Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights Open Media)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.57 (820 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0872866696 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 144 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-12-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Including ecological awareness in our political decisions means including as much death in as many different modes (psychic, philosophical, social) as we can manage. Referring to classic texts as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh, he urges readers to face their fear of death and find guidance in literature as they prepare for and adapt to the future. This is our time and Roy Scranton has had the courage to think it in prose that sometimes feels more like bullets than bullet points."--Simon Critchley, Co-founder and moderator of The New York Times online philosophy series "The Stone" "An eloquent, ambitious, and provocative book."--Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor"Roy Scranton has written a howl f
Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. If that’s true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age--for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought--the shock and awe of global warming.Our world is changing. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton
"A surprisingly beautiful rumination on the inevitable extinction of humanity" according to Nathan Webster. I read this twice before I felt satisfied I could really connect with Roy Scranton's ruminations - but once that switch clicked, I recognized this as about the most beautiful rumination on humanity's eventual extinction that we're likely to read.It's easy to call this a "climate change" book, but Scranton's narrative does a good job connecting this to geologic history, not the comparitive split second of recent human history. Climate change IS going to happen, humanity in its current form WILL be destroyed - there's no point in crying about it. Not tomorrow, obviously, but eventually. But, it's fairly likely that th. An excellent introductory polemic on mourning our civilization walterturg This is a very short introduction to problems of the "Anthropocene" for people willing to face just how dire the situation is. As Scranton's subtitle admits, these are "reflections," although he synthesizes many different sources. The major importance, spread amidst the other arguments, is Scranton's insistence on the importance of mourning, in place of fake optimism, and learning to live in the ruins of our currrent culture as part of our response to the coming climate change. In the year since this book appeared, the argument has been echoed by other activists and scholars, including Anna Loewenhaupt Tsing in The . Best chapter is Scrantons review of Carbon Politics Best chapter is Scrantons review of Carbon Politics.Tracing the devolution form the Agriculture Revolution to the Industrial Revolution and into the Great Acceleration. Thus mapping how we arrived/ created the Anthropocene. I was a little surprised on his views on Violence and that Violence is inherent to Human behavior and "necessary." Then again his book is a book on "learning how to die" not on how to live. I regard that by recognizing "the human species as a geological force" we then arrive at opportunity to Change, to do Good, rather than to continue our self-destruction. Complexity as a natural force will crea