Hot off the press: 'Dismay, dissembly and geocide: Ways through the maze of Trumpist geopolitics'

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of being invited to write a short piece for a review forum in Law and Critique on Kyle McGee's new book Heathen Earth: Trumpism and Political Ecology.

The other contributions are now online, along with Kyle's own introduction:

Introduction: Law Between Two Vertigos, Kyle McGee
The Denier-in-Chief: Climate Change, Science and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Kari De Pryck and François Gemenne
Earthbound Law: The Force of an Indigenous Australian Institution, Stephen Muecke
Trumpism and Being in Worlds that Fall Between Worlds, Lilian Moncrieff

My own piece seems to have gotten jammed in the cogs of Springer's editorial bureaucracy, hopefully to be dislodged some time soon. However, I've uploaded a pre-print and will re-advertise the situation once the finalised version emerges.

So, 'hot off the pre-press,' then: Dismay, dissembly and geocide: Ways through the maze of Trumpist geopolitics

[Update 23/06/17: The full and final version is out now in open access.]

The short of it is that Heathen Earth is excellent and well worth a read for anyone concerned with issues of political ecology, the politics of climate and earth systems, the Anthropocene, the tawdry dementedness of he-who-shall-remain-nameless and so on, particularly (although by no means exclusively) in relation to law.

However, my piece is not really a review as such. Rather, it take Kyle's provocative postulates as a spur for my own worries, musings and therapeutic rhetorical splurges.

All in all, very pleased to have been involved!

'An Ecomodernist Manifesto' reviewed—part 1

There is much in this document that is praiseworthy. However, it gets off to a bad start:

To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes truer every day. Humans are made from the Earth, and the Earth is remade by human hands. Many earth scientists express this by stating that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans.

That is a very poor interpretation of 'the Anthropocene' for several reasons. First, it simple mindedly interprets 'anthropos' as 'homo sapiens.' Second, and even more important, it continues the claim previously made by several of its authors, namely that human beings are 'The God Species' capable of harnessing earth systems. It confuses perturbation with control, peril with mastery.

'An ecomodernist manifesto' published

An Ecomodernist Manifesto

So much wrong with it that it's difficult to know where to begin. Will take some digesting...

How wolves change rivers and whales change climate through trophic cascades

After the very popular How Wolves Change Rivers, now How Whales Change Climate, narrated by George Monbiot.