Blog
Downstream trashiness
If you've been keeping up with my work, I'm into upstream solutions. Here's an example from The Ocean Cleanup which is a very necessary, but very downstream solution. While I applaud such actions, why do these get so much airplay (and funding)? While getting rid of...
On ‘Anti-Environmentalism’
There's a new Handbook of Anti-Environmentalism, which is a new term to me. It seems it should be commonplace. For it articulates the madness which we have experienced in the 20th and 21st centuries, descending on us like a dark, inarticulate cloud. The delay and...
Designed to Break: planned obsolescence as corporate environmental crime (new paper)
smartphone tombstones Is programming premature product lifespans a form of corporate crime? This the question that Lieselot Bisschop, Jelle Jaspers, and I address in our new publication in the journal of Crime, Law and Social Change. Planned obsolescence is a core...
How Science can be Manipulated by Industry Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJG-nJEJWts In a 90 minute interview with Ari Whitten, we explore philosophy of science and public health, focusing on how industry can undermine the quality and public trust in sincere science. I reference the @justsaysinmice twitter...
Platforming Anti-Eco Trolls is Stochastic Terrorism
You would think that at Erasmus University, that those trolls wishing the end of the world so that they don't have to examine their own lives would have the good sense to keep their mouths shut. Unfortunately, that seems to be an unfounded belief. The me-first trolls,...
affording to grieve
We can’t afford to grieve in our contemporary culture. There is literally no space, time, or network to allow for us to process the wrongs done, to atone the righteous rage we feel at a degraded earth and the waste of our own lives. Without the capacity to grieve, how...
the machine takes out the tenderest part of feeling
Pat McCabe, Weyakpa Najin Win (Woman Stands Shining) of the Diné (Navajo) Nation describes the difference between lighting a fire by hand, versus with a standard plastic or metal lighter: “the machine takes out the tenderest part of feeling.” It’s not as if nothing is...
Okay, so it’s an oligopoly, not a monopoly or duopoly
https://videopress.com/v/hIBTPzOc?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true So, I came across this brilliant comedian on Facebook the other day, and Facebook, in all of their infinite wisdom censored it from me, according...
Happinez means asking permission
Why I don’t buy carbon offsets
From Eric Holthaus's newsblog interview with Ketan Joshi in The Phoenix: What I'd love to see is a major company, instead of buying offsets and greenwashing us, is to be up front and unambiguous and say: "We are not going to fully reduce our emissions right away, but...
Chemical Colonialism: Environmental justice and industrial epidemics
https://www.envirosociety.org/2022/03/chemical-colonialism-environmental-justice-and-industrial-epidemics/ I've got a new blog in the Environment & Society blog loosely connected to my 2021 paper in their journal. It builds on my interest in environmental history,...
corona and climate – still relevant
Environmental philosopher and public health scientist Yogi Hale Hendlin will discuss the relationship between climate and viruses during this webinar and argues for a drastic change in behavior instead of treating symptoms. Is our relationship to flora and fauna not...
The Pantheon
A collection of some of my favorite humans who have ever enlarged our imagination: (in no particular order, last date updated 5 March 2022) Alexander F. Skutch - ornithologist and naturalist Hannah Arendt - chronicler of the human condition Kalevi Kull - theoretical...
The tobacco industry’s endlessly “new” tactics: find a loophole in the law, and f%$# it until it’s gone
One of my old colleagues, a lawyer at UCSF once said that the tobacco industry finds loopholes in the law and exploits them until someone closes them. And then moves onto the next one. Our new Open Access paper in Tobacco Control discusses some of these problems....
Climate Change (Finally) Enters the Therapy Room (for the Rich, who can afford Therapy)
(Background NYTimes Article for Reference) As I’ve always said, the NYT is 5-10 years behind the times (their feedback loop doesn’t extend beyond New Yorkers making 5M+). This has been a subject psychologists have been dealing with for at least 20 years in the west,...
Beloved books of 2021
Of the academish books I enjoyed the most in 2021, these are among my favorites. Most of them have to do with systemic modes of looking at intractable or wicked problems, suggesting that wicked problems themselves are wicked only because of those factors or...
Skiing in the anthropocene
For my 41st birthday, my family went skiing at La Rosiere, in the French Alps. Today, I got to go skiing into Italy and back - no passport checks necessary! Truly a unique experience! I hadn't gone skiing for years, since I was visiting my friend Josh in the Austrian...
Fractal Instrumentalism
When we farm fish, do we think that, perhaps, we're being farmed as well? If not? Why not? When we bind life to fulfilling one function: delivering to us what we think we need; do we ponder whether our life also is bound to what someone else desires? When we...
The push and pull of ecocide
Planned Obsolescence is just the verso side of perpetuating fossil fuels. GM's buying up and then sitting on patents for electric cars in the 1960s is but an example of how the fossil fuel industrial complex has retarded energy evolution. The fossil fuel industry and...
Jan 6 2021 and Sept 11 2001
Predictably, more surveillance and bigger data is the answer to dealing with terrorism, this time domestic. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/white-house-jan-6-lessons/2022/01/04/10970c9c-6cd2-11ec-a5d2-7712163262f0_story.html In many ways, this is...
International Institute of Social Sciences Development Research Seminar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=infIvsaegWE
The disinformation playbook: how industry manipulates the science-policy process—and how to restore scientific integrity
My new paper co-authored with the excellent scientists at the Union for Concerned Scientists "The disinformation playbook: how industry manipulates the science-policy process—and how to restore scientific integrity" appears in the Journal of Public Health Policy. The...
The Chemical Anthropocene as Devolution
My recently published paper in Environment & Society "Surveying the Chemical Anthropocene: Chemical Imaginaries and the Politics of Defining Toxicity," draws on Sheila Jasanoff's notion of "sociotechnical imaginaries" to describe how chemicals become cultural...
Beewashing
In an Earth Day issue of Time magazine (April 26/ May3 2021), we have an advertisement from the RJ Reynolds (or Reynolds American) tobacco company "Natural" American Spirits proclaiming "in more ways than one, bees are worthy of our love." Yes, we ought to love the...
Lego Metaphysics: The Engineering View of the Universe, and the non-assemble-ability of life
My kid doesn’t play with Legos the way that Lego wants you to think that people build Legos. Instead of those lush displays with those thousand dollar co-branded sets with odious media corporations that only have pieces that you can use in one way once and then it’s...
Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective published
My co-edited book with Jonathan Hope, Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective, was just published with Springer Nature (2021). This volume explores how the most basic processes in our everyday lives - the material engagement with food and medicine - affect us and...
Organisms and Agency
Responding to an article in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/01/wuhan-coronavirus-lab-leak-covid-virus-origins-china the medical ethnobotanist and philosopher Stephen Buhner had the following astute observations (posted in Facebook):...
New Paper: Plant Philosophy and Interpretation
I'm happy that a paper I first drafted in 2015 made it to the light of day in Environmental Values this week: "Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates." This paper grew out of an Austrian Science Foundation grant I...
Why I define environmental injustice as undeserved entitlement
Some entitlements are deserved: added respect and deference for those who have dedicated their lives to the common good; accommodation for the elderly, pregnant women, children, and those who need it; respect for those who have sacrificed their own good and interests...
$9 billion lost a day due to a stuck ship = stupid economics
"Cargo vessel stuck in Suez Canal drives up shipping losses estimating $9 billion per day" - CBS' headline reads Global commodity markets can fail spectacularly. One little tie up like a stuck boat, and $9 billion is lost a day. What people don't realize is that this...
Egalitarianism explained in a simple YouTube video
As part of my procrastination today from writing my book, I stumbled upon this video by the YouTube science communicator Veritasium. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&ab_channel=Veritasium What's so lovely about the video is how clearly it explains reams...
Review of The Good Hand excerpt
I just read the New York Times excerpt of Michael Patrick F. Smith's (names don't get more American, or Irish--his middle, middle name is Flanigan) book The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown. What struck me first was...
Preemptive versus post hoc: pandemic decision-making and measuring economic trade-offs
A million tourists or new luxury hotels may sound appealing, he added, “but is that sustainable? Is that going to help us in the long run?” The Washington Post's expose today 18 Dec 2020 on the few island nations that are still 100% COVID-19-free discusses the...
Reviews for Plants in Science Fiction
Last year an edited volume on speculative vegetation that I contributed a chapter to on Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume came out with the University of Wales press in the New Dimensions in Science Fiction series (with a beautiful cover, I might add). Since then, some...
Corona and Climate – Lunch Lecture @ Studium Generale and Erasmus Medical School 18 Nov 2020
Register here: https://www.eur.nl/en/events/corona-and-climate-lunch-lecture-2020-11-18 Lunch lecture on the relationship between climate and viruses by environmental philosopher and public health scientist Yogi Hale Hendlin. The impact of the Covid-19 crisis on...
Time to Clear the Air on EUR Smokefree Policies
From Erasmus Magazine’s misrepresentative title "Smoke-free campus: responsible decision or counter-productive?” for the very pro smokefree campus comments from students actually interviewed in the article to the irresponsible and juvenile “Free to Smoke Zone”...