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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...