Talk: 9 April, 2025 on Exporting Suffering: The Flower Industry at Home and Abroad

Everyone loves flowers. They brighten our day. They remind us of the beauty of life, and they are ephemeral, a memento mori of sorts to reflect upon our own mortality. But in the past half-century, the presence of flowers has moved from local to global markets, from...

Addressing Collapsology

Everywhere we look, we see signs of climate denial, whether explicit as in people who are so traumatized by the idea of everything they care about coming crashing down that they outright refuse to entertain the possibility and consequences of ecological collapse...

EuEpigenetics

I get an email from Aporia Magazine titled “You’re probably a eugenicist” — provocatively suggesting that we all favor good genes, and that we, all-knowing moderns, imbued with science, know what good genes are. I take umbrage with Aporia for...

Ecological Sisyphus

I feel like this as an environmental professional: expected to educate why we need to make sustainable change to all those convinced that everything’s fine. One must imagine Sisyphus happy… (Camus) I cannot imagine how it is for climate and environmental...

Semiofest meets Biosemiotics

Semiofest, the largest meeting and organization professional semioticians (working commercially rather than academically) just had a session biosemiotics. In many ways, it was also sustainability 2.0, tackling the issues of performativity and power in how we make...

Reflections on EUR’s Roundtable on Academic Freedom and Sustainability

After the 28 November, 2022 occupation of the Sanders Building at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where I work, by OccupyEUR, the students involved in the very nonviolent protest were violently removed by riot police at the Executive Board’s behest. Not the finest...