Bass Ackwards Problem Prolonging

by | Oct 26, 2023 | Uncategorized

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...

Denial of Death?

by | Sep 19, 2023 | Climate Change, Communication, death, Decolonization, deep ecology, Discursive Gap, Environmental Political Theory, Fake Freedoms, fake loops, Fragmentation, Harm Reduction, Industrial Epidemics, philosophy of science, Priorities, Semiotics, Syndemics, Systems thinking, Unpleasant Design, Verschlimmbessern

“Burnout is nature’s way of telling you, you’ve been going through the motions your soul has departed; you’re a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”?...

The AI Oracle

by | 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...

Ecological Sisyphus

by | 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...

Semiofest meets Biosemiotics

by | 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...

Life From Plato’s Cave Podcast Interview

by | 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...

Algae communication, conspecific and interspecific: the concepts of phycosphere and algal-bacteria consortia in a photobioreactor (PBR)

by | 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)....

When Institutions start arresting or firing climate scientists, government is infested

by | 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...

It’s not about the Animals

by | 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...

Object?Oriented Ontology and the Other of We in Anthropocentric Posthumanism

by | 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...

Reflections on EUR’s Roundtable on Academic Freedom and Sustainability

by | 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...

What do we mean by thinking ‘upstream’? A look at 3 levels

by | 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...

It’s as if Anti-Trust never existed

by | 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...

The Tech Megamachine

by | 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...