Over the last two years, I have worked on two manuscripts that had been stewing for a while. One of them I wrote about in the previous post. Here, I want to introduce the other one, published in January 2022 as Understanding the Rights of Nature: A Critical Introduction. I have been following the idea […]
Category: Human Ecology
Ecocene Politics
It has been a while since my last post. The reason for this is very simple: I have focused all of my writing energy on two books that had been long in the making, and that have now been published: Understanding the Rights of Nature: A Critical Introduction, and Ecocene Politics. Both are also available […]
Cycling through a power struggle
One of the most visible effects of COVID-19 in Brussels, where I live, has been the creation of a bunch of new cycle paths. Given that space in a very dense city is limited, these have tended to be overwhelmingly taken from areas previously designated for cars. In some cases, where there used to be […]
Rights + Nature = ?
I have written before about the tendency, currently enjoying gusts in its sails, to grant rights to natural environments. In practical terms, it all started in a borough in Pennsylvania, but really came to international prominence with Ecuador’s 2008 constitution, the first one in the world to grant constitutional rights to nature. These are the right […]
Habitats
Everything that lives must live somewhere. The idea of habitat, at its core, is nothing more than the designation of a home for a particular form of life. In theory, everything that finds appropriate conditions for its own life requirements has found its habitat. If we are thinking along Darwinian and ecological lines, then chance […]
Social and Ecological Justice: on a conflicted relationship
Current events keep confirming my conviction: the 21st century will be the ecological one, no matter what actually happens to the environment. Just like the 20th century was the century of wars even if you happened to live in a place that saw none, so will this century be defined by ecology, inasmuch as ecological matters will […]
The Difficulty of Slowing Down
The Great Acceleration has been proposed, with good reason, as the proper kicking into gear of the Anthropocene. Long story short, across virtually all indicators of production/consumption (energy, land use, commodities, and so on), the post-WWII world has hit the accelerator hard. Speaking about it in the past tense is misleading, as all indicators currently show […]
Ecological Depression
Ecological depression may become an acceptable diagnosis for an increasing number of people. It is characterised by feelings of impotence and despair when confronted with the massive scale of socio-environmental destruction in our world. It leads to paralysis. In today’s news cycle, not only are environmental problems under-reported, they also tend to be assimilated to […]
Gratitude
I have spent the last three months in New Zealand, immersed in a world very different from the one that defines my usual daily life. I have had the luxury of time-to-think, something that, even though I became an academic for it, is rarer by the day. I have also had the opportunity to start […]
The Normalization of Science
The work of an academic today is disproportionately defined by the imperative to publish. This is true to the point of platitude, and there is no shortage of good writing examining this condition of the academic as publication enterprise. For better or worse, the experience of publishing one’s work allows for a pretty close view […]
The Civil Animal 