The world’s (still) a mess. So, it’s always nice to come across writings that suggest a link between my PhD work and broader ecological-political questions. Here are two from the past month.
“Certainly, human action (including by way of the state) and modern technology are needed. But so are the politics, ethics, and amodern technologies of ecological repair, mutuality, regeneration, and making-habitable. Both sides, I would suggest, are necessary.”
“The epic simplification of agency to humans results in a limited view on the types of human agency needed to end fossil civilization. Questions of care and other forms of non-productive and non-consumptive social agency, such as play and idleness, are left aside, as are questions of our rooting in soils and non-bordered ecologies, and our imaginaries of the good beyond the carbon economy, and the bad within it. Yet the answers to such questions are essential not just for a post-fossil society, but for the awakening of social desires.”
https://www.newframe.com/long-read-overcoming-the-politics-of-abandonment/
“A lot of the rights and privileges that some people treated as built into whiteness are in fact contingent on the particular social structure they live in, their wealth and power to distribute it in discriminatory ways. So it’s because the United States has the wealth that it was able to create a middle class that had economic privileges above and beyond its racialised underclass. Rights and freedom are contingent upon a people’s nation, its geopolitical position, which is contingent on economic production. These in turn are contingent on the sky, the rain, the air and the water, the plants and the animals, things that we will no longer have the luxury of taking for granted in this century. ” – OT
“We need an emancipation, which includes humans and non-humans, because the fate of the humans is now more than ever before tied to the fate of other species. The times we live in require a multispecies project.” – AM
Elliot Hurst 