State of Nature Spring 2013: fossil fuels / environment movement / energy policy / nukes / …

14 January 2014 — State of Nature

Little Big Pine

The Grisly Underside of Fossil Fuels

“As recently as the 19th century, the grizzly race discovered fossil fuels and everything changed almost overnight. What followed was an explosion of the grizzly population, leaving little ecological room for the survival of other species – to say nothing of the environmental requirements for a complex organism like H. s. sapiens.”
Burkely Hermann
Does the Environmental Movement Speak for You?

“We must reject the corporate leeches in the environmental movement: TNC, the Defenders of Wildlife, the EDF, the National Audubon Society, the NRDC, Conservation International, the Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the World Wildlife Fund. These organizations are basically a joke and too corrupted to fix.”
Matt Huber
What do we mean by “Energy Policy”? Life, Capitalism, and the Broader Field of Energy Politics

“Our consumption of oil is not just material – it is not just about the functional need to travel from point A to point B. The combustion of energy-dense gasoline often accompanies cultural ideas about freedom, mobility and deeply entangled normative geographies of home, work, family, and leisure.”
Kenneth Couesbouc
Future Shocks

“There is no pristine inhabitable planet to fly to and colonise – there never was, it was all a pipe-dream – and Mother Earth is turning into a junk-yard/trash-heap.”
Peter Lach-Newinsky
‘We’re Rational, You’re Emotional’, And Other Common Myths of the Nuclearists

“Nuclearists seem incapable of even imagining a world run neither with fossil fuels nor nuclear energy but with renewables, and living at much lower levels of production, consumption and waste.”
Frank Smecker
Marx, Hegel, and the Era of Resource Scarcity

“Growth of modern societies = loss of resources = decline in growth and eventual collapse of modern societies. To simplify this equation even more: Growth of modern societies leads to the collapse of modern societies. And there’s the conundrum.”
Raza Naeem
Remembering Nazim Hikmet, 50 Years On, and the Sad State of Turkish Freedom

“As Erdogan moves to crush these latest protests, he must surely know, as the proud conqueror of the Turkish military and media and the architect of Saudi-Neo-Ottomanism in the Levant, what happened to his predecessor, Adnan Menderes, who confronted a similar level of discontent, ultimately being overthrown and paying with his life.”
Carl Finamore
Different Seasons of the Arab Spring: Reports from Morocco & Tunisia

“Some critics claim that the union confederation remains too far outside the political process, leaving important government issues to other social forces. This begs the question of how much influence the working class organizations that made the revolution will have on elections and the nation building process.”
Michael Barker
Biodynamic Organic-Intellectuals

“Biodynamic tensions within the organic movement are longstanding, as rationally-minded critics have always argued that magical agricultural beliefs have no place in a movement aiming to make the world a better, fairer, and less toxic place. Such criticisms however hold little water with the Soil Association.”
Bruce Bromley
Woolf, Cézanne, and Things

“To strain under Woolf’s images is to practice, on another scale, soldiering in the world upon which her approach to the visual dilates, a world figured wrongly as a contest, with human dominance the only right victory, a world made of relations neither linear nor transparent.”