“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Go Jan

My mates Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have put together thirty one episodes of a really really nice podcast at Rice, as part of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Cultures of Energy Podcast is so good!

I'm waking up here in Brussels, about to give a lecture in a forest courtesy of the fantastic Aleppo group, and the theme is very much to do with how the concept Nature is actually the prologue to the Anthropocene in a really bad news disguise.

And I'm listening to Howe and Boyer interviewing Jan Zalasiewicz, the great, great geologist member of the Anthropocene working group. They do it with such intelligence, lightness and humor. It's so exactly what we need to cope with this stuff.

If you haven't been paying attention the working group just defined the term officially.

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