by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jul 5, 2023 | Uncategorized
Searching for oracles to take the responsibility of judgment off our shoulders is as old as humankind itself. Whether it is the ergot-infused Oracle at Delphi, reading the tea leaves, the stars and their astrologics, the Tarot, ayahuasca and a tribe’s totem...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jul 5, 2023 | Uncategorized
Energy poverty is a consequence of our unjust energy transition. Last winter, when gas prices spiked 4x their ‘normal’ previous levels, those who had poorly insulated houses and were still using gas paid a premium. Many of these people in low quality...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jun 23, 2023 | beyond idealism, beyond liberalism, Climate Change, Communication, cruelty, death, Decolonization, deep ecology, Discursive Gap, duh, Environmental Justice, Environmental Political Theory, exploitation, Fake Freedoms, fake loops, folly, Naturverlassenheit, Normal is Over, pollution, Public Health, Syndemics, Verschlimmbessern
I feel like this as an environmental professional: expected to educate why we need to make sustainable change to all those convinced that everything’s fine. One must imagine Sisyphus happy… (Camus) I cannot imagine how it is for climate and environmental...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Apr 26, 2023 | Biophilia, Biosemiotics, Environmental Justice, exploitation, Extended Producer Responsibility, Fake Freedoms, fake loops, Greenwashing, Industrial Epidemics, Naturverlassenheit, Semiotics, Unpleasant Design
Semiofest, the largest meeting and organization professional semioticians (working commercially rather than academically) just had a session biosemiotics. In many ways, it was also sustainability 2.0, tackling the issues of performativity and power in how we make...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Apr 8, 2023 | deus ex machina, Discursive Gap, Environmental Political Theory, Fake Freedoms, Industrial Epidemics, Interviews, Naturverlassenheit, Normal is Over, normalization, philosophy of science, Priorities, Public Health, Systems thinking, Unpleasant Design
A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of hanging out with Mario Veen and talking with him on his Life From Plato’s Cave podcast. It was a rollicking good time and enabled us to enter into some crevasses of why our world is so stuck, and how we can make it more...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Mar 20, 2023 | agroecology, algae, Artificial Everything, Biomimicry, Climate Change, conservation, deep ecology, Interspecies Communication, philosophy of science, Plants, Publications, Systems thinking
How does the race to make algae do tasks for us undermine the ability of those algae to perform their metabolic tasks? My colleagues and I have a new article out looking at the limits of enclosed ecosystems (lab controlled algae breeding for energy/food/oil, etc)....
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Mar 16, 2023 | Uncategorized
Coping in the Polycrisis: Homer-Dixon and Hendlin March 15, 2023 – Systems & security expert Thomas Homer-Dixon: situation update and battered hope. From Rotterdam, Dr. Yogi Hendlin, exploring the brains of fossil fuel lovers, as the house is on fire. Homer-Dixon...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jan 28, 2023 | Climate Change, Communication, Conflicts of Interest, Dante Alighieri — 'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.', death, Decolonization, Discursive Gap, Environmental Justice, Environmental Political Theory, Fake Freedoms, folly, Industrial Epidemics, Normal is Over, pollution, Priorities, Public Health
Governments are supposed to help us live better, survive. You know, all that crap Hobbes went on about, keeping us from killing each other. But when government systematically shuts up those who try to help us from committing collective suicide through broken Nash...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jan 9, 2023 | animals
(This is a contribution to the Great Transitions Initiative’s discussion – this month, on Eileen Crist’s essay on animals.) What we have done to animals is a crime with a motive that has nothing to do with animals. It has to do with what we have done...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jan 4, 2023 | Artificial Everything, beyond idealism, Biosemiotics, Decolonization, duh, fake loops, folly, object-oriented-ontology, philosophy of science, Publications, Verschlimmbessern, Wolves in sheep's clothing
My new article out in Zygon, “Object?Oriented Ontology and the Other of We in Anthropocentric Posthumanism” is a philosophical takedown of a misguided notion: that difference that make a difference should be deliberately overlooked or ignored for the sake...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Dec 21, 2022 | Uncategorized
A new review article out in the journal of Biosemiotics “And the Flesh in Between: Towards a Health Semiotics,” by Devon Schiller takes Jonathan Hope and my edited volume as an opportunity to review the history of medical semiotics and health semiotics....
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Dec 18, 2022 | beyond idealism, beyond liberalism, Bureaucratic quixotic, Climate Change, Communication, Conflicts of Interest, Dante Alighieri — 'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.', death, Decolonization, deep ecology, deus ex machina, Discursive Gap, duh, Energy, Environmental Justice, Environmental Political Theory, exploitation, Fake Freedoms, fake loops, folly, Greenwashing, Industrial Epidemics, Industry Documents, Naturverlassenheit, Normal is Over, normalization, Perverse Incentives, philosophy of science, pollution, Priorities, Public Health, Systems thinking, University Life
After the 28 November, 2022 occupation of the Sanders Building at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where I work, by OccupyEUR, the students involved in the very nonviolent protest were violently removed by riot police at the Executive Board’s behest. Not the finest...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Dec 5, 2022 | beyond idealism, Biosemiotics, deep ecology, Discursive Gap, philosophy of science, Plants, Systems thinking
In her editorial about my ‘Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates’ article in Environmental Values, Elke Pirgmaier writes ‘Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Dec 2, 2022 | Uncategorized
Image all these resources were actually used to make the world a better place. This company would be out of business. To apocalypse, no Oppidum. Self-fulfilling prophecy to the max. “They are places of serenity and absolute safety for owners and their families. We are...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Dec 2, 2022 | Bad Advertising, beyond idealism, beyond liberalism, Communication, Conflicts of Interest, Discursive Gap, fake loops, folly, Industrial Epidemics
The Abbott Baby Formula catastrophe is what I’ve been writing about for years: it doesn’t matter if you’re making nuclear missiles or baby food, the industrial model predictably results in industrial epidemics. Here, I will look at how this story is...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Oct 27, 2022 | Uncategorized
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by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Aug 6, 2022 | Uncategorized
We have a handful of transnational corporation more powerful than almost every single government in the world. Amazon, Google, Facebook (I refuse to call them by their wannabe name), not to mention Vanguard and Blackrock, the ginormous hedge funds that control most of...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Aug 6, 2022 | Artificial Everything, cruelty, death, duh, Fake Freedoms, fake loops, folly, parasitism, philosophy of science, Public Health, the real
There are some presentations at our second cohort at the biomedical ethics residency today that made me queasy because of how backwards causation they were. The whole point of having biomedical ethics is to avoid blinding ourselves to the various factors that create...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jul 27, 2022 | Bad Advertising, beyond idealism, beyond liberalism, Conflicts of Interest, death, deus ex machina, duh, Fake Freedoms, fake loops, Fragmentation, Industrial Epidemics, normalization, Perverse Incentives, Syndemics, Systems thinking, Unpleasant Design
As annoying as I find Russell Brand on occasion, in this case he makes a good point. The marriage of corporate and state power – technology and the monopoly on violence – which Mussolini called ‘fascism’ and Lewis Mumford called the...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jul 7, 2022 | Industrial Epidemics, Syndemics, Talks
We’ve been waiting 2 years for this. We applied in 2019 for 2020 summer, and then covid hit. Well here we are, finally, on beautiful Lac Leman. Today the fellows resident at the Fondation Brocher give our presentations. The biomedical ethics foundation, located...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jun 15, 2022 | Uncategorized
At Erasmus University Rotterdam, there appears to be a gap in the official rule about smoking on campus. This environmental pollution from littered butts is an indicator of both the environmental and health costs of smoking. Right behind the building where I work, I...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Jun 8, 2022 | Uncategorized
If you’ve been keeping up with my work, I’m into upstream solutions. Here’s an example from The Ocean Cleanup which is a very necessary, but very downstream solution. While I applaud such actions, why do these get so much airplay (and funding)? While...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | May 7, 2022 | Climate Change, Conflicts of Interest, Decolonization, folly, Greenwashing, Industrial Epidemics, Side-effects, Syndemics, Systems thinking, Verschlimmbessern
There’s a new Handbook of Anti-Environmentalism, which is a new term to me. It seems it should be commonplace. For it articulates the madness which we have experienced in the 20th and 21st centuries, descending on us like a dark, inarticulate cloud. The delay...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Apr 19, 2022 | beyond liberalism, Discursive Gap, duh, e-waste, Environmental Justice, Environmental Political Theory, Extended Producer Responsibility, Fake Freedoms, Industrial Epidemics, object-oriented-ontology, philosophy of science, pollution, Public Health, Publications, Side-effects, Syndemics, Systems thinking, Unpleasant Design
smartphone tombstones Is programming premature product lifespans a form of corporate crime? This the question that Lieselot Bisschop, Jelle Jaspers, and I address in our new publication in the journal of Crime, Law and Social Change. Planned obsolescence is a core...
by Yogi Hale Hendlin | Apr 18, 2022 | fake loops, Industrial Epidemics, Industry Documents, Perverse Incentives, philosophy of science, Podcasts, Public Health, Side-effects, Syndemics, Systems thinking
In a 90 minute interview with Ari Whitten, we explore philosophy of science and public health, focusing on how industry can undermine the quality and public trust in sincere science. I reference the @justsaysinmice twitter handle that addresses the harms of...
