Blog
The Wrong Way to Photograph Climate Change
The images of these November 2025 floods in South East Asia show so starkly the total waste of whatever reasoning allows us to continue global warming. The economy isn't getting better. People aren't getting healthier or happier. We are trashing our planet and...
Sacred Bears and Profane Cats: Rethinking Japan’s Wildlife Crisis Through Terror Management Theory
Introduction: The Paradox of Fear and Death in Contemporary Japan In 2023, Japan witnessed an unprecedented 219 bear attacks, resulting in six human fatalities. The media response was immediate and visceral—front-page stories, emergency government meetings, and calls...
It’s Time for Big Oil to Take the Loss: Why Fossil Fuel Companies Need to Stop Suing Over Groningen
Picture this: You run a business that makes you €64.7 billion over sixty years. Your operations cause over 1,600 earthquakes that damage almost 100,000 homes and traumatize an entire region. When the government finally shuts you down to protect citizens and the...
Grifting and Cannibalism in The Great Transformation, or The Inner Development Goals: Or How Business Consultants Turned Bildung into a LinkedIn Badge
The Inner Development Goals emerge from a peculiarly Nordic scandal: Tomas Björkman, who edited Lene Rachel Andersen's book The Nordic Secret, has spent years traveling the world promoting her work as if it were his own, leveraging her scholarship on Bildung—that rich...
Retro Better Living Through Science to populate the Greenwashing Habitability Zone
Predatory ambitions: "the tactical setting of ambitious-looking but unattainable climate targets" -- Ketan Joshi The Greenwashing Habitability Zone, as described by Ketan Joshi (in the first figure below), shows the usual suspects of discourses of denial are at work...
Upcoming Talk at Oxford
At the Smith School Sustainable Leadership Programme, Oxford What Climate Litigation can learn from the US Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement Widely seen as a possible model for pending and future climate litigation, the 1998 United States Tobacco Master Settlement...
Conversations on CDoH – Institute of Public Health Bengaluru
https://youtu.be/ScjbbslWqV0?feature=shared&t=377
Conceptualizing Ecocide (and Semiocide)
October (1-3) I'll be presenting as part of Utrecht University's CONCEPTUALIZING ECOCIDE conference on the relations between ecocide and semiocide, as part of the "Rethinking Harm in the Anthropocene" panel. This builds on my previous talks at Utrecht University where...
New Podcast: WORK ISN’T WORKING on the Rebel Mindset Podcast
Okay, so I've been doing a lot of podcasts lately. On completely different topics (a not-so-secret joy of mine is inter/trans/multidisciplinarity). But this one explicitly calls me out -- It's both very 'business friendly', and happens to have a great title: the Rebel...
Making Biology Easy for the Humanities
I would argue that, although I am a so-called plant philosopher, that actually this domain is the easiest starting point for understanding from a generalist's perspective what constitutes a beautiful, intact, harmonious ecology. For example, entomology is much more...
New Article: Norwegian state-corporate climate obstruction and ecological harms in Brazil
Why is Norway investing in the Amazon Fund when it has gigantic state-owned mining operations destroying the Amazon? This paradox, or contradiction could be dismissed as merely a really expensive greenwashing campaign. Maybe Norway never cared about the Amazon in the...
Essentia Foundation Interview with Hans Busstra on Biosemiotics as Distributed Agency
Having worked on biosemiotics for 10 years since earning my PhD in environmental philosophy on interspecies communication and ethics, I've found increasingly fascinating the various traps of thinking and premature conclusions awaiting the intrepid explorer of...
CRISPR Bacon and the Collapse of Ecological Integrity: Why Gene-Edited Pigs Are a Biotech Disaster in the Making
Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave its blessing to something that sounds like it was lifted from a dystopian novel: genetically modified pigs, designed with CRISPR technology to resist a devastating viral disease, are one step closer to your dinner...
De Salon Ruigoord April 5
De Salon Ruigoord is one of my favorite spaces in the Netherlands. If you haven't been there yet, then you haven't yet experienced that elegant Old World charm reminding you of the places where the Romantics became romantic enough to have their visions that inspired...
New article out on UNDO.org on ‘The dangers of Big Tobacco’s faux-pharmaceutical rebrand’
This follows up on my article published last year: Hendlin YH, Han EL, Ling PM. Pharmaceuticalisation as the tobacco industry’s endgame. BMJ Global Health. 2024;9(2):e013866. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2023-013866 discussing how "To revamp their image, Big Tobacco relies on...
Talk: 9 April, 2025 on Exporting Suffering: The Flower Industry at Home and Abroad
Everyone loves flowers. They brighten our day. They remind us of the beauty of life, and they are ephemeral, a memento mori of sorts to reflect upon our own mortality. But in the past half-century, the presence of flowers has moved from local to global markets, from...
Beyond Set and Setting: Ecodelic Attunement to Regulate Nervous Systems
I'm chuffed to be able to share with you an event over 20 years in the making. You see, I don't post about it here on my website, where Very Serious Adult types lurk, but I've been going to Burning Man, playing music in live bands, singing around the campfire and in...
The Obsolescence of Privacy
In Günther Anders' 1958 essay The Obsolescence of Privacy, he opens with the epigraph: ‘The world is not only delivered to the house’, the inverse is also true, ‘the house is delivered to the world’. It is perhaps no coincidence, that as Hannah Arendt's husband,...
Reading the Signs
Ours is a crisis of misreading the signs. As are the origins of all crises. Humans are the only species of being able to trick ourselves to such a collective, thorough degree that we are able to ignore all the signs, again and again. No other species would survive...
Chemical Sensitivity Podcast
A world for birds reading signs
Too often, we set up reality as if birds could read our signs. And then plead innocence when the rest of the world dies. This insanity confuses formality for plausible deniability, misunderstanding that no sign 10,000 years into the future can be intelligibly read by...
Addressing Collapsology
Everywhere we look, we see signs of climate denial, whether explicit as in people who are so traumatized by the idea of everything they care about coming crashing down that they outright refuse to entertain the possibility and consequences of ecological collapse...
If we only get the models right, we can predict the world
'The data from NUI is critical to solving the mystery of how sediment banks may slow glacier break-up. “Model projections for the future of Greenland are just all over the place,” says Catania.' Here's another example of the "if we only get the models right, we can...
Outside In
Bespoke Ignorance Besides social connections, not a single thing (besides that image) says a shit about repair work, regeneration, getting your hands in the soil, unfucking your air and water (not just for you, but for all people), helping others out, being of...
Giving a paper on membranes, biodiversity, and Naturphilosophie in Kiel, Germany
On July 25-27, 2024 I will be speaking at a workshop at my alma mater in Kiel, Germany, on Blasen, Umwelten und Umgebung: Biodiversität und Porosität im Sinne von Peter Sloterdijk, Helmuth Plessner und Jakob von Uexküll The workshop on "Konzepte und Narrativeder...
Beyond Determinism
Overcoming Determinism Whether something is good or bad for us or others is not always immediately apparent. And it may change according to the situation. Which means that universal, timeless, generalizable rules for what is good or bad according to its essence will...
Ecocide as Semiocide: The Demise of Nature and Its Impact on Meaning
2 May 2024 talk at Utrecht University I'm excited to be giving a talk at Utrecht University's Ecocide Interdisciplinarity Series Talks for Justice. Part of their Conceptualizing Ecocide project, they get that if we wish to actually create a solid Path to...
Update on Glyphosate and Chemical Regulatory Anomalies
This presentation is from January 2024's UCSF's Symposium to Evaluate and Counter Harmful Industry Impacts on Health, which included Tracey Woodruff, Robert Lustig, Lisa Bero, Marion Nestle, and many other inspiring speakers.
EuEpigenetics
I get an email from Aporia Magazine titled "You're probably a eugenicist" -- provocatively suggesting that we all favor good genes, and that we, all-knowing moderns, imbued with science, know what good genes are. I take umbrage with Aporia for their short-sightedness....
Software Enshittification
I would love to exit the Mac/Apple ecosystem. But I haven't found anything else reliable. It is a catch-22: use an overly expensive, bloated software and hardware monopoly that gets worse with every iteration, or go to an unsupported Linux ecosystem which doesn't have...
Pharmaceuticalization as the Tobacco Industry’s Endgame
A new article I wrote with colleagues at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has just been published in BMJ Global Health. It investigates the multi-decade plan of various tobacco...
The first modern ‘War on’ was a War on Smog funded by the fossil fuel industry
A new exposé by Rebecca John at DeSmog Blog shows that as early as 1953 industry was up to capturing popular outrage and dishing out placation. To mollify disgust of Angelinos at the mounting smog in Los Angeles, industrialists got ahead of the public action curve to...
Students are not Customers
There is a difference between a student and a customer. Yet universities, driven by profit motives, and doubting their own values, often treat students as customers. This comes with "the customer is always right" fallacy, that actually precludes and prevents...
Bass Ackwards Problem Prolonging
Instead of trying to force drugs down people's throats, why don't we address smoking, diet, and lobby against air pollution. Especially if you're a drug company. #Demarketing What these tricksters can do is put all their money into upstream prevention, not try to get...
Should Erasmus University Have a Press?
https://www.eur.nl/en/events/eur-university-press-it-needed-2023-10-25
Can a Crisis ever be Singular? (with Daniel Kamp)
can-a-crisis-be-singularDownload