Pyropolitics

Pyropolitics PDF Author: Michael Marder
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783480300
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
From the books and heretics burnt on the pyres of the Inquisition to self-immolations at protest rallies, from the massive burning of oil on the global scale to inflammatory speech, from the imagery of revolutionary sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed to car bombings in the Middle East, fire proves to be an indispensable element of the political. To account for this elemental source of heat and light, Pyropolitics delineates a semantico-discursive field, replete with the literal and metaphorical mentions and uses of fires, flames, sparks, immolations, incinerations, and burning in political theory and practices. Relying on classical political theory, literature, theology, contemporary philosophy, and an analysis of current events, Michael Marder argues that geo-politics, or the politics of the Earth, has always had an unstable, at once shadowy and blinding, underside—pyropolitics, or the politics of fire. If this obscure double of geopolitics is, increasingly, dictating the rules of the game today, then it is crucial to learn to speak its language, to discern its manifestations, and to project where our world ablaze is heading.

Pyropolitics

Pyropolitics PDF Author: Michael Marder
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783480300
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the books and heretics burnt on the pyres of the Inquisition to self-immolations at protest rallies, from the massive burning of oil on the global scale to inflammatory speech, from the imagery of revolutionary sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed to car bombings in the Middle East, fire proves to be an indispensable element of the political. To account for this elemental source of heat and light, Pyropolitics delineates a semantico-discursive field, replete with the literal and metaphorical mentions and uses of fires, flames, sparks, immolations, incinerations, and burning in political theory and practices. Relying on classical political theory, literature, theology, contemporary philosophy, and an analysis of current events, Michael Marder argues that geo-politics, or the politics of the Earth, has always had an unstable, at once shadowy and blinding, underside—pyropolitics, or the politics of fire. If this obscure double of geopolitics is, increasingly, dictating the rules of the game today, then it is crucial to learn to speak its language, to discern its manifestations, and to project where our world ablaze is heading.

Pyropolitics in the World Ablaze

Pyropolitics in the World Ablaze PDF Author: Michael Marder
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 153814333X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
From books and heretics burnt on the pyres of the Inquisition to self-immolations at protest rallies, from the burning of fossil fuels to inflammatory speech, from the imagery of revolutionary sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed to car bombings and “scorched earth” policy, fire proves to be an indispensable element of the political. Pyropolitics in the World Ablaze builds upon the scintillating, by turns horrifying and hopeful, images and realities of flames, hearths, sparks, immolations, melting pots, incinerations, and burning in political thought and practices. Relying on classical political theory, theology, philosophy, literature and cinema, as well as an analysis of current events, Michael Marder argues that geo-politics, or the politics of the Earth, has always had an unstable, at once shadowy and blinding, underside—pyro-politics, or the politics of fire. If this obscure double of geopolitics is increasingly dictating the rules of the game today, then it is crucial to learn to speak its language, to discern its manifestations and to project where our world ablaze is heading. This new edition includes recent examples of the uses and accusations of ‘incendiary speech’ both by Donald Trump and by European populist right and exploration of threats of global warming that have now reached a turning point in our collective relation to the dangers and promises of fire .

Burning Matters

Burning Matters PDF Author: Peter C. Little
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190934549
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Introduction: From e-waste ashes to ethnographic intervention -- Amidst global e-waste trades and green neoliberalization -- "We are all North here" : Dagomba migrations and meanings -- Erasure, demolition, and violent obsolescence in the urban margins -- Embodied burning, e-waste epidemiology, and toxic postcolonial corporality -- Visualizing Agbogbloshie and re-envisioning e-waste anthropology -- Looming uncertainties and neoliberal techno-optimism -- Conclusion: New openings, relations, and burning matters.

Territory Beyond Terra

Territory Beyond Terra PDF Author: Kimberley Peters
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786600137
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
At the root of our understanding of territory is the concept of terra—land—a surface of fixed points with stable features that can be calculated, categorised, and controlled. But what of the many spaces on Earth that defy this simplistic characterisation: Oceans in which ‘places’ are continuously re-formed? Air that can never be fully contained? Watercourses that obtain their value by transcending boundaries? This book examines the politics of these spaces to shed light on the challenges of our increasingly dynamic world. Through a focus on the planet’s elements, environments, and edges, the contributors to Territory beyond Terra extend our understanding of territory to the dynamic, contentious spaces of contemporary politics.

Toxic truths

Toxic truths PDF Author: Thom Davies
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526137011
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Debates over science, facts, and values are pivotal in the struggle for environmental justice. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuse of science, engaging in community-led citizen science that champions knowledge produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. However, post-truth politics have threatened science itself. Toxic truths examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. The volume features a range of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research projects that seek to establish different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice. From struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, this volume examines political strategies for seeking environmental justice. With international, interdisciplinary contributions from distinguished authors, emerging scholars and community activists, Toxic truths is essential reading for those seeking to understand the cutting edge of citizen science and activism around the world.

The Phoenix Complex

The Phoenix Complex PDF Author: Michael Marder
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262374889
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
An innovative, wide-ranging consideration of the global ecological crisis and its deep philosophical and theological roots. Global crises, from melting Arctic ice to ecosystem collapse and the sixth mass extinction, challenge our age-old belief in nature as a phoenix with an infinite ability to regenerate itself from the ashes of destruction. Moving from antiquity to the present and back, Michael Marder provides an integrated examination of philosophies of nature drawn from traditions around the world to illuminate the theological, mythical, and philosophical origins of the contemporary environmental emergency. From there, he probes the contradictions and deadlocks of our current predicament to propose a philosophy of nature for the twenty-first century. As Marder analyzes our reliance on the image and idea of the phoenix to organize our thoughts about the natural world, he outlines the obstacles in the path of formulating a revitalized philosophy of nature. His critical exposition of the phoenix complex draws on Chinese, Indian, Russian, European, and North African traditions. Throughout, Marder lets the figure of the phoenix guide readers through theories of immortality, intergenerational and interspecies relations, infinity compatible with finitude, resurrection, reincarnation, and a possibility of liberation from cycles of rebirth. His concluding remarks on a phoenix-suffused philosophy of nature and political thought extend from the Roman era to the writings of Hannah Arendt.

Slopovers

Slopovers PDF Author: Stephen J. Pyne
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816539758
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
America is not simply a federation of states but a confederation of regions. Some have always held national attention, some just for a time. Slopovers examines three regions that once dominated the national narrative and may now be returning to prominence. The Mid-American oak woodlands were the scene of vigorous settlement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and thus the scene of changing fire practices. The debate over the origin of the prairies—by climate or fire—foreshadowed the more recent debate about fire in oak and hickory hardwoods. In both cases, today’s thinking points to the critical role of fire. The Pacific Northwest was the great pivot between laissez-faire logging and state-sponsored conservation and the fires that would accompany each. Then fire faded as an environmental issue. But it has returned over the past decade like an avenging angel, forcing the region to again consider the defining dialectic between axe and flame. And Alaska—Alaska is different, as everyone says. It came late to wildland fire protection, then managed an extraordinary transfiguration into the most successful American region to restore something like the historic fire regime. But Alaska is also a petrostate, and climate change may be making it the vanguard of what the Anthropocene will mean for American fire overall. Slopovers collates surveys of these three regions into the national narrative. With a unique mixture of journalism, history, and literary imagination, renowned fire expert Stephen J. Pyne shows how culture and nature, fire from nature and fire from people, interact to shape our world with three case studies in public policy and the challenging questions they pose about the future we will share with fire.

Dark Ecology

Dark Ecology PDF Author: Timothy Morton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541368
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are. The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse.

Dust

Dust PDF Author: Michael Marder
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628925582
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
No matter how much you fight it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. It is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces, and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention the dust mites who make it their home. Dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world ("for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return:). Michael Marder's Dust delves into one of the most mundane and familiar phenomena, finding in it a key to thinking about existence, community, and justice today. -- Inside cover flap.

Green Mass

Green Mass PDF Author: Michael Marder
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503629279
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Green Mass is a meditation on—and with—twelfth-century Christian mystic and polymath Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Attending to Hildegard's vegetal vision, which greens theological tradition and imbues plant life with spirit, philosopher Michael Marder uncovers a verdant mode of thinking. The book stages a fresh encounter between present-day and premodern concerns, ecology and theology, philosophy and mysticism, the material and the spiritual, in word and sound. Hildegard's lush notion of viriditas, the vegetal power of creation, is emblematic of her deeply entwined understanding of physical reality and spiritual elevation. From blossoming flora to burning desert, Marder plays with the symphonic multiplicity of meanings in her thought, listening to the resonances between the ardency of holy fire and the aridity of a world aflame. Across Hildegard's cosmos, we hear the anarchic proliferation of her ecological theology, in which both God and greening are circular, without beginning or end. Introduced with a foreword by philosopher Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and accompanied by cellist Peter Schuback's musical movements, which echo both Hildegard's own compositions and key themes in each chapter of the book, this multifaceted work creates a resonance chamber, in which to discover the living world anew. The original compositions accompanying each chapter are available free for streaming and for download at www.sup.org/greenmass