A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury us. “The Anthropocene,” or The Human Era, is an attempt to name our geological fate – that we will one day disappear into the layer-cake of Earth’s geology – while highlighting humanity in the starring role of today’s Earthly drama. In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism that takes as its starting point humanity’s eventual demise. The only question for a realist today, he suggests, is what to do now and what quality of compost to leave behind with our burial.
The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz.
Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
Check out the “Reader’s Guide” to Shadowing the Anthropocene
Adiu, your book sounds fascinating and, at the same time – for the non-philosophically inclined and ecological novice – quite unnerving and intimidating. Congratulations on another triumphant personal achievement!
That’s why there’s a Reader’s Guide! (http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2018/10/13/shadowing-the-anthropocene-a-readers-guide/) But just as quantum physics is difficult to describe without technical terms like “wave-particle duality,” “quantum entanglement,” “wave function collapse,” and “indeterminacy,” a process-relational account of things (which the book provides) is difficult to describe using everyday language. The book aims for a balance between readability and precision, but if it lacked the precision (which it gets from defining terms a certain way) it would probably just sound like mush…
That’s why there’s a Reader’s Guide! (Click on the link above author bio.) But just as quantum physics is difficult to describe without technical terms like “wave-particle duality,” “quantum entanglement,” “wave function collapse,” and “indeterminacy,” a process-relational account of things (which the book provides) is difficult to describe using everyday language. The book aims for a balance between readability and precision, but if it lacked the precision (which it gets from the technical language) it would probably just sound like mush… As for the “unnerving” part, is it any more unnerving than the news from climate science and ecology?
Hi, I have tried to download the pdf… and have left a donation for this book, which I’m very excited to read… and I am seeing no sign of any pdf download anywhere.
Can you help me?
thank you.
Dean
Apologies for the glitch; here’s the download link: http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25418
Hi Dean, thanks for your donation! The book should have automatically downloaded to your Downloads folder. If not, try this link: http://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/25418/1004677.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Don’t leave home without the Shadowing the Anthropocene travel mug! Available here: https://www.redbubble.com/i/mug/Shadowing-the-Anthropocene-by-punctumbooks/45192205.V33QC