Categories
environment

Ladakh Climate Protest

Thousands are protesting in Ladakh, India, demanding constitutional provisions to protect the region’s ecology and autonomy over land and agriculture decisions. The region, affected by climate change and territorial disputes, is seeing worsened conditions due to militarisation. Activist Sonam Wangchuk is leading a “climate fast” in freezing temperatures to highlight these issues. The protesters seek statehood and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Metacrisis

Metacrisis complexity reflects the deep interconnections among global systems, where socioeconomic, technological, geopolitical and environmental factors are intricately interdependent. Each regulatory response to these integrated crises, while intended to mitigate challenges, often becomes a functional microcosm in the runaway complexity it aims to address, amplifying the signal of entropy it seeks to navigate. This dynamic requires adaptive governance, focusing […]

Categories
Philosophy

Saving the Planet: Growth, Degrowth, Regrowth or…

I spend a lot of time considering abstract, complex and the many aspirationally “real” systems that exist between our ears and upon the surface of our planet. My acquired suspicion in this context is that neither “growth” nor “degrowth” represent sufficiently sophisticated concepts with which to effectively engage this vast and multidimensional problem we are […]

Categories
Philosophy

Environmental Law

The generative indeterminacy of (a) living diversity is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the variously atavistic legal frameworks with which we might frame them. Discontinuities between law and activism are, in this context, the result of a false dichotomy. That is – the differences and environmentally unsustainable if not outright and questionably unethical outcomes […]

Categories
Philosophy

Curious Cats

Entity and context, system and environment, part and whole. Behaviour and purpose is not bounded or purely or completely encoded in an entity, regardless that our linguistic (as much as cognitive or technologocal) teleologies and intuitions reinforce and validate such a belief. Symbiosis also occurs at the level of whole systems. Entity and environment both […]

Categories
Philosophy

Environmental Communication

The breadth and depth of the systemic (i.e. Global) changes we need to seed to sustain biodiversity and ecological resilience are far beyond the aptitude of contemporary political and economic practices. How to transform the many heroic yet isolated efforts of conservationists into the broad and consequential systemic changes we need without frightening the political […]

Categories
environment

Deep Time and Shallow Machines

Astonishing beauty and entirely natural, expressed in the harmony and resonance of the (very) many parts with the whole. I enjoy this kind of photography because it also reminds us, much as does astrophotography, that wherever (and whenever) we look into the natural world we are staring into our own deep history. Contrast this with […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Climate Crisis, Logic and Oily Lies

Context: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: ‘Why can’t we get it through our thick skulls?’ America boosting oil and gas production is ‘not against’ climate change I suspect that his opinion is, much and in one way or another as are all systems of belief, a function of the extent to which language as abstraction has […]

Categories
Philosophy

On the Knowledge of Gloriously Inconsequential Beauty in Nature and Ourselves

Nature is interesting and beautiful, of course, and in all the many and diverse ways an environmental context and integrated system expresses itself in its bounded instances. I often do this and by inverse approach to either and both aesthetic or functional appraisal, consider the instance of embodied phenotype as being a mezzanine artefact and […]

Categories
life

Environmental Inversion

It’s a little unorthodox but I suspect we deeply misunderstand the nature of living systems, long before we ever aspire to protect them from the ravages of pollution and environmental degradation. The genetically regulated phylogeny of an organism, a species and a behavioural niche are each and all inverse encodings of the environmental context they […]

Categories
Philosophy

New World, New Self

All actions, all choices, all approximation to unambiguously individuated (as subjective) self-determination tends to fade away in such an exquisitely, eloquently, interdependently entangled Cosmos. More subtly rendered: the kinds of self and other or system and environment that such a complex world as this invokes is distributed, integrated and functionally, existentially multidimensional. The reflexive boundaries […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Zen of Systems

All systems exist in contexts, environments and distributed, often integrated, other systems from which they gather or variously acquire (as effect, consequence, experience or memory and encoding) information as internal structure. This internal structure or variety is only possible and sustainably continuous by offsetting the inevitability of growing internal (as thermodynamic or logical/information) entropy to […]