Working for Tom Bristow

Tom is a really wonderful ecological humanist and I'm just proofreading an essay I wrote for him right now. We've been working on it for a while and he's really helped me to get it really nice-sounding. There's something very compact and incisive about it. It's going to be in a book called A Cultural History of Climate Change and I think it's going to be really interesting to readers. Dipesh Chakrabarty opens it up and my essay closes it.

Look at this for example:

hyperobjects, massively distributed entities such as global warming, biosphere, evolution, electromagnetism—the discoveries of the nineteenth century and after—are precisely efficient in reopening the gap for us. Hyperobjects are things that one can compute and think, but not see or touch (Morton, 2013). It is as if in the case of hyperobjects, reason were capable of slapping us upside the head with a dose of reality, or better, as if through reason we figured out that we were not the greatest and final creatures on Earth, but rather that we were inhabiting all kinds of gigantic entities that are thinkable, yet invisible. The nineteenth century was the moment at which the hyperobject we call El Niño was conceptualized, a vast climatic system in the Pacific that affects weather—a gigantic being whose existence can be surmised but not directly seen, only indirectly and vicariously in phenomena such as rain and drought.