The Wrong Way to Photograph Climate Change

by | Nov 26, 2025 | Biomimicry, Biophilia, Climate Change, collapsology, Decolonization, deep ecology, Discursive Gap, Environmental Justice, Environmental Political Theory, Greenwashing, permaculture, philosophy of science, Systems thinking

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...

Sacred Bears and Profane Cats: Rethinking Japan’s Wildlife Crisis Through Terror Management Theory

by | Nov 24, 2025 | animals, Biophilia, Biosemiotics, Climate Change, conservation, Decolonization, deep ecology, Environmental Political Theory, Naturverlassenheit, parasitism, philosophy of science, Semiocide

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

by | Nov 19, 2025 | beyond liberalism, Climate Change, collapsology, duh, Energy, Environmental Justice, folly, pollution, Priorities, Public Health, Semiocide, Systems thinking

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...

Retro Better Living Through Science to populate the Greenwashing Habitability Zone

by | Oct 17, 2025 | Artificial Everything, Bad Advertising, beyond idealism, Climate Change, collapsology, deus ex machina, Fake Freedoms, fake loops, folly, Greenwashing, Industrial Epidemics, Verschlimmbessern

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...

Upcoming Talk at Oxford

by | Oct 5, 2025 | Climate Change, Environmental Political Theory, Harm Reduction, Industrial Epidemics, Industry Documents, philosophy of science, pollution, Priorities, Public Health, Side-effects, Syndemics, Systems thinking, Tobacco Industry

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...

Conceptualizing Ecocide (and Semiocide)

by | Sep 10, 2025 | Uncategorized

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...

New Article: Norwegian state-corporate climate obstruction and ecological harms in Brazil

by | May 27, 2025 | Bureaucratic quixotic, chemicals, Climate Change, Conflicts of Interest, Environmental Justice, Environmental Political Theory, Extended Producer Responsibility, fake loops, folly, Fragmentation, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Industrial Epidemics, Perverse Incentives, pollution, Public Health, Side-effects, Systems thinking, Uncategorized

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...

CRISPR Bacon and the Collapse of Ecological Integrity: Why Gene-Edited Pigs Are a Biotech Disaster in the Making

by | May 9, 2025 | Artificial Everything, eating animals, meat, Naturverlassenheit, normalization, pollution, Semiocide, Side-effects

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

by | Apr 3, 2025 | Uncategorized

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...

New article out on UNDO.org on ‘The dangers of Big Tobacco’s faux-pharmaceutical rebrand’

by | Mar 27, 2025 | Industrial Epidemics, Industry Documents, Perverse Incentives, Priorities, Public Health, Publications, Side-effects, Tobacco Industry

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...

Talk: 9 April, 2025 on Exporting Suffering: The Flower Industry at Home and Abroad

by | Mar 22, 2025 | agroecology, beyond liberalism, chemicals, Climate Change, Communication, Decolonization, deep ecology, Environmental Justice, exploitation, Fragmentation, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Industrial Epidemics, philosophy of science, Plants, Public Health, Semiocide, Side-effects, Syndemics, Talks

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...

Reading the Signs

by | Jan 31, 2025 | Uncategorized

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...

Addressing Collapsology

by | Nov 22, 2024 | Bureaucratic quixotic, Climate Change, collapsology, Communication, death, deep ecology, deus ex machina, Discursive Gap, duh, Environmental Justice, exploitation, Fake Freedoms, fake loops, folly, Fragmentation, Industrial Epidemics, Normal is Over, Perverse Incentives, philosophy of science, Systems thinking

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...

Outside In

by | Aug 30, 2024 | Uncategorized

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...