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

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...

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

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...

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...

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...