Philosopher

My mates Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have put together thirty one episodes of a really really nice podcast at Rice as part of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The 'Cultures of Energy Podcast' is so good!

Humans can no longer ignore nonhumans: they end up haunting the words we use and interrupting everyday talk.

I'm not unhappy with the idea of appealing to people's self-interest if that's what makes them understand something about the non-human world.

When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is 'over yonder' in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement.

Beauty doesn't have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of 'pretty.'

Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?

A weird thing is a strange loop, what some of us call 'an object.' Thus it is looked down on by the constructivist spokespeople of anti-art, which is also an anti-products movement - the dominant mode of high art since the inception of the Anthropocene.

Invoking Nature always measures the distance we have yet to travel to achieve real progress on environmental issues.

Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?

When I make music, I often sound better singing as a woman, go figure, so I like to tweak the format and pitch and suchlike of my recorded voice. Sounds better.

I like to think of myself as the corniest, most awful thing you could possibly imagine.

Unfortunately, there are some ecological phenomenological chemicals within consumerism.

Reductionism and elimination make one feel clever, but what happens when the meditator drops her fixation on feeling clever?

Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.

It's easier to be the art school band than to be the Beatles.

The trouble with ecological invocations of Nature is that they're like calling for a medieval tool, perhaps a portcullis or an arrow slit, to fix a modern problem.

Job applications are an aesthetic event. They are performance art. They are not about proving you are smart - well, maybe your writing sample does that, but even then, the main point is to get an interview.

An adjective, such as 'flimsy,' describes someone's access to a thing, such as 'argument.' But that's just that someone's access. It may be accurate. But it's theirs nevertheless.

The Severing is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place 'at' a certain 'point' in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, and in whose wake we are caught.

In the end, a lifeform is always a hybrid, a being endowed with some X-power such as being able to breathe for a few seconds out of water. That's how evolution works. Spectrally. We are all mermaids.