Blog
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
Finding ‘middle’ requires exploring extremes
Every time I encounter people afraid of scientists being 'alarmist' I see fear masquerading as 1001 justification for negligence, false moral superiority, and license to check out and deflect responsibility. If you are an archer and trying to hit the bullseye, and you...
Denial of Death?
“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.”? Sam Keen, Fire in...
The AI Oracle
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 animal...
To Heat or to Eat: Confronting Energy Poverty and the State of Just Energy Transitions
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 housing stock,...
Ecological Sisyphus
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 scientists...
Semiofest meets Biosemiotics
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
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 likely...
Algae communication, conspecific and interspecific: the concepts of phycosphere and algal-bacteria consortia in a photobioreactor (PBR)
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)....
Radio EcoShock episode Coping in the Polycrisis: Homer-Dixon and Hendlin
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...
When Institutions start arresting or firing climate scientists, government is infested
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
(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 to each other. ...
Object?Oriented Ontology and the Other of We in Anthropocentric Posthumanism
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 of...
New review of Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective
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. Our book, Food...
Reflections on EUR’s Roundtable on Academic Freedom and Sustainability
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 day...
Decolonizing plant hierarchies in intelligence taxonomies
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...
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Billionaire Bunkers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s12KMTj1RE 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...
What do we mean by thinking ‘upstream’? A look at 3 levels
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 told from three...
The Biosemiotics of Waste special issue CfP
the-biosemiotics-of-waste-cfp-1Download
It’s as if Anti-Trust never existed
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...
Alienation’s Apotheosis
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...
The Tech Megamachine
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 megamachine, is getting closer and...
Presentation day at the Brocher Foundation
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 in...