(But do we still say "Save the Planet" these days? Can someone come up with a better three-word slogan?)

And then there's GP2 (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a.k.a. the Pacific Trash Vortex), and the artists who are out there now. This from Midway Atoll, near the apex of the North Pacific Gyre:

Folks, do something. First about greenhouse gases, then about the impending ocean aquacalypse, and global poverty, and everything else. Enjoying every minute of it while you're doing it.

The Speculative Realist blogosphere has been abuzz over the relationship between ontology and politics. Nick Srnicek's post at Speculative Heresy - and the many comments on it - provide a good entry point to this discussion. Nick has wisely redrawn his initial arguments in ways that represent the counter-arguments quite well, so that both (or all) sides seem smarter and more clear-headed coming out of the process than going into it -- which is what good philosophizing should be about.

The key, as he presents it, is to define politics in a viable and useful way: is it just about relations between humans and other humans (as he first assumed), or is it about ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ ‘the space of the im/possible’ (a Derridean formulation that needs more clarification, so see Nick's elaboration on it), or something else. Nick argues that "if we’re not careful, everything becomes politics, and nothing gets changed. Art becomes intrinsically political. Ineffective protests become political (rather than spectacle). Writing blog posts becomes political! Politics – if it is to mean anything, and if it is to escape the nihilism and apoliticism that Nina rightly criticizes – must have a narrower definition than these neutered conceptions of the political."

I agree with Nick that the definition of 'politics' should not be fully subsumed within the definition of 'art' (or 'philosophy' or religion' or 'science' or 'nature' or anything else) -- losing the distinctiveness of each of these terms renders the world less distinct and gives us a weaker grasp on things. But art, philosophy, etc. can still be political, and identifying overlaps between these categories can do important work for us.

Politics, to my mind, is about relationality -- ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ etc. -- but it doesn't just describe that relationality; it affects it. Something becomes political to the extent that it effects change in relations, and specifically in power relations -- that is, to the extent that it opens up, closes down, or somehow reorients or reconfigures capacities (one's own and/or others') for acting and for effecting change in the world.

This seems circular, but I'm trying to be consistent here with a process-relational ontology. To say that 'politics' is about 'effecting change in the ways change can be effected' is to render politics open in a world that is itself open. If voting cannot effect change, then it is not (any longer) political; or rather it is negatively political to the extent that it closes down the possibility for change, for instance, by creating the illusion that one is making change when one isn't. Politics, by this definition, consists of those adjustments, negotiations, and struggles by which we reconfigure power in the world (where power is not just 'power over' but power-to, power-with, etc.). This can be done through art or philosophy, i.e. through the expression or conceptual formulation of new or different ways of relating, to the extent that these then affect actual relations in the world. But it is not identical with them.

And it can be not only between humans, since humans aren't the only entities acting within a shared world. But humans have been pretty effective at changing others' capacities for acting on their worlds, so politics - cosmopolitics, in Stengers' terms - should today be about the nonhuman as well as the human .

Also published at Indications.

Having just written a piece for Environmental Communication about the promises and pitfalls of cognitive science-based approaches to communicating about issues like climate change, I can't help commenting on this video and blog post that arrived this morning on my blog reader from identity campaigning, re-posted from Cognitive Policy Works. The piece both captures and fails to capture salient issues in this debate...

The author, Joe Brewer, gets it right in arguing that the video successfully applies the following "lessons" from cognitive science:

1) That our thinking works in visual and embodiment-based metaphors: Yes, the video employs the graphic physical embodiment of such metaphors portrayed through movement, gesture, dress, etc.

2) That it "makes climate change sexy": Yes, it does this through the way it elicits, solicits, and interpellates the viewer in a process of desire, a directional build-up whereby we want to "finish the job" of stripping the supermodel. It's left up to us to do that in our imagination. It's now in our hands, like a video-game joystick. (Take that where you will...) This point is made by Brewer's second ("sexy") and fourth (image schemas) arguments. (The latter, his "balance" and "source-path-goal" schemas, are a fancy way of saying that the metaphors are based in the capacities of the body -- for movement toward a goal, for balance, etc.)

3) That it's effective marketing. Indeed. At 160,000 views as I write, it's now had 50,000 more views since he wrote his piece.

But his point that it "deconstructs the fashion industry" is wishful thinking on Joe's part. It plays along with that industry, adding fuel to its workings. (Underwear ads are just as much a part of the industry as are ads for jeans and fur coats, and provoking viewers' desires to see naked bodies doesn't take anything away from clothing manufacturers' ability to sell those bodies clothes.) It adds to the normalization of a certain body image for women: all the models are unhealthily tooth-pick thin women, and all follow the script of how sexy women are supposed to look at their audience of unseen voyeurs. (And did anyone else notice that the more they strip, the more they look 15 years old?) Of course, there's nothing to stop others from doing alternative versions of this featuring non-white models, male strippers, transvestites, or anything else -- which is the argument of the pro-porn feminists, the green fashionistas, et al.

But another thing that strikes me is that the final take-home verbal message -- "If you want to see 350, our natural state, you have to get your politicians to act now" (emphasis added) -- is not conveyed in a visually or metaphorically effective way. When it comes to graphically embodying any kind of action (other than stripping, or being stripped), our cognitive (embodied, visual, metaphorical) mind is left at the door.

The first text comment below the video when I watched it was dagrimreefah's "This media cartel sure is doing a great job on all of you livestock" -- which is probably intended as a witty interjection of climate denialism, but there's a more general point that could be made with that. A quick glance at the rest of the comments tells us a few interesting things:

(1) Most of them refer to the physiques of the models (some of them, wisely, asking to see more -- not less clothing, mind you, but just more healthy flesh covering their bones);

(2) Of those that refer to the science of climate change, a large number deny it and/or politicize it with anti-Obama rhetoric (or with critiques of his compromises); and

(3) Not a single one seems to get the metaphor of "supermodels" being both the women displayed and the ways -- the only ways -- in which we actually know about climate change itself and the role "350 parts per million" plays in it.

Climate change models are highly sophisticated, complex pieces of science that deserve a bit more discussion. Riffing on that, however, would take away from the project of making hegemonic ("common-sensifying") the message about climate change. But I would argue that part of making that message broader is playing up its science (just to raise awareness of how we know about climate change) and, secondly, playing up its ethics and politics: its potential (and already claimed) victims, its costs, and the vested interests on both sides ("old energy" on one, new entrepreneurialism on the other).

Okay, I'm asking too much of a simple 90-second ad. But discussing the ad seems useful, even if it contributes to the viral spread of something I'm ambivalent about...

I loved Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, so I've compiled a list of some useful online resources about the film, book, and author (mostly for my own sake, so I can easily access them if and when I might get around to writing more about it). Just to summarize what I like most about the book and the film:

- Its existential realism: play, fun, mischief, friendship, love, loss, fear, loneliness, change, beginnings and endings... all there, in a kind of holistic mix that brings them all into reflective perspective.

- Its extended-family cameraderie/communalism: Max's "wild things" are a social network of flawed but hearty characters, kinda like reality. And they like to pile on top of each other.

- Its valorizing of the imagination as a place to play (and work) things out, to figure out one's emotions & responses to things, a place for practice (in the sense of preparing for reality, but also in the Buddhist sense of practice being everything).

- That they eat their kings (at least up until Max comes along). Kings need to know their place!

- Max's performance is great.

- Finally, there's the East European Jewishness of the characters (or call it their Italianness, their Slavicity, whatever) -- I mean that quality of being emotionally and bodily there, present, expressive, close to the surface but resonant in the depths, which can be a troubling thing for those not used to it, but which can be lovely. In the film, this is in the the facial, bodily, and emotional expressivity of the acting (if animatronically enhanced puppet/costume/creatures can be said to act). There's a soulfulness to these characters that stays with you long after Max leaves the island.

"The creatures spend their days and nights ambling, flopping in and around the forest and seaside (and into each other), averting direct confrontation with dropped sidelong glances and turnings away, shyly or defensively signaling affection or hurt in breathy, nasal, barely enunciated speech. [...] Jonze seems to have spent the same obsessive energy on getting James Gandolfini to give him the right quietly nasal delivery of lines like "Oh, hi" or "What?" as D. W. Griffith and his team of artisans expended on the reconstruction of Babylon for Intolerance."

I realize there are at least two critiques of the story worth considering. The first is the narrative/psycho-political critique that sees it as reintegrating the child's rebelliousness into a new compliance with the adult order (he does come home, after all, with a seeming willingness to conform). As Kenneth Kidd puts it in Making American Boys, the story makes wildness utterly safe; it's a story of "managed wildness." But my hunch is that this reading overplays this "safeness," since kids do have to grow up (i.e. integrate into the adult world) and both the book and the film, in their effects, valorize the wild things in a way that renders them available for the child as a resource to be drawn on as he or she grows up. (Or am I too much a product of my ego-psychology-as-taken-for-granted time? What would Deleuze & Guattari say? Work with the wild things, become-wild, but not as a prelapsarian reversion back to childhood; rather as a synthesis and integration.)

The second is the post-colonial critique that claims the story reiterates the colonialist trope of the white boy-man adventurer journeying out to tame the wild and (racially) colored jungle primitives and all that. Pushing this interpretation too far, though, would probably sound silly even to the least Euro-American of audiences -- but see Shaddock below for a good case of this argument.

Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak

Richard Gottlieb on WTWTA

Fitzsimmons et al visual literacy analysis
(I think that analyzing Jonze's film using their methodology would show some interesting differences between the book and the film; e.g., in the film Max is treated less like a "king" and more as an equal, a "buddy" or interesting newcomer related to playfully and with interest, but not with too much deference)

Shaddock article (postcolonial critique of the story)

Sendak interview with Bill Moyers

Newsweek interviews

Maria Lassen-Seger's thesis on metamorphs in childrens literature

But a few things worth mentioning both concern economics:

First, the very pleasant surprise of Elinor Ostrom being awarded a Nobel Prize for it. (The other surprise Nobel I'll leave uncommented upon...) Ostrom is a political scientist whose work on the commons is central to reconceptualizing the human capacity to manage commonly held resources. Her work (along with that of many colleagues) has dealt the death blow to Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" scenario, with its ornery assumption that unless we privatize or bring in the heavy hand of government, humans will destroy their environment inevitably, incessantly, and repeatedly, out of some kind of death drive (or maybe birth drive, an inability to control our own reproduction). That's a simplification, of course, intended provocatively, but it still gets a little maddening to see how captivated students get by the elegant simplicity of Hardin's apocalyptic tale, while being much less interested in the messy complexities of real life as shown by painstaking fieldwork and careful analysis. Ostrom's work shows that commons can be, and often have been, successfully managed -- it just takes the right kind of collective institutions (appropriately scaled, manageable and participatory, with clearly understood responsibilities, etc.). Here's the Nobel committee's justification for their decision, a recent article of Ostrom's from Science for those with institutional subscriptions, and some blog discussions on the topic.

And second, the seismic shifts starting to take place in the field of economics, of which Ostrom's Nobel is one indicator, Paul Krugman's recent NY Times Magazine piece How Did Economists Get it So Wrong? is another, and the growing prominence of behavioral economics is a third. The latter is being incorporated into policy making in the US, as I've written about before, especially now that Cass Sunstein has been confirmed as Obama's regulatory "czar" (he who has been under fire from Glenn Beck for, well, does it matter?). This piece from Britain's funky Prospect Magazine provides more news about how it is also shaping public policy in the U.K.

(Where, though, are our buddies the ecological economists? They need to be taking this opportunity to leap to the forefront of economic debate as well. (I ought to prod my colleagues up the street at the Gund Institute eco-eco think-tank to see what they have to say...)

The idea of the commons is central to Ostrom's work and, incidentally, is also at the heart of Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's third and final installment of their much loved / drooled over / berated (hopefully not in equal measure) Empire trilogy. (Are they the George Lucas of sociopolitical theory, or the Darth Vader?) Following up on Multitude, this one's titled Commonwealth. They are the inspirational writers of the Spinozan (post-Marxist) left, and I'm eager to see where they've taken things (despite the weaknesses of the previous volumes, as outlined, for instance, by some of the articles here).

Re-Public put out a very nice special issue on the commons a while back, though it focuses more on the technological commons than the ecological ones, and the issues faced by the two are not always the same. I would also recommend Re-Public's environmental justice issue, and Steven Shaviro's (and others') more recent analyses of the economic crisis. And see On the Commons for more of this kind of thing.

Before Ken Burns' 6-part, 12-hour series on the national parks was aired, a perceptive article by the LA Times' Scott Timberg warned that it might be greeted by "sharp knives." Ten years in the making, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, finally came to our television screens last week, and so far no sharp knives seem to have been drawn. But there have been blunt forks poking into the meat and leaving large parts of the six-course meal undigested on the plate, its servings a bit too super-sized for easy consumption. (There are, of course, the stealth knives and box-cutters of right-wing bloggers, who criticize the series for its NPR liberalism, communism, paganism, and whatever else, but so far the jabs have been mostly off the mark, and few and far between.)

The US national park system would seem to make for an ideal subject for the Burns treatment -- a treatment Apple has captured, at least in part, on its iPhoto program as the "Ken Burns Effect." Timberg describes the Burns style as a "combination of a deep, authoritative male voice, pan-and-zoom camera work over sepia-toned photographs, period music and extravagant claims about American exceptionalism." The Washington Post's Tim Page has less charitably called Burns' style an "unreflected populist Hallmark-ese," a "strange mixture of New Deal and New Age." The latter was said in reference to Burns' "Jazz" series, with its idea that improvisation was an integral element of the American spirit, but it could easily also be said about National Parks.

But there's something to Burns' claim about improvisation: one finds that improvisational spirit in the pragmatism of the country's best philosophers (John Dewey, William James, et al) and in the poetry of Whitman, the Beats, and the nature romanticism of Thoreau and Muir. All of which is another way of saying that progressivism, the very backbone of the American conservation movement (the national parks being one wing of that, the national forests being another), is very American, and those who forget that -- like today's rabid Republican right -- are not nearly as American as they would like to think.

Critics have so far identified the predictable weaknesses in Burns' treatment: his over-reliance on talking heads and overdrawn narratives (along with the series' overstated subtitle), his folksy mandolin soundtracks, which drone on a bit too long, and the wearying 12-hour length of it all. Variety rather sourly calls it "tediously exhaustive," "an act of supreme vanity, stretching so far beyond the topic's weight as to strain and finally snap the thread of goodwill he has developed," and, commenting on the quasi-religious reverence that exudes from every frame, expects that some viewers will fall asleep in the same way that churchgoers do during a long sermon.

Time's James Poniewozik notes that the Burns/Dayton Duncan prose is overlaid with "one spectacular money shot after another—not pans of sepia photographs, but glaciers and glopping lava flows and glittering stalactites and bison trudging through snow drifts. It is enough to give a nature lover a petrified woodie" (take that, Ken!). "I had to wonder," he continues, "watching all this gorgeously shot nature porn, whether the goal of National Parks wasn't in part to give PBS its own answer to Discovery's Planet Earth, the amazing nature miniseries whose staggering footage stole public TV's thunder and was a critical and commercial hit. In this, National Parks can't quite compete—it has a limited choice of subjects, for starters, whereas Planet Earth had, well, Earth."

The New York Times' Mike Hale enjoys the early episodes, with their "story of how the park system was born out of the pantheistic response of people like Muir to the newly discovered wonders of Yosemite and Yellowstone and of the men and women who nurtured the system and protected it against the forces of logging, mining, grazing and unbridled tourism." After that, though, the story loses some of its urgency and focus and leaves viewers with "the repetitive flow of lofty, often misty verbiage."

But most critics also wax effusively about its magnificent camerawork and the dexterity with which Burns assembles it all. Gauging critical reception, Metacritic gives it a respectable, if not overwhelming, 76 so far -- a B+ (see the links there for more reviews).

My own viewing of it is probably not that different from that of many viewers. I managed to watch portions of three episodes and let my DVR record the rest for future viewing at an undisclosed time (if ever; I don't know how most people can watch 12 hours of television in a given working week, let alone watch a single program for that many hours). But what I did see impressed me with the quality of its cinematography and the scope of its narrative. The series seems intended to be a PBS instant classic -- beautifully shot, exhaustively documented, and thoroughly supported by historians and commentators.

At the same time, it’s so old-school that I doubt it would keep the attention of my students' generation. It's all talking-head historians, magisterial shots of nature (which it does wonderfully, but Planet Earth did better), and seamlessly soundtracked with the kinds of soothing folky grooves that will wear thin as the folks who like them die off one by one. There were plenty of white males waxing expertly and eloquently, but also some women, a few African-Americans and Native Americans and other ethnics (like the Japanese-American family of a park-loving artist interned during during WW2), and references to Buffalo soldiers and to Native Americans being evicted in the making of some parks. Some of these segments went on too long and seemed a little strained -- the result of a self-conscious effort at inclusiveness -- but, all in all, they were among the series' achievements: it’s not a revisionist history but just a gently, and usefully, amended one.

I also couldn't resist comparing it with the films it aims to replace, like the American Visions episode “Wilderness and the West”, or the 1992 “Wilderness Idea” (about the conflict over between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot over Hetch Hetchy) where Muir’s voice was more rough-edged and obviously Scottish, while here it's toned-down into a warm, wise, and friendly American baritone.

But sitting through a 12-hour history lesson in which the viewer is talked at by experts -- and which ends, unsatisfyingly, before the Reagan era (still prehistory, as far as my students are concerned) -- is not the way (young) people learn these days. So the question I would ask is: what are the best ways to use this series (and its web site, etc.)? How could the themes that remain relevant today — democracy, the role of government, the evolution of environmental advocacy, etc. -- be brought out better? Had Burns taken that kind of more engaged, topical and thematic approach to it rather than trying to re-present the chronological history of parks, would its substance be more engaging, more bound to trigger the unleashing of those sharp knives? Or could the narrative at least be broken up more, even in the way that Planet Earth peppered its episodes with those live-action “here’s how we did it” clips? And maybe I'm also wanting more ecology and less parks, those frozen monuments to a pristine nature that never existed (not that I believe that take on them, but I think the debate -- and Bill Cronon at least alluded to it -- is worth having).

One thing I did find quite interesting is the way the parks movement is unabashedly characterized as a kind of civil religion -- the epitome of American nature religion, as Jason at pagan blog The Wild Hunt perceptively notes. From the Deism of some of the "founding fathers" through the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau to Muirian pantheism, nature becomes more and more a religious virtue as American history matures -- though, as always, it's pretty directly related to the thrashing of nature at the hands of industry. Some of the sharper knives of the series' critics should no doubt come from those who would advocate wise use (in the real sense of the word, not in the greenwashed and astroturfed "movement" sense) and appreciation of wilderness over its preservation and reverence, at least to the extent that the series implicitly favored the latter (which is the sense I got from what I saw and the reviews I've read). (But is this country prepared for a respectful debate about the virtues of pantheism? Someday, maybe...)

And the interaction between this "nature" -- all pristine, beautiful, and always somewhere out there -- and ecology , in all its metabolic complexities, remains the topic of a history that will likely never be made into a Ken Burns documentary. Jason goes on to muse that

"we’ve come a long way from the nature-loving hunter-conservationism of Roosevelt, and his party is more often the party of “drill, baby, drill”. Will “National Parks” ignoring almost the entirety of the modern environmentalism movement really galvanize bipartisan support for a new ethic of conservationism? Was it responsible for this love-letter to not even mention climate change, and the terrible damage it’s doing to the parks? I have to feel, that as much as I loved the scenery, the rapturous commentary, and the spiritual centrality of Muir’s vision to this series, this is a somewhat cowardly oversight."

Fortunately, the environmental community isn't sleeping. The NRDC and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization have smartly timed the release of their report "National Parks in Peril: The Threats of Climate Disruption" to coincide with the series and, of course, with the run-up to December's Copenhagen climate change forum.

The series will last as a historical document, and while the argument it pieces together is not a radical one, in this day and age it seems a useful one. The images will do their work for some -- and hopefully not just to add to the tourist traffic on the interstates and at parking lots and scenic vistas. And re-impregnating those images with the ideals of democracy and an expansive religio-nationalism of nature remains a worthwhile effort. For it to be more useful, though, I would have liked Burns to have made a 90-minute capsule version as a postscript -- not the Reader's Digest version of the detailed history of national parks, but the argument for how this country has created them, what they meant then and what they might mean today, and how nature itself -- both the thing and the idea -- has changed as a result of them, and is changing still.

(Here's the reference from the last post...)

This is one of my favorite scenes from the David Attenborough-narrated Planet Earth series... The music is toned down, soft and sparse and a little eerie, some of the cinematic apparatus (at least the lights of the submersible) is displayed on camera, and we get a hint of the umwelt of a very strange creature, before that creature "disappears into the blackness," rather like Graham Harman's objects disappearing into the density of their tool-being...