It is very critical of systems theory and how it has been absorbed by capitalist power elites, technologists etc. It features interviews with Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand amongst others.

The ecosystem is the best anti-politics machine ever invented.

Adam Curtis – All Watched Over by Machines of… by jamesyireland

If you’re having difficulty watching this, try viewing the documentary at DailyMotion.

In this lecture by Jean-Pierre Dupuy entitled “Rehabilitating the Prophet of Doom” the Greek myth of Casandra is discussed among many other insights relevant to environmental historians and philosophers.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy analyzes the anticipation of apocalypse in contemporary culture. Part 1 of 8. Lecture given at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) meeting at Riverside, California in June 2008.

According to the biologist Jared Diamond, Easter Island provides an analogy for the present state of the world. In his telling, the Easter Island story involves human agents cutting down the very last tree (their only means to escape the limits imposed by the island) to raise Rock Sculptures to their Gods. In this declensionist telling of environmental history people appear as homo sapiens in a zero-sum game. This reductionist tale mirrors fellow biologist and University of California professor Garett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons thesis. History is understood by biologists as a series of natural experiments with human beings appearing as species determined by a handful of deterministic elements (Eg. Guns, Germs and Steel).

According to the anthropologist Wade Davis, Easter Island provides an analogy for the diversity of cultures and the finely tuned development of cultural capacities and the natures within which they are embedded. Wade Davis spends a significant amount of time describing the lifeways and lifeworld of the Polynesians in his brilliant Massey lecture, Wayfinders. Navigators and island hoppers were never trapped on any island (Easter or otherwise) in the Pacific ocean; Davis pulls us into a rich way of being human that is threatened. This is not a declensionist tale but a political warning to protect and defend diverse human lifeways against the reductionist assumptions of university scarcity and zero sum games that constitute the lenses through which Californian biology professors (Hardin, Diamond, Ehrlich) understand world history.

It is indicative that Jared Diamond’s “informants” in Papua New Guinea have suited him for misrepresenting their history and using them as universal analogies in ways that they deem slanderous. Two Papua, New Guinea, men claim the award-winning science writer lied about their lives to prove that tribal culture is violent.

While both white anglophone men could be called public intellectuals, Wade Davis has joined in political struggles to maintain cultural diversity while the arguments of biological interpretations of history have been used to dispossess and undermine indigenous rights and amalgamate diverse ways of being into zero sum games of population pressure on resources and the territorial imperative. Things are too serious today for such simplistic declensionist history. If a hopeful future is to be created we need to draw on a diverse and multi-dimensional understanding of historical cultural being rather than the reductionist world of species being thrown at us by biologists whose native habitat appears to be located along the natural fault lines that are geological California.

This paper was commissioned by Environmental History in Canada. You can read the HTML version at NICHE. And you can download the PDF: Writing the Next Chapter of Canadian Environmental History

Max Oelschlaeger was the first to introduce me to the work of Charles Taylor.  In this recent series from David Cayley several critical issues are discussed including the critical difference between descriptive and constitutive understandings of language.

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2011/04/11/the-malaise-of-modernity-part-1—5/

The Malaise of Modernity, Part 1 – 5

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is Canada’s best known and most widely read contemporary thinker. In books like Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, he has attempted to define the unique character of the modern age. He maps the fault-lines in our modern identity, and points to both the pitfalls and the promise of our condition. Charles Taylor has also been active in politics, having run four times for Parliament during the 1960s. IDEAS producer David Cayley surveys Taylor’s thought in a series of extended conversations.

The aim of Bavington’s book is to expose that the collapse of the fishery only occured after it had been entirely state managed and that even after 20 years the industry has still not recovered. Bavington expresses that even though the collapse has caused scientists and policy makers to question their abilities to predict and control nature, the desire and attempt to control it has not waivered. The only changes that have been made are the methods used in their attempt to control nature.