Norman Myers (University of Oxford) 

Climate Refugees: Destabilising an Unstable World

 

We are witnessing a new phenomenon in the global arena: the environmental dimension to security issues. It reflects those environmental factors—water, soil, vegetation, climate, and whatever others are prime components of a nation’s environmental foundation—that ultimately underpin all our economies and hence our societies and our political stability. When these environmental resources are degraded, our security declines too. In fact, any adverse environmental factor can serve as a source of economic disruption, social tension and political antagonism. While it may not always trigger outright confrontation, it helps to destabilize societies in an already unstable world—a world in which we can expect the destabilizing process to become more common as growing numbers of people seek to sustain themselves from declining environments. This thesis is illustrated with particular reference to three issues: water supplies (and scope for water wars), global warming and population/poverty pressures. Environmental refugees: already total 25 million or more than all conventional refugees, and could total well over 200 million in a globally warmed world. 

12 May

Timothy Morton (University of California-Davis)

The Ecological Thought 

F.R. Leavis admired poets for "concrete enactment"--for reproducing or mimicking their content at the level of form. What does an understanding of enactment do for contemporary theories of cognition, which outline an "enactive" view of the interface between consciousness and environment? In this talk, I will be using literary and cultural theory to probe a dominant paradigm in environmental thinking--systems theory. It is to systems theory that the "enaction" theory looks to ground its view of how mind and world intersect.

This talk is part of a larger project, called The Ecological Thought, which I am publishing with Harvard UP next year. The Ecological Thought is, if you like, the prequel to my book Ecology without Nature. Where do you have to be intellectually, politically, philosophically, to have an idea like ecology without nature? (Which argues that in order to enter an "ecological" society we have to trade in the idea of Nature at the door.)

In brief, the ecological thought is the most thorough possible enagagement with the fact of interconnectedness. What are the implications of this fact?

19 May

Karen Pinkus (UCLA)

The Disjointed Temporality of Climate Change 

This talk puts forward the idea that discourse around climate change in the public sphere is focused on decadal timescales for change and on the automobile. I use thinkers like Heidegger, Derrida, Stiegler and Agamben to undo the sort of certainty that we hear in the public realm about the individual consumer or "stakeholder" being able to make behavioral changes that will result in significant greenhouse gas reductions within decades. Instead, I argue that both the obsessive focus on the auto and the focus on greentech as consumer product deflect our attention from what is a true incommensurability between the timescale of fossil fuels and "human" time. It is only by "thinking otherwise" -- beyond the consumer, beyond the time of common sense -- that we could begin to address climate change in a meaningful way. In short, literary theory proves extremely useful in helping to think about these issues, precisely because it undoes a kind of commonsense certainty that we find in the public sphere -- such as in Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth."

Imaging the Arctic

Nick Cobbing

11 February

The Political Aesthetics of Climate Change

Kathryn Yusoff (University of Exeter)

25 February

Serious Things

Gregory Normington

10 March

The Boundless Main: On Poetry and Frost

Melanie Challenger