Underground Ecocriticism Liveblog 13

Andrew McMurry, “The Role of Humanities in the Time of Climate Change; or, What to Do As The World Burns.” 

Social scientists believe they know they have better things to do. Humanists often confined to their pen. Contemporary disaster movies. Humanists treat them as placeholders of meaning. The kind of truth that Jesus or Hallmark like (!). Routinizing declinist narratives. 

The threats are less definable than in a nuclear age, but more substantive. 
The crash of man overcomes the triumph of man, which is the humanist theme. 
It's hard to know what to do with this. 
I won't tell anyone how to approach the role of...etc as in my title. (!)
[This is funny in a kind of gallows humor way]
Textual entities are the humanist bread and butter. 
German call for papers about ecological humanities while avoiding the rhetoric of "catastrophic urgency."
Why are the humanities so unresponsive? Arnold, Dilthey, Fish. Nonutilitarian perspective. 
Teaching of soft skills. 
Believing what you contest: proving skills in the market. 
Upton Sinclair: "You can't make a man understand something when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it."
Inhofe: "I thought [global warming] must be true until I found out what it cost."
Materialism, deterioration of communities, exploitation of third world, loss of skills and so on. 
University's self description colonized by commerce.