than average satisfaction ranking – 48th out of 93, and Performing Arts is widely regarded as providing training at least as good as the Royal Colleges. The cutting of these three courses, following the decisions made earlier this year to close several other Humanities courses, leaves only a small rump of surviving courses, which will almost certainly be absorbed into other Faculties. It therefore seem likely that LMU will in a very few years be a University without Humanities. This is therefore another instance of that alarming trend, whereby, not only philosophy, but also other Humanities courses are deemed inappropriate for students in the post-1992 Universities.

It is still possible that pressure from inside and outside the University will prompt reconsideration of this decision. If you wish to register a protest, please email:

Prof Malcolm Gillies, Vice Chancellor - m.gillies@londonmet.ac.uk

Roddy Gallacher, Dean of Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Languages and Education - r.gallacher@londonmet.ac.uk

With thanks in advance for your support,

Jim Grant, Course Leader
Dr Adam Beck, Senior Lecturer
Dr Chris Ryan, Senior Lecturer

A petition for an emergency meeting of the Board of Governors can be found here: http://t.co/vq1awor

Another Philosophy Department Closure

This from the Chair and Programme Leader of Philosophy at the University of Greenwich, Kath Jones:

The situation: The management of the School of Humanities has closed recruitment to the Philosophy programme with immediate effect and are writing to students who have already been given places for Sept 2011 to tell them that these are no longer available. The management are recommending that the Philosophy BA be closed down. This recommendation has to pass through the Academic Planning Committee before it is formally set in stone (but this is only a formality unless we can interrupt it). The Philosophy team were not invited to take part in any of the discussions leading up to this decision, and they have not been presented with any written document detailing the argument for the closure of the programme. The partial statistics that were presented at a school meeting yesterday are out of date and do not in any obvious way support the decision. We have requested proper documentation from the Head of School, but have still not received it. The British Philosophy Association is writing a letter asking the University not to close the programme, which will be signed by Heads of Philosophy departments at other Universities. Past and present students are meeting at the Student Union on Monday at 5pm to discuss how best to protest against the decision. Letters from past students are available (from me) to use for letters to newspapers or anything else.

Increasingly I am of the view that thinking is seen as a dangerous luxury item by neoliberalism and capitalism. If it can't turn an obvious/quick profit, or generate short-term wealth, it can and should be sacrificed. Gah ... lifeboat economics of the worst kind. Facebook group here.

Nothing Lasts, not even Goddess

I wake to an interesting post from Tim Morton, wherein he is responding to Hägglund and radical atheism.

...I'm still not convinced that impermanence implies radical atheism. I keep returning to the possibility, which Hägglund simply doesn't consider, that there is a god, and that she is mortal, and that she created the Universe, or that she is the Universe. Such a god would exist as much as a pear or a floating iceberg exists—not that much, according to the deconstructive view, but existence nevertheless.

Inevitable self-promotion here, but this is precisely the position that I develop in Goddess as Nature. Most Goddess feminists and many Pagans, of the Starhawk, Z. Budapest variety, both view and value the Universe/Nature as a mortal, impermanent deity, who is also in some sense female, and whose existence is little different than that of the pear or iceberg that Tim deploys.

This Goddess as Nature and Pagan worldview is most readily characterised as a form of pantheism, a religious/philosophical position that atheists such as Dawkins rapidly dismiss as simply "sexed up atheism". It seems, though, as philosophers such as Michael Levine and Grace Jantzen have argued, that pantheism is an eminently defensible religious and metaphysical worldview that far, far too many simply reject in a knee-jerk fashion.

Quite amazing how many of these new and radical atheist arguments only play out as responses to an ontotheology that is shackled to the triad of Abrahamic monotheisms.

[Addendum: I should add that I am not aware if Hägglund claims or argues that radical atheism follows from impermananence (not being familiar with his work). I merely note that impermanence is assimilated into many theistic worldviews, and the degree of success probably warrants examination on a case by case basis.]