Here in North Texas we’re currently experiencing the warmest start to a year on record. This comes on the heels of the warmest winter in Texas history. A few years ago we had the dramatic wildfire apocalypse — enabled by an epic drought — that engulfed huge portions of the state, and that had me…
Category: Environment & Ecology
Forces that we cannot contain: The cosmic horror of the nuclear age
Riveting and unsettling: Here’s Robert Stolz, Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia, drawing on a recent interview with nuclear engineer and anti-nuclear activist Dr. Hiroake Koide to write in The Asia-Pacific Journal about the truly cosmic-horrific implications of radiation exposure in our present nuclear age, as related not just to events like…
Collapse and dystopia: Three recent updates on our possible future
It looks like we can forget about “collapse fatigue,” the term — which I just now made up (or maybe not) — for the eventual exhaustion of the doom-and-collapse meme that has been raging its way through our collective public discourse and private psyches for the past decade-plus. I say this based on three recent…
Teeming Links – August 30, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word is actually double: two opening words. The first is from John Michael Greer, writing with his typically casual and powerful lucidity. The second is from international studies expert Charles Hill, who writes with equal power. They’re lengthy, so please feel free to skip on down…
Teeming Links – August 27, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word simply has to go to Ben Godar, who, in a marvelous little piece for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, offers exactly what we’ve all been frantically (if unwittingly) yearning for during our past two decades of seeking total fulfillment in cyberspace: Are you tired of being in…
Teeming Links – August 23, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s invocation comes from author and cultural historian Mike Jay, author of last year’s The Influencing Machine, slated for U.S. publication in January 2014 as A Visionary Madness. The article’s tagline states the basic thesis, which articulates an uncanny experience, sensation, and intuition that we’ve all had with…
Teeming Links – August 20, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Did somebody say “apocalypse”? Oh, yeah: that was me, here, all the time. And it was also, as it turns out, everybody, everywhere these days. To preface the current roundup of recommended and necessary reading, here’s a rich reflection on this very fact, and on the deeper meanings…
“Row upon row, aisle upon aisle of nutritional zero, gaily boxed and packed”
Not that anybody should be surprised by this, but it turns out that what we commonly regard as “healthy foods” may be nothing of the sort, not because the specific foods in question (fruits and vegetables) are wrongly characterized in and of themselves, but because farming techniques — the ones we’ve honed and developed over…
‘Koyaanisqatsi’: A warning not just for America but for China
I first watched the film Koyaanisqatsi as an undergraduate student at Mizzou, in the company of other students, in the context of a student Philosophy Club meeting. And the film flat-out blew my mind and rocked my world. I have no idea if any of the others present at that viewing were as deeply affected…
Recommended Reading 41
This installment of Recommended Reading might almost be described as a special Apocalypse and Extinction edition, as evidenced by the first four items below. Today: A new book about the reality of mass extinction and the human race’s best strategies for survival. John Michael Greer on the entrenched historical tendency, especially among Americans, to posit…