The Russo-Ukrainian war is an environmental war, for at least the following reasons.

1. It is an environmental war because environmental destruction is a side effect of all wars.1

2. It is an environmental war because environments have been targeted by Russian forces—because disabling Ukraine’s economic potentials, including its agricultural fields, its ability to provide food for itself and the world, as well as its urban environments and industrial infrastructure, is a large part of the goals of the war.2

3. It is an environmental war because ecocide is the logical accompaniment to ethnocide or genocide,3 and the war is ethnocidal by the Russian government’s own admissions.4

4. It is an environmental war because the causes of the war are primarily environmental, or at least ecopolitical and geostrategic. Russia is a petro-state whose economy depends, to an extent greater than with any major economy in the world, on the revenues from its oil and gas reserves.5 This means that as oil and gas become less valuable—as they will with the world’s energy transition toward non-carbon-emitting energy sources—so will Russia’s economy decline. This accounts for Russia’s leading role (alongside the Arab oil producing countries and the Trump administration) in the international campaign to prevent concerted climate action on phasing out fossil fuels.6

It also makes the shoring up of Russian imperialism all the more strategically important. For historical as well as sentimental reasons, Russian imperial nationalists (including Putin) see Ukraine as central within that project.7 And in case the word “imperial” needs explanation here, it is helpful to recall that of all the European colonial empires that ruled much of the world directly one or two hundred years ago, Russia is the last one still standing, still unreconstructed by anti-colonial movements.8

5. It is an environmental war because Ukrainians’ defense of their territory is rooted, to a degree greater than it would be in many places, in an understanding that Ukrainians and the land they live on—their zemlia—make for a deeply valued partnership. It is not that Ukrainians haven’t been displaced from that land by industrialization, mechanization of agriculture, and rural to urban migration, all of which the Soviet state ramped up to an intense degree, telescoping processes that took a few centuries in Britain, France, and elsewhere into the space of a century. The ways in which serfdom and other ethnopolitical-ecological relations imposed by the Russian empire, or by Polish rule, substantiated a certain relationship between Ukrainians and land is part of that equation. The legacy of Ukrainian connections to the land, a legacy retained and celebrated in poetry, music, and other forms of popular culture, is one that still retains a vibrancy at times when land is clearly under attack.9

6. To summarize the above, it is an environmental war in the same way that wars have always been environmental. This is a lesson of environmental history: wars have, for centuries, been fought between people defending land and their relationships with it from those who would like to replace those relationships with others that favor their own kind, that see their land as suitable for expansion, or extraction, or some other end. And while that process has gone on for millennia, there is an intensity and global reach to these expansionist wars in the last five centuries or so that has been undeniable—an expansion over and against those people and places that are “in the way.”

Ukrainians and the Ukrainian land are “in the way” of Russia’s neo-imperialist plans. (As they were during the Stalin-produced Holodomor of the early 1930s.) This is analogous to the ways in which Indigenous peoples and their lands were “in the way” of European colonization, for centuries; and the way in which Palestinians are “in the way” of the Netanyahu regime’s plan for a Greater Israel; and… add your own examples, of which there are many.

And in a world of multipolar imperialisms, the only ethically defensible position is to extend solidarity to every victim resisting every and any imperialism. The opposite of imperialism is not some vague and selective rhetorical “anti-imperialism.” It is democratic self-determination that is rooted in one’s place. It is tuteishist’, the defense of what is here, tut, and globally it is the solidarity of the earthbound.10

7. Finally, the Russo-Ukrainian war is environmental in the way that future wars will all be environmental, in a world affected by climate disruptions, rising sea levels, intensifying weather disasters, and the demographic shifts, agricultural failures, economic hardships, and resource and land conflicts that will accompany these. The climate-destabilized world to come is the culmination of centuries of imperialist, extractivist, and colonial-capitalist “resourcifying.”11

The lessons from Ukrainians’ resistance are thus lessons all of us (hopeful survivors) will need to learn. The sooner we recognize our shared precarity in the face of climate change, the sooner we will see the outlines of the “ecological class struggle” to come: a struggle of the “global climate precariat” against the “fossil-fuel protectorate” and its technopolitical allies, for whom the struggle to dominate is paramount, with all social and ecological costs offloaded onto others (or onto the future).

Communicating this shared condition of climate precarity is therefore of great importance, and it is a task for artists and media makers as much as for anyone else. That’s why Terra Invicta, the book from which the above argument comes, puts such a strong emphasis on images and the work of artists. (That, of course, is consistent with my other work, such as The New Lives of Images.)

(To see the images Terra Invicta works with—in effect, counter-images to the destruction of the landscape portrayed in the satellite picture below—you’ll have to get the book. It is available from McGill-Queen’s University Press. But it is also open-access, available for free to all. It is a book that Slavoj Žižek says “deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.” See also Marin Coudreau’s wonderfully detailed review of it from the French radical ecology journal Terrestres. entitled “Terre invaincue: la catastrophe écologique à la lumière de l’Ukraine en guerre.”)

I’m also attaching a PDF of the final version of the Preface and the book’s 30-page index, which my indexer, Greg Fisher, did a great job with. (That’s for those who’d like to get a better idea of what’s in the book before purchasing it. And if the book is too pricey for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me by e-mail.) Click on the black racetrack shape at the bottom of the white space below to get the PDF.

THE NEW LIVES OF IMAGES

PREFACE

Our civilization doesn’t have adequate images, and I think our civilization is doomed, is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images. — Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, 1980[i]

Without an image of tomorrow, one is trapped by blind history, economics and politics beyond our control. … Only by having clear and vital images of the many alternatives, good and bad, of where one can go, will we have any control over the way we may actually get there in a reality tomorrow will bring all too quickly. — Samuel Delany, Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction[ii]

The imaginal is not a world, but it is what makes a world possible in the first place. … [T]he imaginal is a field of possibilities.   — Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary[iii]

This book is rooted in a conviction that I have pursued in my writing for the last few decades: that most modern accounts of the human imagination misunderstand and underestimate its role in shaping the world that humans inhabit. Imagination is not something that is “just in our heads”; it is not merely an error-prone way of making sense of the data brought to us from the world by our senses. On the contrary, imagination is something like the medium in which we and others live. There is a universe outside of the one we can grasp with our imagination(s), but it is not a universe that is free of the kinds of meanings we impart to it. This is because meaning is inherent in the universe for meaning-bearing beings. We humans are one such being, though far from the only one, and the idea that our (human) ability to bear or create meaning is not only special but somehow separate from the physical universe is a flawed premise.

In this sense, I begin with a rejection of what Alfred North Whitehead called the “bifurcation of nature”: the idea that there is a physical realm of “molecules and electrons” that is separate from, or more “ontologically primary” than, the world of “secondary” data—“the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, the feel of the velvet,” and the like.[iv] Each of the latter presumes a perception, an interpretation, or a meaning. If this conviction is true—that meaning does not separate us humans from the universe, but, if anything, that it situates and emplaces us within it—then I believe it is also true to say that the main way in which meaning-bearing beings grasp or bear meaning is through what can be called “images.” As I will explain in the first chapter below, images are central to understanding what it means to live in a world, or to “live a world.” Images are neither subjective nor objective, or, rather, they are both; they are what links subject and object, and what connects our concrete experience with the abstraction that makes sense of that experience. They are small and they are large. As Gilbert Simondon has put it, “images impregnate civilizations and energize them with their power.”[v]

Understanding our capacity to make and use, or at least to bear, images—which is how I will define the imagination—is central to understanding both ourselves and our universe. What is most important, and what I will attempt to shed light on, is what we do with those images and how they shape, enable, and constrain us as we navigate our relationship with the more-than-human world around us. Our capacity to bear images is inherent to our perception of the world, but also to our creative transformation of that world. This dual aspect of images—as perceptual and as creative, as reproductive and productive—will be our key. As philosopher Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei writes in The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World, imagination both reveals and makes the world for us. It is “the presentational and transformational activity of human consciousness,” where “presentational” refers to “something that is brought to the fore or made present for consciousness,” and “transformational” refers to the possibility of “change” in the “object or expression of imagining.”[vi]

Two modern philosophers whose work provides rich insight into this, if in quite different ways, will be my touchstones here. Whitehead is one of them; the other is Charles Sanders Peirce. The work of both has been applied to the interpretation of images and to understanding media, including today’s digital media, but not necessarily in the way that I will do this. Their work is not entirely unique, and it is related to and echoed by a diverse cast of others today and in the past—westerners and non-westerners, women and men, philosophers and poets, scientists and shamans.[vii] Even as Whitehead and Peirce frame my own thinking about images and imagination, neither of them detailed the many implications, nor for that matter the causes, of the “bifurcation of nature” they each, in their own way, identified. All of that has required generations of philosophers, historians of science, and others who have probed the ways in which this bifurcation both affects and has been affected by variables including race, gender, and histories of colonialism and extractive capitalism, variables whose influence will become evident in the interpretations taken up later in this book.[viii] And all of this work remains to be successfully synthesized into a popularly resonant form.[ix]

What I tease out of the work of these thinkers is this idea that the perceptual and the creative—what and how we perceive, and what we do with those perceptions—constitutes a kind of unified field within which images, or imaging, plays a central role. Today that field is shaped increasingly by the world of digital media, and it is my overarching goal to understand how that world affects and changes the possibilities for imagining the world into existence. The reason such an understanding is needed, to quote political artists Mihnea Mircan and Jonas Staal, is in order to address the “crisis of the imagination,” which they define as “a lack of imagination to understand our disastrous present as much as to project our desired future.”[x]

This book is the fourth in a series devoted directly to some dimension of this image-centered understanding of the contemporary world. The first, Claiming Sacred Ground, focused on how imagination features in conflicts over land and in perceptions and interpretations of its meanings. Those interpretations included claims for land’s alleged significance or “sacredness” in places where environmental conflicts appeared outsizedly acute. While its analysis of images was more implicit than explicit, the book’s attempt to theorize “place-images” in the context of human activities—“practices of place” that shape those places into what they become—is something that is directly relevant to the present volume. Most especially, the way in which that volume moved between activities thought to be religious or spiritual and those considered secular or modern—between ceremonial rituals on one hand and tourist promotion, recreation, and real estate speculation on the other—is something I will pick up again in this book. All such activities are still with us, but now they are found within a context shaped increasingly by digital media.

In light of that first volume, the second in the series, Ecologies of the Moving Image, may have appeared a detour into an altogether different line of study, though it is the book that most directly leads into this one. Understanding images today necessitates a rigorous analysis of the kinds of images that came, most dramatically, to populate and to shape the world over the course of the twentieth century: moving images. Ecologies of the Moving Image attempted not only a thorough refashioning of our understanding of moving images, but a kind of excavation of them from within a world reshaped by them. It presented a multi-leveled analysis of cinema in terms of the worlds it produces, which are material, social, and perceptual (or animate); the ways we viewers engage with those worlds—their moment-by-moment spectacularity, their sequential narrativity (or one-thing-after-anotherness), and their referentiality to all kinds of other worldly and imagined things; and the ways our engagements with film-worlds changes the worlds that precede and outlast those film-viewing experiences (which, again, it does materially, socially, and perceptually). Ecologies of the Moving Image was in this sense both phenomenological, to do with how we experience films, and ontological, to do with what films and their worlds (film-worlds) are and how they relate to other dimensions of reality.

The next volume, Shadowing the Anthropocene, deepened the philosophical basis of my previous work, relating it especially to the “speculative realisms,” “new materialisms,” and “ontological turns” that have marked certain segments of the philosophically inclined academy (though not so much analytic philosophy departments as cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and social sciences). Then I applied this philosophy to the practice of living and to the theorization of cultural and religious “image wars” or “iconoclashes,” all within the context of the “Anthropocene predicament,” which an increasing number of intellectuals take to mark the present time. With its forays into the practical and the “iconoclashic,” Shadowing returned me more directly to the concerns of the first volume in this tetralogy.

The present volume effectively brings all of these concerns together. It proposes, in the most complete form to date, a theory of the imagination that is also a theory of images—what they are and what they do—and that accounts for a broad spectrum of people’s use of images, from the religious and political to the scientific and aesthetic, and from the pre-modern to the world of digital media. If anything, it takes such categorical distinctions—between religion, science, magic, aesthetics, politics, as well as modernity, secularism, and others—as categories to be set aside so that their common substance can be recognized. That common substance is imagination and the forms it takes: images or imaginings (image-events), image ecologies (or imaginaries), image regimes, and the icono-couplings and iconoclashes that occur in the mixtures of images we find in the world; all these terms will be defined soon enough. And it continues the work of analyzing moving images—images that move us—in a world where those images have gone if not viral, then at least digital.

This book is, in a sense, both a genealogy and the beginnings of an analysis of the heavily mediated present. That makes it an ambitious book. Fortunately, its division into two absolves me of some of that ambition. Where the first half presents the theory in its most holistic form, the second selectively focuses on a series of locations or sites of interest to understanding the Anthropocene condition. Like the three books preceding it, this one aims to help us navigate the set of circumstances humans collectively find ourselves inhabiting today. I (and others) have argued that the term “Anthropocene” is a misnomer, both because the “Anthropos” is hardly a responsible and unified agent—the “cause” of the Anthropocene is far more complex than the term suggests—and because humans are far from equally implicated in this condition. At any rate, the case I make is that the Anthropocene condition or predicament—a shared situation rather than a geological epoch (as geologists themselves have recently asserted)—is not just one in which human activities today risk the physical and biological foundations on which we depend, so that those activities need to be reassessed and remade. It is also a predicament that requires epistemological and ontological regrounding. This book hopes to contribute to that task by helping us understand the image-world in which we live.

I use this term “image-world” in a double sense. It is, on the one hand, the world of images that surround us increasingly, and that do this by virtue of imaging technologies that are primarily electronic and digital. This is the digital image-world, and while the digital is not reducible to images, digital technology makes possible the networked, participatory, and “hypermediated” world that so many of us live with and, to a large degree, live within. It is where we find the bulk of the images, as well as the stories and texts, that shape and make sense of our lives. On the other hand, I also intend to recognize that every human world is an image-world; it is a world brought forth in and through our imaginative capacities and acts. The book aims to contribute to both of these: an ontology of the image-world (which is every world) and an ontology of the particular image-world—that of digital images and networks—that grows around us and enfolds us increasingly today.

I will do this, first, by identifying a series of patterns or configurations, which I call “image regimes,” according to which humans have negotiated their relationships with the larger world through the use of images. These present multiple variations on the triad “humans—images—reality.” Since human ideas about each of these—about images, about reality, and about humans ourselves—have changed over time, this will be a way to establish some reference points amidst an ensemble of moving pieces. In the second part of the book, I will apply this understanding of image regimes to three sites of image production. The first of these pertains to the Anthropocene itself, in the shape of a set of multi-media art works dealing with ecological, climatic, and geological changes affecting humanity today. The second examines an array of online audio-visual materials documenting and commenting on trans-species animal encounters, that is, encounters that cross commonly assumed boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals. The third looks at art, music, and poetry that refers to and engages, or at least claims to engage, with agential forces that exceed or transcend “humanity” as it is currently understood in its dominant formulation.

I have chosen these three sites in order to give us a sense of what is at stake in our imagination both of ourselves—the human, the Anthropos—and of three significant kinds of others-to-the-human. The first of these others is the Earth as a whole, the geological or biogeochemical other in its singularity. The second includes the ranks of animal species to which we humans belong, as animals ourselves, but from which we have disavowed our belonging insofar as we have considered ourselves humans and not animals. The third of these others is less easy to pinpoint: it is not one that is obviously scientifically knowable, and depending on one’s convictions, it may or may not exist except as a product of imagination. And yet it represents the kind of other that has been looked to as the most significant by many societies over millennia: the other referred to in discourses commonly labeled religious, spiritual, mythological, supernatural, or at the very least poetic. Together with the second (the animal other), this third “other” raises a question that has haunted humanity across the period marked by the rise of what is loosely called humanism: the question, Are we alone? If most forms of humanist thought, including the very humanist idea of the Anthropocene, suggest that humans constitute a central character on the stage of the world, then this question “Are we alone?” becomes a complex and open site: a site of denial, of haunting, of speculation, and of utopian imagining. And if we are to move to a “post-humanist” embrace of the more-than-human world, a “more-than-humanism,” this question will need to be taken seriously.

To that end, the three chapters that make up Part Two of this volume will treat these three image formations as, in effect, construction sites. It is these kinds of sites that are, to use Chiara Bottici’s words (cited above), “what makes a world possible in the first place.” They are part of the “imaginal” that can prepare us, or fail to prepare us, for the world Werner Herzog and Samuel Delany foresee in the accompanying epigraphs. I will name them “scenes”—the “Anthroposcene,” the “Therioscene,” and the “Theoscene”—to highlight the ways in which they serve as settings for image-formation unfolding at three kinds of boundaries, thresholds, crossroads, or encounter zones: those between humans and the Earth, between humans and (other) animals, and between humans and the more mysterious relations that anchor us in our sense of passage between the past that grounds us and the future that beckons.[xi] It is this sense of movement within temporality, and in fact within multiple temporalities, that makes this project a “chronopolitical” one, a way of navigating time that encompasses aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions.

For all this talk of the “anthro” and its “(s)cene(s),” I wish to make clear, and hope that my analysis bears out, that the human world is neither singular—one shared human world—nor is it exclusively human. Humans are one kind of being that bears worlds; many worlds do we bear, and their convergence and divergence is a real issue for us to contend with today. The argument developed in this book builds up to a focus on how certain decolonial, Indigenous, and Afrofuturist artists are contributing to the elicitation of imaginaries that may help us with this world-crafting. This is a world-crafting that involves redefining ourselves as well as our animal kin and our other others—those ancestral, invisible, and mysteriously present to us in ways that may be accessible to us via the imaginal practices of artists and other “diviners.” My premise here is that grappling with a world of growing ecological precarity, political and economic instability, late-imperial resource rivalry, and general “feverishness”—the twenty-first century world of late-capitalist crisis—requires cultural and imaginative resources from beyond its dominant, institutionalized strains, and significant creativity in their uptake.

Many other worlds exist alongside our human worlds, and some of them elude even the least of our human contributions. Each of them points to a larger, all-encompassing reality within which these worlds arise and by which they get subsumed. We can call that reality “the more-than-human world,” as my subtitle does, or we can call it, much more broadly, the universe, even if physicists (and anthropologists) aren’t sure if it is one universe or many, a multiverse or a pluriverse, or something altogether unknowable—an agnoverse (to coin a term). Each of the worlds making up this pluriverse, polyverse, or agnoverse, situates the bearer within some understanding of that more encompassing reality, a reality that is actively turning (from the Latin vertere) in one direction or many. This is what it means to bear a world, to image, and to live and dwell in it.

That we bear and share worlds with other dwellers, and other kinds of dwellers, is the starting point for any philosophy worth promoting today. The fruit of that philosophy will be a contribution to the task of living with those others. I dedicate this book to all of those others, whoever and wherever they are. 

[i] Quoted in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, dir. Les Blank, 1980, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081746/.

[ii] Samuel R. Delany, Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, rev. ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 14.

[iii] Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 61.

[iv] Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1920/1964), 30-31.

[v] Quoted by Jean-Yves Chateau, “Preface: A Theory of the Image in Light of the Notion of Invention, a Theory of Invention in Light of the Notion of the Image,” in Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention, trans. J. Hughes and C. Wall-Romana (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), xxiv.

[vi] Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei’s The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 26, 28. This book is an ambitious, yet concise, recent overview of scholarship on imagination. Aside from its apparent restriction to human consciousness, Gosetti-Ferencei’s definition of imagination coheres entirely with my own use of the word, and the “object or expression” with my own use of the word “image” (though I will suggest it is more like an event than an object). For somewhat overlapping arguments, see Kathleen Lennon, Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). For a broad survey of philosophical approaches to imagination, see Amy Kind, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (London: Routledge, 2016).

Many others have probed the long history of concepts of the imagination. Richard Kearney’s The Wake of Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), J. M. Cocking’s Imagination; A Study in the History of Ideas (London: Routledge, 1991), and Eva Brann’s The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Rowman & Littlefield, 1991) all arguably err on the side of an all-too-Western history, rooted in ancient Greece and culminating in European Romanticism (or the French Renaissance, in Cocking’s case), with a late modern or postmodern dénouement. Kearney’s version of this is an incisive tale of a long rise, a sharp fall (via existentialism and postmodernism), and, as dénouement, the promise of an errant ethico-poetical wandering. In its 800 pages, Brann’s volume is dauntingly comprehensive, and its definition of imagination, as an internal power or faculty that represents absent things as present by way of resemblance, deeply informs my own. To bring such a story up-to-date and place it within a more global, cross-cultural frame remains an open project. My work in this volume presumes that the result would be not only polymorphous and multi-linear, but that the difficulty of defining its object (or subject, rather), “the imagination,” would make it virtually untellable. The cognitive study of imagination is a case in point, with numerous competing approaches and little obvious consensus about what imagination is, let alone where it is neurologically located. I therefore begin from a fairly specific definition, with ontological presuppositions, and follow it where it leads me.

[vii] In my book Shadowing the Anthropocene (Punctum, 2018), and especially in that book’s Appendix on “Contemporary Process-Relational Thought: A Primer” (231-240), I outline a long genealogy of thinking along these lines, a genealogy that is as much “Eastern”—encompassing Buddhist, Daoist, and Hindu philosophers among others—as it is “Western.” That “the image” and “imagination” have tended to be topics of concern among professional philosophers, who have tended to be male, means that I will refer more to these philosophers than to Indigenous thinkers or to women (whose thought is in any case historically much less represented in literary form). But it should not imply that the concerns of the book are elitist; we all live in a world dense with images today.

[viii] To mention just one strand of significant theory here, the feminist, would be to delve into the writings of a large number of important authors including Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, Silvia Federici, and Val Plumwood. The same could be done for Marxist and socialist theorists, postcolonial and decolonial thinkers, and environmental philosophers, many of whose names will come up here and there throughout the book. My previous writings have delved into these rich sources of critical theory. And among the twentieth-century thinkers who have emphasized the centrality of imagination in human experience, whose influence is felt here but not explicitly referred to much, are Cornelius Castoriadis, Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Simondon, and Richard Kearney (see also note 6 above). In various ways, philosophers from Aristotle to Kant, Schelling, and Nietzsche have probed the role of imagination, but A. N. Whitehead’s notion of the “bifurcation of nature” remains pivotal in its taking it as the critical core of his metaphysical project, and so that is where I begin.

[ix] For a recent effort, see Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2024).

[x] Mihnea Mircan and Jonas Staal, “Let’s Take Back Control! Of Our Imagination,” Stedelijk Studies 6 (2018), https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/lets-take-back-control-of-our-imagination/, accessed June 12, 2023.

[xi] Readers of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image (2013) may wonder how this triad maps against the one that organized the previous book. While that one paid attention to the construction of and movement across boundaries, the division of its three central chapters was premised on a differentiation of the “geomorphic” (geographic/geological), “biomorphic” (biological), and “anthropomorphic” (human) dimensions of the production of cinema worlds. In this book, I focus more directly on the boundaries between the human, on one side, and the geological/geographic (geomorphic), the animal (a sub-set of the biomorphic), and—what is novel here—the “theomorphic.” In this, I hope the book is resonant with work in decolonial theory and the “pluriversal politics,” as Arturo Escobar calls it, of a less Eurocentric future. See Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

Ukrainian Review has published a special issue on “Legacies of Chornobyl” that includes a fascinating interview with historian Serhii Plokhy (who seems to be writing at the incredible rate of a book a year) alongside several articles on the muliple dimensions of the accident and its impacts.

My own piece in the issue, “Chornobyl at 40: Times and Spaces of a Hyper-Event,” is a distillation of a much longer argument, some of which has appeared in print before and other parts of which are still in progress. The final paragraph distills the message into a single sentence:

So we have an event that is multiple things at once: an ‘error’ registering the shadowy underside of industrial modernity; the limit case of a bipolar Cold War order, now transmogrified into a multipolar geo-informational disorder; a cipher of contested narratives including those that would yoke it to Ukraine’s emergent national sovereignty; an emptied yet alluring terrain of the world’s shadow ecology; and a signpost on the accelerometer of the Anthropocene.  

Read the editors’ introduction here, my piece here, and the rest of the issue here: https://www.londonukrainianreview.org/

Related to this, I’ll be speaking on Terra Invicta and the ecopolitical continuum that connects Chornobyl to the Russo-Ukrainian war in New York City tomorrow, in Toronto next month (at the Munk School on April 20 and in Ukrainian for the Shevchenko Scientific Society on April 24), and in Montreal at the Jean Monnet Centre on April 22 (Earth Day) and at Concordia University on April 23.

Are we alone yet?

Insofar as the very notion of an Anthropocene represents the culmination of an onto-­epistemological humanism, a centering of collective humanity as the leading actor on the world stage, this question “Are we alone?” haunts the Anthropocenic imagination. Logically speaking, the question invites a series of answers, each of which has emerged in different guises.

Blaise Pascal’s famous line “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces,” that is, of the heavens, “frightens” or “terrifies me” exemplifies an affirmative response to the question: yes, we humans are alone in this universe. For whatever reason, there is no other species that is our kin. We stand alone, and this marks our significance, our greatness, or perhaps our tragedy. We have no one to turn to except the figments of our own imagination and the results of our own creativity. (Presumably, AI would lie within that span.) Pascal went on to reason that the benefits of believing in a God, one whose inhabitation of those spaces would temper that fear, outweigh the benefits of disbelieving in such a God. But the very fact that he was able to raise the question tells us how far down the road of a species solipsism elite European thinking had reached by the seventeenth century.

Indigenous cultures around the world would likely recoil at the very question. Who is “we,” they might ask? Do we not already inhabit a world rich with kin of many kinds? Setting these two in dialogue with each other suggests a range of other potential responses. At one end, then, we could simply answer yes and accept our human aloneness with solemnity, grace, befuddlement, or arrogant pretense; let’s call this the ultra-­humanist option. Secondly, we could answer no, that there are others out there and that we might one day, or have already, been in contact with them; the only thing preventing us from knowing this is the distance of Pascal’s heavens. Let’s call this the extraterrestrial, or distant more-­than-­human, option. The very fact that there are hundreds of billions of Earth-­like planets in our own galaxy, not to mention the hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe, suggests that the chances of us being alone in the universe are astronomical (no pun intended).

Thirdly, we can answer no, that we aren’t even alone here, as we have so many companions with such rich ways of making sense of their own worlds, neurocognitively similar or different from us and with sensory systems comparable in varying degrees; let’s call this the near more-­than-­human option. (Where chatbots and other forms of technical persons might figure into this will be an open question.) Finally, we can push the latter approach further to simply ask, Who do you mean by “we”? and What do you mean by “alone”? Not only are there furry, finned, winged, webbed, vascular, rooted, and mycelial others; there are the many others of our dreams, our visions, and our mythological narratives. The question barely computes. Let’s call this the always much-­more-­than-­human option.

If these options were marginal, we could confidently pursue the ultra-humanist position, but they have never been marginal, and they are not that in the broader world today. The question then becomes what to do with the other-­than-­humans in our midst already. What is their ontological status relative to ours?

If some of them are, like us, the kinds of evolved biophysical life forms studied and confirmed by evolutionary science over the last several decades, then what status do we assign those which are not — the spirits, deities, or whatever else, by all the names they have come and gone with — and how do we draw whatever boundaries may separate these categories? Are there empirically verifiable, scientifically researchable entities — ­particles, molecules, genes, organisms, and other measurable or theoretically positable forces — and then, in contrast, other kinds of things that humans posit, but that elude empirical verification through science?

There is a long and distinguished tradition of bifurcating the world this way (to use Whitehead’s term), distinguishing the empirically real from the imagined or merely experienced, and I have already made the case for rejecting this tradition. At any rate, some scholars today argue that this way of thinking overly privileges science as a way of knowing, at the expense of Indigenous and non-­western ways of knowing. Yet the belief in multiple ways of knowing hardly makes things easier for us, for as long as we lack an agreeable means to bring those alternative ways into commensurability, that is, into a common framework of understanding whereby their differences can be navigated. If non-­western ways of knowing (and many western ones, too) posit gods, spirits, or other forces as real entities with which we humans maintain relations, is there a common language for speaking about those relationships?

The ontological turn in anthropology has returned these questions to the forefront of that field. It is in the study of religion that these questions of ontology become particularly acute, even if they are conventionally left aside so that the study of religion can continue without too much discomfort. At the broadest, however, we can distinguish “essentialist” presumptions from “constructivist” challenges. Where some presume that the gods, spirits, angels, or other divinities — ­some if not all of them — ­are what believers say they are, or at least are something apart from human constructions, with some sort of agency of their own, others have long argued that they are nothing but social productions fabricated, imagined, and enacted into presence through individual and collective human activities.

This opposition may be deeply ingrained, but it is not irreconcilable. Human activities clearly produce religion, but that does not necessitate that there aren’t other things at play — ­agencies or “actants,” to use Bruno Latour’s agnostic formulation, with some of these being “natural” or accountable through current science and others not. If we are to follow our Whiteheadian premise, introduced at the outset of this volume, that the greenness of the trees is no less ontologically significant than the molecules, electromagnetic waves, and neuro-­sensory processes that deliver that greenness to us, then we have to admit that the religious experiences of billions is real experience even if the theories that account for it are contestable (was it God who spoke to me, or my wish-­fulfilling unconscious mind?). In this sense, the fact that millions of people around the world swear they have seen and even interacted with ghosts, spirits, or deities is an empirical fact of the same ontological status as the fact that scientists have failed to capture those ghosts in an empirically replicable way. And the reality that unidentified aerial phenomena continue to be witnessed, by reliable witnesses like military pilots no less, and that some of these appearances seem to deny what we know about current human technological capacities, is an empirical fact about which theories still elude any consensus.

[At this point, the book goes on to critically examine one of the recent popular articulations of a certain brand of theory of religion, Tanya Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real, finding its analysis a little unsatisfying. It then begins an exploration of art and music that pushes at the boundaries of the “more-than-human,” including the visual art of Hilma af Klint and Oberto Airaudi and the work of Afrofuturists including musician Sun Ra and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I argue that the work of these artists pushes us toward a sense of “immanent utopianism” that enables an expanded sense of kinship, emplacing us within timescapes in which futures and pasts become newly meaningful, even if they remain somewhat fraught and contestable.]

No, taking over Venezuela is neither about democracy nor about drugs. It’s about four closely related things:

• oil, which means maintaining the fossil-fuel industrialism that is running the world into the ground;
• power, specifically the continuing anti-constitutional takeover of the United States, which requires something new every day to prevent opposition from consolidating;
• distraction, specifically, from the Epstein files and Trump’s plummeting approval ratings; and
• geopolitics, specifically, the neo-imperialistic carve-up of the world between authoritarian power blocs (at least three of them, with one, China, now being pushed aside from Venezuela).

This is the new world order, which is the final flaring up of fossil-fuel imperialism. Opposition to it will have to be bottom-up, anti-imperialist, and thoroughly ecological.

The way to think about this reconfiguration of the world is as a new class antagonism. (I present this idea in the introductory chapter of Terra Invicta and am developing it further in a forthcoming publication.)

We could identify a historical series of “class antagonisms” over the last 500 years: between colonizers and colonized groups, between landowners and serfs, between owners of capital and proletarianized workers, and between metropolitan elites and diverse subaltern populations. All of these have been made complex by internal divisions and cross-cutting filiations, including the emergence of “middle classes” as well as diverse international coalitions and alliances. Democracy has, in its different forms, largely (if not always) worked to mediate and mitigate these antagonisms, though also in uneven ways.

As authors like Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, Matthew Huber, Razmig Keucheyan, and Andreas Malm have variously argued, the globalization of climate change impacts comes marked by an emerging “new class antagonism.” There is not yet any consensus on the constitution of these classes, which are hardly self-aware as such. But they are the best way to read current conflicts so as to guide our actions toward a better alternative.

Huber, for instance, pits an ecological “working class,” the class of those “alienated from nature and forced to survive via the market,” against a seemingly insurmountable enemy he calls (citing Malm) “fossil capital.” He defines the latter as including a long list of “forms of capital that generate profit through emissions” — “extractive capital,” “industrial capital,” “electricity capital,” “green capital” (including “renewable energy developers, carbon-offset swindlers, and an emergent field of innovation based on carbon removal [… and] geoengineering”), “finance capital,” the “rentier class,” petroleum-exporting “landlord states,” the “middle class” of “managers, supervisors, and other infantry enforcing the rule of capital,” alongside “petty-bourgeosie” small business owners and others. How the alienated global working class is to come to class consciousness is a question Huber leaves untheorized.

Latour and Schultz, on the other hand, define the “ecological class” so expansively as to be almost everyone: the “proletariat in the production of wealth,” the women whose role in that production has long been unacknowledged, the colonized who have been subjected to “unfair trading” for centuries, “the living beings and the Earth system” whose role as “wealth producers” the ecological crisis makes unassailable, indigenous peoples, “the next generations,” “large swathes of the intellectual classes” including Earth scientists and the “engineers and inventors, whose desire for innovation has been shattered by the narrow constraints of production,” “all the activists, militants, people of good will, ordinary citizens, peasants, gardeners, industrialists, investors, explorers in one capacity or other, not to mention all those who’ve seen their territory disappear before their very eyes,” and even “the religions” who “represent huge forces and deep emotions that have already managed, over the course of the centuries, to transform souls, landscapes, the law, the arts,” and who include “all those who work, rite after rite, to make sure that the ‘cry of the Earth and the Poor’ — to take up the beautiful expression (or, rather, cry!) of Pope Francis — is finally heard.”

The difference between these two variations of an “ecological class antagonism” is not only a difference in who belongs and who is welcomed, but also in what the struggle is over: is it over “ownership and control of production,” as Huber would have it, or something altogether more ontological, involving the “forces of reproduction” or “engenderment,” to use Latour and Schultz’s term, but also identity and affiliation with place — the “earthbound” who have either attached themselves to the maintenance of specific places or have never managed to detach themselves in the first place?

To propose identifiable names to this “emerging antagonism,” I suggest that it pits a climate precariat, whose vulnerability to climate change renders it hardly able to protect itself from climate-related eco-trauma, against a fossil-fuel protectorate, which, while divided in other respects, works together to protect its interests at others’ expense. The two are defined less by their economic position than by their relative vulnerability and, relatedly, by their capacity (or lack of it) to shield themselves from the impacts of climate change through continued investment in the fossil-fuel energy regime.

Forming a triangle with these two is a nascent third force, a kind of “attractor” that exercises an increasing pull on both, which I call an energy transitionate. The third force could ultimately take the form of a “green capitalist” alliance or a “green social-democratic” alliance, or more likely something with elements of both in an uneasy truce that would, at its best, harbor the potential of a global “Green New Deal” reminiscent of the New Deal that defined U.S. politics in the two and a half decades after the end of World War Two, which are sometimes considered the “golden age” of liberal capitalism. It wasn’t utopia then, and neither can we look forward to utopia anytime soon. But it was a workable compromise between industry, labor, and the state that not only generated but spread wealth for millions.

This tripartite division is heuristic and theoretical; it hardly captures what is occurring in real-world relations between, say, the United States, Europe, China, Russia, and other nations or blocs. Yet sociopolitical and ecological conflicts around the world, in the interests and perceptions that shape them, might be read as marked by this antagonism and its third “attractor.” Defining what might be a possible compromise for a future of precarious earthly regeneration is the task of our time.

Every global conflict today bears the marks of this ecological class antagonism. I make that case about the Russo-Ukrainian war in that introduction to Terra Invicta. Briefly, it’s that the war is environmental not only in the targeting of environments, energy grids, and nuclear power plants, but in that its causes are ecopolitical. Russia is a declining petro-state and Ukraine’s role as its gas pipeline go-between and industrial support is significant. Add to that the libidinally powerful pseudo-history that Putin obsesses over — in which Kyïv is the “mother of Russian cities” and Ukraine by definition his imperial cradle — and you have the psychologically potent mix of eco-irrationalism that feeds the Putinist ideology.

The U.S. under Trump is fully on board with Putin’s fossil-fuel interests (less so his Slavo-historical obsessions), and taking Venezuela is entirely consistent with its own fossil-fuel imperialism. Whether Cuba or Greenland will be next, the same set of interests obtains. And if it’s Taiwan that is next in the ring of imperial dominoes, we might not have oil to blame, but history and semiconductors will both be part of the picture.

The task for those of us who want to see a better, more sustainable, regenerative, and just world, is to continue working from the ground up to make that world possible, and to communicate the vision of it as clearly as we can. Our work is cut out for us.

(“Class triangle” image updated to be more viewer-friendly.)

Every ten years this century I’ve posted a list of the “Books of the Decade in Ecocultural Theory.” (The last one was here; the previous, here.) Given how quickly things are evolving — and the precarious state of the world that’s accompanying them — it feels appropriate to take advantage of this quarter-turn in the century’s clock for a deep dig into the kinds of insights we need to make sense of our intertwined ecological and cultural, i.e., ecocultural, challenges.

Here’s a baker’s top ten (which makes eleven) of the books I am nominating for the most ecoculturally insightful of the last 25 years. Three of them were published since my last list, and only four of the remaining eight are repeated from previous lists.* A retrospective gaze enables a revised valuation of the earlier books’ significance, but also opens up an opportunity for me to think a bit more broadly about what’s needed these days. (And I smuggle in several other titles into the comments.)

As always, deep apologies to those whose excellent work is missing from this list. Among the authors who’ve published important work this century are Isabelle Stengers, Deborah Bird Rose, Thom Van Dooren, Marisol de la Cadena, Ursula Heise, Achille Mbembe, Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Timothy Morton, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Nigel Clark, Joachim Radkau, Alf Hornborg, John R. McNeill, Malcom Ferdinand, Brian Burkhart, Sean Cubitt, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Stefan Helmreich, and plenty of others whose work I’ve cited elsewhere on this blog or in my own writing.

This list represents one person’s view of things at this particular moment in time. It has little to do with citations or influence, and is certainly not intended to cover any entire field, such as the environmental humanities (which has became too large to encompass) or anything that could be constituted as “ecocultural studies.” I offer it for what it is, and welcome your comments and suggestions for others you would recommend.

1. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature (Stanford University Press, 2024) — There are many books that try to cover our current Anthropocene predicament with a synoptic and transdisciplinary gaze. This one rises to the top of the heap due to the authors’ creative juxtapositions and insightful conceptual language, which draws sciences and humanities, histories and ontologies, together around concepts of patchiness, ferality, rupture, hotspots, scale-jumping, infrastructure building (and “unbuilding”), and varied other ways of mapping and “collaging” time, space, and change. The book is an accompaniment to the many-authored digital project Feral Atlas: The More-­Than-Human Anthropocene, which is worth spending several hours perusing. Together they make for a powerful educational punch, one aimed at resituating us within, and no longer on the (incomprehending) outside of, the processes that we are making through our lives and that we can therefore unmake and remake if we put our minds to it.

2. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (ZKM/MIT Press, 2020) — Bruno Latour edited or co-edited so many important anthologies this century, each one a little more audacious than the last, and most of them accompanying exhibitions that were equally ambitious, transdisciplinary, and boundary-breaking. Each of them — from Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (2002) and Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005), both co-edited with Peter Weibel, to Reset Modernity!, edited with Christophe Leclercq (2016), and this one, with Weibel — are worthy of close attention. Latour’s own work has also remained singularly important: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2012) served as his magnum opus, though verdicts on it remain rather mixed, while Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (1999 in its French original, 2004 in English translation) and Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017) have both retained an influence on much that has come after them. I list this volume here not just because it’s the last of the collaborative ventures and therefore the most up-to-date in its concerns, but because its notion of a “critical zone” is capacious enough to corral scientists, artists, and humanists into a different understanding of life on this planet. Framed by Latour’s notion of “landing on Earth,” or becoming “earthbound” after our society’s flirtation with a kind of disconnected globalism, Critical Zones contains a richness of valuable ideas worth working with in the years to come.

3. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015) — There’s a great need for a grand synthesis of environmental history (the history of human relations with environments), historical ecology (the historical study of ecosystemic relations in their full complexity), and political economy (the historical interplay between politics and economics) — political ecology, for short — that would make sense of the ways in which human ways of living have brought the “social” and the “natural” into different kinds of relational entanglements over time, leading to the present conjuncture with its sticky impediments for moving forward. To my mind, Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life makes the most important single contribution to this task of any book published this century. Its central idea — that “nature” and “society” are historical products whose configuration changes depending on what humans and their economic systems do — may not be original, but its ambitious synthesis of Marxist political economy and world-systems theory with ecology makes it indispensible for understanding today’s economic system, how it emerged, and how it is causally related to the systemic crisis we are currently in the midst of. (That said, the ten years since its publication call for an update that would make sense of the latest wave of capitalist overproduction, that of digital media and now AI. The book was written before Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and it shows.)

4. Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2021) — Ghosh’s The Great Derangement brought this novelist onto the stage of global literary stars articulating an ecological message. This follow-up is one of the most incisive overviews of the messy 400-year ecocultural history that leads us into the current climate precipice. In a sense, it doesn’t belong on this list, as it’s less an original contribution than a distillation of so much of what the ecocultural disciplines have learned in the past decades. With his skills as a narrator, however, Ghosh accomplishes what more scholarly authors fail to do, resulting in what is probably the most readable volume on this list. “The questions of who is a brute and who is fully human, who makes meaning and who does not,” he writes, “lie at the core of the planetary crisis.” If this insight seems puzzling to you, and even if it is simply not yet second nature to you, then I strongly recommend reading Ghosh’s tour de force from start to finish.

5. Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Duke University Press, 2008) — In 2010, I described this book as a “tremendous synthesis that places social movements — actual people doing things together to change their worlds — at the center of thinking for how the ecological-cultural dynamic is changing in our time.” Cultural anthropologist Escobar has consistently worked at clarifying the intersections between culture and ecology, from his early critiques of “developmentalism” through to his development of the notion of a “pluriversal politics,” which has become so influential in decolonial thought. For its detailed exploration of Afro-Colombian socio-ecological movements, this remains his most brilliant and satisfying volume.

6. Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Denise Ryner, Claire Tancons, Zairong Xiang, Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2022) — In his years curating art at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), and before that at KW Berlin and Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp, Anselm Franke has led some of the most audacious exhibitions and multidisciplinary projects working the intersections of politics, ecology, and culture. Animism was particularly innovative (and the HKW’s 10-year-long Anthropocene Curriculum also deserves mention in this context, though it wasn’t led by Franke). Ceremony strikes me as a kind of grand finale mega-project, a deeply thoughtful and wildly interdisciplinary exhibition and book project that takes its starting point from Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s declamatory 1984 proposal that we need to find a “ceremony” for decomposing the ontology and practice of colonial modernity, so that a new way forward for humanity could be found. It is a rich and beautiful collection full of wonders.

7. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013) — Kohn’s book brought Peircian (bio)semiotics to a wider world (which made it especially relevant to my fields of theory), but more importantly it connects the “ontological turn” of current anthropology with rigorous thinking about what a forest, a society, and communication are and how they alter the very notion of what it means to be human. Other books on the sociality of forests, fungi, plants, and other nonhumans may be much more approachable, but the stakes in Kohn’s game are higher and more satisfying, if you’re willing to do the work for it. I still highly recommend it.

8. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015) — I’ve been arguing (most recently in The New Lives of Images, but also in The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies) that understanding media, especially at this digital juncture of their global development, is crucial to any kind of societal transformation we might be able to pull off. Peters’ book is not about digital media, but it is arguably the most conceptually powerful rethinking of what media are, and how the world is essentially a mediated world. As a preparation for thinking mediatically about the world we live in, with all of the environments that mediate it for us, it is unparallelled.

9. Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin with the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016) — Haraway remains a giant in the world of cultural theory and this is arguably her most satisfying and engrossing book of the century so far. It’s rich in theoretical provocation and in ethnographic texture, and suffused with an intelligence that works its way from the midst of all the muddles and “troubles” of our time to indicate directions for movement and creative action. Its focus on the arts and on visioning or “futuring” exercises is particularly helpful in our days when, as it’s been put too often, the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism. Haraway envisions something different to both of those “ends.”

10. (tie) Toby Hemenway, The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience (Chelsea Green, 2015) — Most people today live in cities. For our world to transition from an unsustainable global economy built around fossil fuels, which underlie our food, transportation, and communication systems, to one that is much more sustainably integrated within local ecological patterns and capacities, we need to transform our cities. Permaculture — which began as a kind of unacknowledged appropriation of Indigenous agro-ecological practices — is not the answer to everything, but its core insights are essential. Of all the books published on the topic, this one is the one that (to my knowledge) is most usefully focused around transforming our cities. With sections exploring city gardening, food forests, urban water systems, local economies, and much more, it is brimming with insights on how to make cities not only more habitable, but socially and ecologically regenerative, which is crucial for any kind of human future.

10. (tie) Robert L. Thayer, Jr., Life Place: Bioregional Thought and Practice (University of California Press, 2003) — This could be considered a companion to Hemenway’s book, providing the broader regional perspective that underpins the kind of thinking that permaculture, bioregionalism, agroecology, ecovillages, and other forms of world-changing ecological praxis are aimed at. It’s over two decades old, but is still is the closest thing we have to a manual in bioregional living. If there’s anything that would likely be added were this book to be revised for the mid-2020s, it’s a chapter on collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in bioregional activities. That said, what all locally and regionally focused approaches, like this or Hemenway’s book, tend to neglect is the global scale, which is why the first several books on this list focus on that. (Their lack of the political can also be a weakness; a book like Terry Leahy’s The Politics of Permaculture attempts to address that.)

Read these eleven books and you will be pretty well informed about how we’ve gotten to where we are and what can be done about it.

Comments and suggestions welcome!

*This was corrected soon after publication when I realized that Critical Zones had been published and mentioned in the 2020 list, but did not make the top ten.

It isn’t meant to replace Immanence, though there will be overlaps and we’ll see how things develop.

The reasons to go to Substack are multiple. It’s a thriving media ecosystem that’s both reader- and writer-friendly. Some of my favorite writers commenting astutely on today’s world are there, and likely some of yours, too. At the same time, it’s good to be aware that, like any single platform — especially one that’s a privately-held, venture-backed company — there’s a certain inevitability that that ecosystem will change, likely for the worse, for reasons that are outside the control of its users. (Cory Doctorow’s take on that is appropriate, and some say it’s already started to happen with Substack.) So there’s something about spreading one’s eggs across different baskets that’s relevant here.

I’ve loved this space here, and this WordPress platform hosted by the University of Vermont (where I’m still a faculty member, now technically “emeritus” and no longer salaried), and I don’t intend to leave it behind. Its 15-year archive of thinking and writing has been helpful for me and (I’m told) for others, and I intend to keep it that way.

But it hasn’t felt like it’s been growing with me recently. The early years of Immanence were particularly exciting, because it felt like there were a lot of us — bloggers (in the philosophical blogosphere, especially) and we were interacting much more — I’m thinking of the objects versus relations “wars,” for instance (they were friendly skirmishes, really), and the cross-blog book readings of texts like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. Substack seems like the best place that offers something akin to that level of interactivity today.

Reflecting on the last 15 years, it’s clear to me that blogging — writing a regular newsletter in plain view of the public — is a great way to keep one’s thinking active, alive, and accountable. A lot of what I’ve written here has worked its way into my writing, into books and articles that can now be read elsewhere (see the “Publications” links in the right-hand sidebar), and some of the feedback I’ve received here has been helpful for it. But much of that writing has not left an obvious “real-world” product, and it’s good to keep a record of that thinking, which this space will do.

That said, the Earth will go through its revolutions, technological systems will falter and fail, records and archives will pass and open up new niches for colonization by new life forms. (Selling my own vinyl record collection was one of those moments that forced me to reckon with the passing nature of all things loved. And of course we all know that from losing people we’ve loved. Fortunately, my Whiteheadian metaphysics is good with that, as one of my favorite books of comparative philosophy, Steve Odin’s Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics makes beautifully clear.) The moment will continue turning into the next moment, and communicating and sense-making from the midst of that transitional space — prehending, to use Whitehead’s word — will remain the most important thing we ever do. Maybe all we ever do, as I argued in Shadowing the Anthropocene.

So: Immanence will remain here, and I’ll continue publishing on it the things that seem most relevant to it. (My other blog, UKR-TAZ: A Ukrainian Temporary Autonomous Zone, will also continue in its form, where you can find things directly relevant to my research in Ukraine, the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the like. The multi-author book talk on my edited anthology Terra Invicta can be found there.) And I’ll keep writing for other venues, scholarly and otherwise.

But if you want to follow my thinking closely, over the coming months and perhaps longer, I recommend that you subscribe to “Terrestri(e)alism.” The About page gives you a sense of what to expect there. If it sounds like a rephrasing of what I’ve been writing here for years, that’s exactly what it is. But a rephrasing for riding the current of our times.

The verb “transitioned” resonates in an interesting way for western viewers, who may be accustomed to hearing it in the context of trans identity discourses, in which people typically “find themselves” when they establish their chosen gender identity after years of a confusing dysphoria. In Ukraine, as it would be in many parts of the world, the “finding oneself” might happen in circumstances of war, when a choice has to be made between taking the side of good over that of evil (however these are perceived), or — as in this case — between speaking a (perceived) colonizer’s language and speaking one’s mother tongue. It also happens, more commonly perhaps, in religious contexts, when confronted with an option that comes to make sense for a newly self-proclaimed believer or “convert.”

The parallels are instructive, because they raise the question: what kind of transitions or conversions are allowed and encouraged, and which ones discouraged or foreclosed in a society? What are the circumstances that shape these options, and what is it that is called out from “within” an individual that compels that person in one direction or another? The issue appears to hinge on a choice, as if they are an individual option, but really they have to do with choice points, forks in roads, that are placed before people by their circumstances. In sociological terms, the individual’s sense of agency is always a matter of the larger social structure.

In the world ahead, we will all be faced with choice points, to be faced individually or collectively. We can all (metaphorically) keep speaking the colonizer’s language, the language of global capitalism, infinite growth, and endless consumerist enjoyment. Or we can opt for learning the language of our place, a place to shelter and maintain for the multispecies relations that make it habitable.

The form the latter takes will be the hinge around which we’ll be able to distinguish political “left” from political “right.” Will it be a language of exclusivity, where one’s own — language, culture, identity (always rooted in an imagined past) — is the only thing that counts, and keeping the other out becomes the primary strategy? (That’s where so many leaders of populist right are taking us.) Or will it be a language of eco-social solidarity, a commitment to one’s own place that is understood to be open and yet-to-be-established, and that is paralleled across regions, nations, territories, the many home-places that make up the Earth?

That’s where the emerging “ecological class antagonism” — that Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, Matthew Huber, Razmig Keucheyan, Andreas Malm, and others variously write about (and the differences, which I wrote about here, are significant) — will come. It’s also something I describe in my introduction to Terra Invicta, and its relevance to Ukraine is as acute as it is anywhere else. (I hint a bit at that in my reflections on today’s “manifesto” posted by Ukrainian intellectuals on the 34th anniversary of the 92%-in-favor referendum that confirmed Ukrainian independence.)

I’m happy to share the news that Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, the first English-language book-length anthology of wartime Ukrainian environmental humanities writing (and art), is out now — and that it’s available as a fully open access downloadable file thanks to McGill-Queen’s University Press and the Olga M. Ciupka Memorial Fund.

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes about the book that “Terra Invicta deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.” Writer Andrey Kurkov adds that “The war in Ukraine affects the ecology of nature and the ecology of consciousness throughout the world. This book is the best way to understand Ukraine today and the impact of Russian aggression on your life, no matter what country you live in.” 

The book’s comprehensive introduction contextualizes the Russo-Ukrainian war within the historical processes — of politics, economics, culture, and ecology — that made it possible, and assesses it as the kind of environmental war that (sadly) presages wars likely to come as climate change intensifies. It then introduces the remainder of the book, with its 30+ authors and artists and rich array of topics, from place-based memory and trauma, ecocultural relations with amphibians, plants, trees, and fungi, and mappings of Indigenous (Tatar) musical landscapes and wartime soundscapes, to the role of art in war, ecological “war-rewilding,” decolonization of Europe’s last remaining empire (Russia), the possibilities of international solidarities across colonial contexts, and the tensions between extractive capitalism and democracy in the “full-scale Anthropocene.” To read the Introduction, see below.

Once you’ve looked at the open access PDF of the book, you just might decide to get yourself or someone else a print copy. (Or at the very least, to recommend it to libraries.) The book is available at a 25% discount until December 31, and it’s perfect for holiday gifts. All royalties from sales of the book will be donated to Ukrainian charities until the war is over and the country’s viable reconstruction is assured. See below for ordering information.

The first online book event, featuring several of the book’s authors and moderated by Tallinn University’s professor Epp Annus, will take place on December 8, 17:00-18:30 EET (GMT+2), hosted by the RUTA Environmental Initiative and University of Tallinn’s Institute of Humanities. Further information can be found here. Register for the event here.

Further Terra Invicta book events, which will double as fundraisers for Ukrainian charities, are being planned for Vancouver (late January–early February, details TBA), New York City (March 27-28), Toronto (April 20 and 24), Montreal (April 22), and elsewhere. Please sign up here to be kept in the loop or e-mail me for details.  

The book can be ordered with the 25% discount code “MQ25” online or directly with the distributor in your area until 31 December 2025. Canada UTP Distribution: 1-800-565-9523 utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca. USA & Rest of World: Chicago Distribution Center 1-800-621-2736 orders@press.uchicago.edu. UK & Europe: Combined Academic Publishers +44(0)01423526350 enquiries@combinedacademic.co.uk.

The open-access PDF can be found here:
https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/items/11368c23-15ef-4907-a4b6-147877f62507

Below is the front matter and introductory chapter:

Director until recently of Simon Fraser University’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Am Johal is also an author, whose books include Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (2015) and the co-authored Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (2018) and O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology (2024). He is currently Chair of the Vancouver International Film Festival, Vice Chair of Greenpeace Canada, and a board member with the BC Alliance for Arts and Culture.

In preparation for the public conversation, which veered off in many directions (with a lot of questions and comments from audience members), Am sent me some questions ahead, to which I’ve written out responses. I’m sharing those here, as I think they’re helpful in elucidating both what’s in the book and a few things that go beyond it.

Here, then, is our full “print conversation” (really, a Q & A). The actual public conversation that took place at Harbour Centre, with a lot of audience participation, will feature in the podcast, which should come out in February at Below the Radar.

Images and imagination as world-making

Am Johal: You suggest that imagination is a medium through which we and others live. Could you begin by expanding on how images — and the ways we understand and interact with them — relate to imagination as a world-making force?

Adrian Ivakhiv: My argument is that imagination is a word for the world of images, and that images are a way that the world is constituted — they are relational events that create meaning through likeness or resemblance. They aren’t the only type of meaning-making events; we also make meaning through symbol systems like language; and we make meaning through inference from causal-indexical relations (we see smoke and understand “fire”). In the study of semiotics, these are the three basic kinds of signs, or meaning-making events. But images, or what C. S. Peirce, the founder of semiotics, called iconic signs, are more primary because they engage our direct perception together with that part of our cognitive-affective “hardware” that deals in memories, which makes them more direct than language. Words may include images, so that’s a bit misleading; and indexes, to use Peirce’s language, are more accurate or reliable than icons, but it takes a lot more work to parse out the indexicality of the world, whereas the world’s iconicity — its “imageability” — is immediate. We evolved to “read the signs of the world” quickly, and images are our main way of doing it.

AJ: This brings us to the book’s larger reframing of what an image is. You describe images as dynamic, living participants in our social and ecological worlds. What do you think is the biggest misconception we still hold about what images actually do today?

AI: The biggest misconception is the same misconception we have about reality: that it consists of objects in the vast container of space, and that we humans are privileged to be able to act upon some of those objects, with the objects themselves having little meaning except what we make of them. Images, in that sense, are just another kind of object that we can manipulate and make use of. From a process-semiotic perspective, images aren’t objects that are just there before us. They’re events involving the recognition of objects (which can always be misrecognition) — objects that can be visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and so on. If images aren’t the objects but the events in which an object comes to stand for something else (from somewhere else or sometime else) to someone or something — it brings something absent to presence because of what it looks like, sounds like, smells like, tastes like, or feels like — then we can see how an image builds a world by connecting past experiences to things in the present, and producing meaning through those connections. Images are world-making connectors, world-weavers.

Then the important question becomes how to relate to an image. We humans have developed various ways of relating to images, some of which have become particularly prominent — I call them “image regimes.” And we have some fundamental disagreements about where the power lies in our relationship with images, and what the relationship between those images are and the reality they may point to. For instance, for some of us, certain images are powerful or even holy, not to be tampered with (I call those “ideal-images”), but for others no images are holy; holiness doesn’t even exist (the ideal-image regime makes no sense). That’s one of the most acute kinds of problems we run into, but not the only one. Unless we understand how these different kinds of image-relations are even possible — they’re part of the fabric of the image-mediated world — we get into conflicts that we aren’t in a position to untangle because we don’t understand what they’re rooted in.

Ecological thinking and the “post-truth condition”

AJ: How does ecological thinking help us see images differently from more traditional approaches in art history or media studies?

AI: First I need to clarify that the way I use the term “ecological” is not just ecological in the scientific sense. It is that — i.e., materially sensed, perceivable and measurable, ecology as the study of objectively measurable relations between things (ecology #1) — but it’s also social (ecology #2), which is the ecology of our social and ethical relations with each other, our intersubjective relations, and it’s perceptual (ecology #3), which means it’s mediated by our sensory entanglements which include those things we call our senses, but also those extensions of our senses that we call “media.”

This tri-ecological way of understanding images helps us because it allows us to see them in their interactive, relational webs, which are always material, social, and medial-perceptual. It’s that third dimension — that in-between place of sensorially mediated, embodied interactions — which is where it all happens, where the negotiation takes place between “what will bear signs and what will not” (to quote Bruno Latour), what will be an agent, to be respected as such, and what will just be an object, a resource, a piece of the background. And that’s why I put a lot of my focus on that medial-perceptual dimension. Those ecological webs are made up of entanglements of objects, behaviors and practices, and relationships within which we get immersed and “enchanted.” The most powerful images are the ones that enchant us to such a degree that they possess us; they act through us. We become their medium.

AJ: Of course, we’re also living in a rapidly shifting media environment. With deepfakes, AI-generated imagery, and algorithmic distribution, how do you see the agency of images changing? Are images becoming more autonomous, or simply more entangled in human and technological networks?

AI: Images are becoming more autonomous in the sense that their relationships with each other are becoming thicker and more complicated — as Trevor Paglen has put it, the “overwhelming majority of images” today are made “by machines for other machines.” And it’s becoming more and more difficult for us to understand where they begin and end: who creates them, with what goal, who they belong to, what they mean, etc.

Where the scientific model of working with images — which I call the “regime of the world-picture,” the image as a copy of reality that’s constituted by causal-indexical relationships — required an awareness of the source of each part of the indexical network — with the digital image-world, that indexicality gets washed out and almost entirely lost to us. With generative AI especially, the image is no longer sourced from any indexical event: it can be created from a prompt with a high degree of randomness, of mystery really, in the sense that I can ask Gemini or Midjourney to create a certain image, and with the same prompt it will generate one image one day and a different one the next day, and there’s no way to tell why the two are different. The indexical relationships behind AI are so complicated no human brain could possibly grasp them.

So it’s not just entanglement that is increasing, but also the loss of a traceable and verifiable connection to an originary reality. We experience that as a loss of faith, a kind of cognitive loss in our perception of the “reality” basis of images — this is the so-called “post-truth” condition — even as the images themselves become more powerful in our experience, as a kind of affective gain in their emotional volume.

The practice and responsibility of artists

AJ: Your ecological framework has practical implications as well. You describe images as part of wider energetic and material flows. How might this reshape how artists, designers, or media makers think about their own work and responsibilities?

AI: Artists have always been the key shapers of the images that make up our worlds. I say that even though the notion of the artist, and the regime of the “art object” — which I call the “expression-image” — is relatively new in its widespread dissemination across a whole range of activities we call art (the art world of galleries, art schools, biennales, and so on). But the images that have shaped societies have always been somewhat constrained by their ability to travel and extend themselves spatially. Proselytizing religions, like the Christianity of colonial Spain, France, and England, had to be spread by ships, priests, and physical warfare. At the height of the world-picture regime, images spread by printing press (which was controlled by elites); and at the height of the moving-image regime, by celluloid, radio, television, electronic cables and radio transmitters and receivers (also still broadcast out from centers of power). But with the digital image-world, they come to spread not only at the speed of light, but with the multiplicational and recombinatorial frenzy that digital media makes possible.

Image-making has become both thoroughly democratized — anyone can do it — and thoroughly reshaped by the algorithmic channeling of various structuring forces, including what’s been called “surveillance capitalism” (the capitalization of online behavioral data), cultural-political information warfare, celebrity-focused spectacle, memetic propagation, and so on. Credentials are no longer important in these domains; what’s important is the ability to dominate the attention economy. The key movers now aren’t artists, politicians, or movie stars but “influencers.” Trump is an influencer extraordinaire. Musk is an influencer who happens to have the power to shape the algorithms for a lot of other people. Wealth and influence go hand in hand, as they always have, but now that relationship is turbocharged by the infrastructure of digital media, the platform economy, and increasingly by artificial intelligence.

Maybe the first responsibility of artists, within this new world, is to recognize that the art you make is not something for yourself (which is trivial), but is something that can contribute to building memetic, narrative, and imagistic alliances within a world that’s being contested by rival imaginaries, with their visions of what’s possible and what isn’t. Some of them build on fear and offer the promise of a return to the “ideal-images” of imagined pasts — “make America great again” (white, Christian, etc.), “make Russia great again,” “make India Hindu again,” and so on. Others do the hard work of envisioning habitable relations encompassing a much broader constituency of humans and nonhumans living together in multispecies ecologies that are materially sustainable, socially just, and perceptually enlivening. If you’re not part of working toward that kind of broader vision, if your art is just about yourself, then it can sink with the trivialities of the art world…

Afterlives (and futurities) of images

AJ: One of the memorable ideas in the book is that images have “trajectories” and “afterlives.” Could you share an example of an image whose afterlife surprised you, or one that illustrates the kind of transformations you find most meaningful?

AI: One of the artists I write most about is Hilma af Klint, the early twentieth century abstractionist whose work was completely unknown practically until this century. The reasons for her rediscovery — or really just discovery, and when it was shown at the Guggenheim in 2018, it broke all records — is not just because she was a woman abstractionist doing all the things that the famous men did — Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, František Kupka, and others — at least the artistic things, not so much playing the networks of the art world as they did. So feminism could pick up on her today. But it’s also because she was doing them not for “art” but for what we today call “spirituality.” She was responding to “commissions” given to her from the “higher worlds.” It turns out that so were they, too — to one degree or another, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, and the majority of the leading artists of the early twentieth century were either Theosophists or Anthroposophists or dabbled in Spiritualism or something of the sort. They were reading, and in some cases (like Kandinsky) writing about how color — or sound, in the case of musicians (like Scriabin or Holst) — had real power. They believed in it, a bit like the early Soviet constructionist artists believed they could make a new world through art.

Both Kandinsky and af Klint believed they could change the world through images that corresponded to cosmic truths that represented the harmonies of color and nature, truths about evolution (physical and spiritual), in Klint’s case about gender complementarity, and so on. All of that got whitewashed by art historians like Clement Greenberg and the hegemony of MOMA and the post-war “art world” that saw it all as quasi-religious, maybe even proto-Nazi superstition that didn’t warrant anyone’s attention. In the end, af Klint thought the world wasn’t ready yet for her paintings, so she asked that they be kept secret for at least twenty years after her death.

I connect her work to some of the futurisms of recent decades — Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, and others — all of which I see as moving well beyond the notion of art as individual expression toward something that is both expressive and ideal, a combination of the expression-image of individual creativity and the ideal-image, which is the religious, holy image, but in these cases an ideal-image that comes not from the past but from the future, something that’s never existed before because we’re still making our way toward it. Actually, it comes from a sense of long-range, multi-generational movement between the ancestral and the futural, between ancestralities (which are multiple) and futurities (which can also be multiple). I call it the “creative-image,” and my book ends with an exploration of some variations of it, including in music and in poetry (especially the poetry of Alexis Pauline Gumbs). 

So af Klint’s work was a surprise to me, but also a surprise to everyone who saw it at the Guggenheim, or the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2013, or the Tate Modern a couple of years ago, where I first saw it. And it’s a genuine “afterlife.”

Navigating the image-world: “adequate images” and accountable infrastructures

AJ: Many people feel overwhelmed by the volume of images that surround us. Does your framework offer ways for individuals or communities to navigate this image-saturated world more consciously or ethically?

AI: My hope is that we can better navigate the image-saturated world by having a better understanding of what images can and can’t do. So I point toward art that can move us, cognitively and affectively, toward a better world. But I also point to some limitations of the art that doesn’t quite get us there, or that gets lost along the way. For instance, while I love what Ed Burtynsky and his collaborators are trying to do in their Anthropocene Project — and I agree with them that if you just aren’t aware of the scale of the human transformation of the Earth, you need to see those images — I also think they run up against limitations because they’re working with older principles of environmental communication via the scientific world-picture and the expressive sublime, and those kinds of pictures get a little washed out in the digital image-world where we’ve seen them all before in movies, sci-fi flicks, apocalyptic films and the like.

I compare their work with John Akomfrah’s beautiful multi-screen video works Purple and Vertigo Sea, which work with a much more nuanced understanding of what the Anthropocene is — with its thorough entanglement with the last five hundred years of colonialism, slavery, resource extraction, but also travel, tourism, homelessness, romantic nature spectacle, the hopes and dreams and illusions of modernity and all of the rest. There’s a quality of feeling that Akomfrah gets at that is more mixed, more ambivalent, and more probing than Burtynsky’s extractionist sublime. But its limitation is that Akomfrah works in the art world — in galleries and museums — and we really need to get those kinds of rich imagistic flows from our interaction with images in digital worlds (which I think is possible).

AJ: If images are actors rather than objects, that raises ethical questions. What responsibilities do we have toward the images we create, circulate, or interact with? I want to reference a quote you use from Werner Herzog. He says that a civilization without “adequate images” is doomed. How does this idea connect to your project, and what might it mean for cultivating more adequate images for our time?

AI: Herzog has a way with words (as we see in that quote), and of course a way with images: he’s given us some memorable images “for our time” (I wrote about a few of these in Ecologies of the Moving Image). I agree with him that we need more adequate images, which are always also adequate narratives — storylines lodged within images that embody an understanding of where we’re coming from and where we’re heading — our histories and ancestralities, the trajectories that we’re on, but also the openings they might offer for deviating from their logical, inertial end-points and toward other possibilities. Envisioning alternative futurities is perhaps the most important project for art today, and it requires images that can motivate us to act against the predominant tendencies of the art world, the political world, the algorithms of digital media, etc. A lot of artists recognize that, and it’s heartening to see the ways in which environmental and climate justice issues have been taken up, not just through the tired old white-environmentalist lenses, but through decolonial lenses, by artists in recent years. But we need a lot more than that.

And one of the key leverage points is the establishment of much better regulations for digital media, for social media, and for artificial intelligence. It seems very difficult today to be talking about reining in the media industries, at a time when politics is so discouraging, so polarized, and the world ruled by neo-imperialist alliances of right-wing populists and tech overlords. But there’s actually a lot of common ground to be found across the political spectrum once you start talking about the risks to humanity from the new digital tools of the tech titans — AI, the addictive and attention-eroding qualities of social media, the vast profits being made and huge bets being placed on our futures, and so on.

So yes, we need more adequate images for our time, but we also need to understand how the environment in which all of our images move and function is being reshaped in ways that aren’t publicly accountable or even understandable, that are geared toward mega-profits and new imperialisms, and how this — like every wave of extractionist expansion in history — has to be reined in very quickly. 

In that sense, The New Lives of Images is both a call for new kinds of images and a call for understanding and managing the infrastructures within which images take on these very strange and different lives, lives that change us in the process.    

I want to share two sets of thoughts here: one on academic relationships with Chinese universities, and the second on the politics of media.

The big picture

On the first, China is far too massive a country for anyone to become expert in it from just a few short visits. But I do get asked if academics traveling to China aren’t lending its government more credibility than it deserves, and I have two responses to that. The first is that whatever miniscule “credibility” visiting China might give its government is far outweighed by the actual relationships built with people doing good and important work. I think that anyone who’s been engaging with Chinese scholars (or, I assume, with Chinese business people, artists, activists, et al.) understands that, and understands that this kind of cross-border cooperation undergoes its “freezes” and “thaws”; they are part of the weather systems to be navigated, just as U.S. universities today are navigating the rather different landscape for knowledge generation created by the Trump administration.  

The second is a longer term view. The transformation undergone by China in less than five decades is remarkable, in some ways seeming even miraculous. From the political upheavals, large-scale violence, famines, and economic stagnation of the 1960s and early 1970s, the country catapulted itself into an economic powerhouse, and its cities and transportation networks have become beacons of modernity in practically every respect. In the process, over half the population has become middle class by global standards, and China’s poverty levels were reduced from constituting over 40% of the world’s (ultra) poor in 1991 to near zero today.

You don’t have to be a fan of the Chinese Communist Party to recognize that much of the credit for that transformation can hardly avoid going to its leadership. How to distribute it within that is another question. Deng Xiaoping is likely to get a disproportionate share of it, but the Party is a complicated apparatus whose inner workings, meritocratic or otherwise, will always remain somewhat mysterious.

The shortcomings of China’s government today don’t seem to be in a different league from the shortcomings of many other governments. Its pandemic response was problematic. Youth unemployment is high, and China’s geopolitical role is disappointing to those of us who care about democracy, national self-determination, and the like. How much more disappointing they are from the disappointments we have with the U.S. under Trump, for instance, is a relative question. China’s development of a surveillance state may be particularly draconian, but the mixture of surveillance capitalism (of the Googles, Amazons, et al) and tech oligarchy (of the Musks, Thiels, Ellisons, et al) that’s come to dominate in the West is not exactly that much more comforting.

From an environmental perspective, that China’s slogans about “ecological civilization” are largely just slogans can only disappoint those of us who’d like them to be much more. But they are still better than what many western governments have arrived at. The big difference there — and it’s a crucial one — is that western nongovernmental organizations take up the slack from our own governments’ failings. But something similar can and does occur in China. It’s just less visible and more vulnerable, which makes supporting it all the more important. 

If all of that sounds like bothsidesism, I don’t intend it that way: the differences matter, which is why the role of monitoring organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International remains important, and why censorship should still be a primary interest of ours. It’s worth acknowledging that there are few leaders on the global political stage who unproblematically represent the interests of humanity writ large; they all deserve criticism. There are places where that criticism isn’t allowed, and others where such criticism is deployed toward echo-chambered confusion. I prefer the latter, but neither is ideal. I can also understand where the Chinese penchant for censorship and the maintenance of stability is coming from. Knowing Chinese history is helpful for that, as is understanding the lessons Chinese officials might have taken from the unraveling of the Soviet Union.

The Great Firewall

That brings us to the second theme: the politics of media. It’s a topic I write a lot about, and I want to report here specifically on my internet experience. For those familiar with travel in China, there’s probably not much new here, but I’m sharing my observations in case they’re useful.

Unlike some people I know, who use non-Google alternative browsers like DuckDuckGo, I’m Google-dependent. Whatever browser I use (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox), I tend to google things. It keeps me plugged into western surveillance capitalism (with some limitations I can opt into with effort), but it’s very convenient and allows me to access as much of the internet as I need to. In China that isn’t possible. Google, as well as a lot of western news sites and other sites I rely on for my work, are either completely inaccessible or only accessible with difficulty, due to what’s known as The Great Firewall. I’ve been told you can work around that firewall using VPNs, but I tried doing that with Nord VPN (one of the better ones that’s supposed to work here, which I’ve used before) and did not have much success. Only by avoiding hotel wifis and other such systems and relying on roaming from my Canadian mobile carrier (Freedom Mobile) was I able to work around the Great Firewall. (That itself is a bit surprising.) I suspect that Chinese citizens who wish to access western news sites and the like have ways to do that, but I’m not sure what they are.

One of the few browsers I know that works in China but isn’t Chinese in origin is Bing China (cn.bing.com), Microsoft’s browser that works in compliance with Chinese internet restrictions. While in China, I asked it “What is The Great Firewall?” Here’s part of what it told me. (It appears to be an AI answer, with sources; I’ve taken out the latter, though they are informative.) 

“The Great Firewall, officially known as the Golden Shield Project, is a comprehensive internet censorship and surveillance system implemented by the Chinese government. It was launched in the late 1990s and has evolved into a complex network designed to regulate internet traffic in and out of China. The primary aim of the Great Firewall is to maintain strict control over information, ensuring that online content aligns with the government’s cultural and political ideologies.

“The Great Firewall operates by blocking access to specific websites and filtering content based on keywords and phrases. It employs a combination of automated systems and human intervention to monitor and censor online activities. The system can block popular international platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, forcing users to rely on domestic alternatives like Baidu, Weibo, and WeChat. 

“Content Filtering: The firewall uses sophisticated algorithms to detect and block content that is deemed sensitive or inappropriate, including topics related to human rights, political dissent, and historical events like the Tiananmen Square incident.

“Slow Connections: Even when websites are not blocked, connections to servers outside China are often intentionally slowed down, making them difficult to use. 

“Impact on Internet Users: The Great Firewall significantly shapes the online experience for Chinese citizens, creating a unique digital ecosystem that is heavily regulated. While it restricts access to foreign information, it also fosters the growth of local tech companies, which dominate the Chinese digital landscape. 

“Bypassing the Great Firewall: Despite the restrictions, many Chinese internet users employ VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and other methods to bypass the Great Firewall and access blocked content. While the use of VPNs is technically illegal, enforcement against foreign travelers is generally rare, allowing them to access the unrestricted internet. 

“In summary, the Great Firewall of China is a powerful tool for internet regulation, reflecting the government’s desire to control information flow and maintain social stability. Its impact is profound, affecting not only the availability of information but also the development of the internet within China.”

I have to agree with Bing China that The Great Firewall deters people in China from accessing “unwanted” web sites, but doesn’t stop them completely. At first this is a drag for visitors: for those of us used to using Google or one of the other main search engines as their default (and that includes Duckduckgo et al), in whatever browser you use (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, et al.), you feel locked out almost entirely. So you develop workarounds. 

That Bing China tells us all of this is helpful. It even refers to the “Tiananmen Square incident” (the euphemism “incident” being its workaround for what western sources accurately call a “massacre“). Comparing the level of detail you get from Wikipedia’s entry on the topic, however, gives us a sense of what is missed from behind the Great Firewall. (And I can’t speak to what level of information is available in Chinese, as I don’t read the language.)

The lesson for the rest of us, I think, is this: It is possible to avoid western online surveillance capitalism, but the Chinese form of the alternative, an alternative The Internet Society astutely labels a “national intranet,” is unsatisfactory. I support the idea of regulation and management of the internet to democratically accountable public ends. That applies to artificial intelligence as well — in fact, working toward global regulations and public accountability on artificial intelligence is one of the most important things we ought to be working on right now. That AI technologies are ramping up the production of fossil fuels is only one piece of a bigger problem, which defangs all global efforts to rein in climate change (as COP 30 is showing). And unfortunately, it seems that the only place where there are serious and somewhat successful efforts to take on these tasks of digital governance is Europe, and not without challenges.

The world is still catching up to the workings of digital capitalism, and experiments in national (e.g., Chinese) or supranational (e.g., EU-level) regulation are warranted. Let’s learn from them and pursue global standards the only way we can: through policy proposals, lobbying, and communicating the idea that we really do need a global revolution in the means of information. It’s the one thing that might save us from the disastrous trajectory we’re still dead set on.

Recall that Trump today is the most powerful man on Earth, supported by the most powerful army and backed by the most powerful set of technological oligarchs ever assembled. And that yesterday’s protests, estimated at 5 to 7 million, were the second largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. (Earth Day 1970 still holds the record for the first, while the George Floyd protests topped yesterday’s over multiple days.)

Interpreting the video is not so difficult. By imagining himself as King Trump flying over protesters and dumping poop on their heads, the president of the United States is presenting a juvenile-delinquent’s regressive-infantile fantasy of white-male rebellion against the social order that, in normal times, would be able to contain it. It’s a naughty little boy’s poop fantasy, one that suggests that a pooping toddler, Donnie, along with his enabler friends — Jimmy D, Stevie, Russie, Lonnie & the silicon poopers, et al — just don’t wanna grow up.

But they also want it both ways: they want the transgressive jouissance of the boy-rebel AND to inherit the kingdom of the patriarch. They want their poopy-colored chocolate cake and the poopy-farty joy of spreading it all over the nursery walls. They want to break the rules and to force others to follow their rules.

The questions this raises are questions for all of us: How did we allow a political-economic system to emerge that would enable such a person to become the most powerful person in the most powerful nation on Earth? And, equally importantly, what in his fantasy appeals to so many people who support his rule?

If Trump were an isolated aberration in U.S. history, we could limit these questions to the U.S. itself, but he isn’t. We’ve had premonitions of it in Reagan, G. W. Bush, and others. Worldwide, Putin represents something similar, a patriarch-rebel’s middle-finger to the social order of the (imagined) “liberal West.” (We needn’t go back to Hitler and Mussolini, though the parallels aren’t lost on the Americans who protested yesterday.) Farage, Bolsonaro, Berlusconi, Orbán, and countless others, not to mention Musk and his fellow Silicon Valley man-boys, all represent variations of the same fantasy.

I actually think watching the video is helpful for the rest of us to see, so that we can let the message sink in:

https://1a-1791.com/video/fwe2/89/s8/2/u/u/X/r/uuXrz.caa.mp4?b=1&u=ummtf

This is because the questions it raises are significant psycho-spiritual questions that humanity needs to answer if we are to progress beyond the current stalemate of climate helplessness, authoritarian defensiveness, and looming ecological disaster. If we can help these man-boys grow up — first, by reining them in and, second, by demonstrating that a more dignified kind of humanity can be both more satisfying and more constructive — then we might have a fighting chance. If we cannot, then our time on this Earth may be nearing its gloomy end.

There are reasons not to want to grow up, but the trumpniks’ reasons aren’t them. Perhaps Tom Waits should have the last word on them: