Month: November 2017

[This Q&A in late 2017  was the last entry on this blog, at least for now. The blog ran from spring 2016. It tracked significant new books and papers on the Anthropocene that appeared just before and just after my book shown on the right, with excursions on to a few related topics. I’ll leave the blog up here for the foreseeable future, and perhaps even return to it some time…]

A few weeks ago I did a Q&A with the Marxist Education Project in New York, as part of their reading group on “Science, Politics, and Culture in the Anthropocene.” What follows is a very approximate and idealised summary of our conversation. My thanks to the participants for their questions, and especially to Fred Murphy and Steve Knight. Continue reading “Q&A with the Marxist Education Project”

Razmig Keucheyan, Nature is a Battlefield: Towards a Political Ecology, trans. David Broder (Cambridge: Polity, 2016)

In contrast to Fossil Capital below, I haven’t been able to find any previous reviews of the English edition of this concise intervention by Razmig Keucheyan, even though he’s quite well known for The Left Hemisphere. It seems timely to say something about it, in light of this year’s hurricane season in the Greater Caribbean. The calamity in Puerto Rico is still unfolding as I write, more than a month after Hurricane Maria. The damage caused by the preceding hurricanes Harvey and Irma was estimated at somewhere in the region of $200bn in the United States. Keucheyan asks: can expensive disasters like these, intensified by climate change, come to pose a threat to capitalism? Are they signs that capitalism might be running out of ecological rope, and so destroying itself? Contra Jason Moore (and many others), he answers: no.  Continue reading “Antibody Politics”