2018/19 Biosemiotics Gatherings

My review of the 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering that Terry Deacon and I organized at UC Berkeley is now a Featured Article and Open Access at the Journal of Biosemiotics. The Biosemiotics Gathering this year will be in Moscow.

Islands of unsustainability

John Rawls’s (1971) notion of national self-sufficiency in terms of resources is about as far from our current globalized world as we can get, in terms of theory aimed at non-ideal applications. Globalization is a fact of life. And yet, with each displacement in...

Smoking as Acceptable Rebellion.

Notes from a debrief of Philip Morris’s 1998 Litter Focus Group read: “Non-smokers tend to give smokers a lot of slack about throwing down a butt,” claiming that “throwing it on the ground eliminates fire risk,” and that litter is a “natural result of outdoor smoking...

Every day should be Sustainability Day

In Erasmus University Rotterdam’s weekly online magazine Erasmus Magazine, a condensed version of my speech I gave Monday March 4th, 2019 for the Opening Ceremony of the Erasmus Sustainability Days is now published. It’s also available in Dutch [in...