President Obama announces major action on climate change.
It's the end of June, almost. It's been an intense month of writing. Pope Francis's encyclical about climate change (May 24, 2015) has been provoking lots of fascinating responses on all sides. One of the most interesting parts of the encyclical itself has to do with how it juxtaposes/problematizes the notion of "humanity" as a whole (i.e. "we" as "anthropoi") and the notion of "different humans" (i.e. how "we" are not all the same, because of history, gender, etc.), something I've unpacked more in one chapter of the Humanist Anthropocene. The Guardian discusses the televised interview of Barack Obama and Sir David Attenborough: "it is Attenborough, on the day in which he marked his 89th birthday, who poses the most probing questions of their encounter, asking the president why he cannot show a commitment to tackling climate change in the same way previous presidents had strived to put people on the moon." The World Policy Institute's Summer 2015 journal is dedicated to "Climate's Cliff," i.e. how close we are to "falling off."
Article in the Guardian about how “John McCain mocks Obama for calling climate change a threat as Isis advances.”
Yesterday, Bill MbKibben wrote a piece for the New York Times about Obama's decision to allow drilling for oil in the Arctic. The facts: "The Arctic is melting, to the extent that people now are planning to race yachts through the Northwest Passage, which until very recently required an icebreaker to navigate." And the ignoring of the facts: "This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn’t real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground." The spirit of McKibben's piece is taken up by a short satirical piece in the New Yorker today by Andy Borowitz, "Scientists: Earth endangered by new strain of fact-resistant humans."
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Project THE HUMANIST anthropoceneis a thought archive and workspace of Phillip John Usher (NYU) at the crossroads of early modern humanism and the problems and insights of the Anthropocene. Main Research Page. Categories
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Related SitesASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment)
Environmental Humanities (journal) Resilience (A Journal of the Environmental Humanities) All text and images quoted from other sources used according to fair use. If I have used one of your images and you would like me to remove it, please email me.
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