Ecological Collapse Research Articles

Environmental changes and mental distress in rural communities.

In Japan, non-farmers and people living in urban areas have not been greatly affected by environmental changes. In contrast, primary producers living in rural areas increasingly suffering from declining crop yields and drastically reduced catches of wild animals and seafood because of recent environmental changes. Studies, mainly from overseas, have reported that farming is an especially stressful occupation associated with high rates of depression and suicide, and the relationship between climate change and depression, as well as between climate change and suicide, is almost certain in rural communities. Particularly striking examples include the impact on the mental health of farmers in rural Australia and the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic, who are losing their livelihoods because of ecological collapse; this mental distress is known as "ecological grief". Such mental distress may be a major cause of depression and suicide among people in rural areas and Japan is no exception. I hoped that the concept of mental distress due to environmental changes will be recognized in Japan, leading to more eco-friendly attitudes that can promote the health of people living in rural areas and protect the surrounding ecosystem.

Indigenous Theatre Protocols

How can existing and reimagined protocols contribute to the decolonization of performing arts practices among Indigenous artists? How can they allow us to reconnect with our languages and the pre-Columbian concepts they keep alive? Who we are and who we will be have not been captured by how we have been represented. Like all the peoples of the earth, we have our own theatre traditions. How can we repatriate or draw inspiration from non-Western forms of theatricality rooted in our ancient cultures? Artistic protocols are the walking sticks that might guide us towards discoveries and rediscoveries deeply rooted in who we truly are. They promise to lead us towards vital theatrical practices in an era in which ecological collapse threatens the future of humanity.

АГРОВИРОБНИЦТВО ТА ПРОДОВОЛЬЧА БЕЗПЕКА ЯК ФАКТОР ЗМІН АРХІТЕКТУРНИХ ОБ’ЄКТІВ ТА УРБАНІЗОВАНИХ ТЕРИТОРІЙ У ДРУГІЙ ПОЛОВИНІ ХХІ СТ.

Food security is the of the most important basic human needs. The sphere of agricultural production affects direct or indirect ways to the settlement system, density, socio-demographic parameters. It affect on typology and appearance of agricultural buildings and edifices also. In the past, the size of the city was limited by local food opportunities. Despite the increase in agricultural production every year, natural renewable resources are depleted faster than they can be restored. It is very likely that after 2050 the world ecological collapse may begin. The result will be the inability to feed even half the human population.Active development of food production at the local level it is necessary to prevent such a catastrophic scenario. It will significantly reduce losses during storage and transportation of food, create closed cycles, where waste will be one of the elements of the ecosystem. Much of agricultural production must be located in an anthropogenic environment – an artificial landscape created by human. Local food production will significantly affect on urban planning structure of settlements and visualmorphological structure of architectural objects. Local agricultural production should become a key element of food security. Area vulnerability degree should be primarily determination of urban agricultural production share. Local agro-climatic, energy and technological opportunities will determine the possibility of self-sufficiency in food at the local level. Agrophotovoltaics can become a main landscape-creating element of medium and large cities suburban areas. Integration of agrostuctures in buildings and edifices is possible at various scales and ways. Synergy of energy, agricultural production and waste recycling will be one of the 5–7 key structural planning principles for all architectural objects. Local food production capacity will limit the maximum size of megacities and contribute to a more dispersed settlement structure. information technology and networks is key elements in ensuring of this today. We should actively provide and implement a new solution of variety projects because window of opportunity may be significantly smaller than expected.

Jessie Kleemann’s Art of Survival

In her work as an educator, actor, poet and visual artist, Jessie Kleemann has persistently expanded the limits of arts discourse in Kalaallit Nunaat, not least through her unique approach to body art informed by historical Kalaallit theatrical forms and antimimetic dramaturgy. Emphasizing how Kleemann’s embodied practice prompts reflection on the potential for action amid environmental collapse, this essay situates her work alongside schools of thought that have theorized the body during moments of crisis. I focus on Kleemann’s early experimentation with analog video and recent ecocritical poetry, aligning her work with traditions ranging from ancestral Inuit performance genres to post-1945 action art and contemporary practices advocating on behalf of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Kleemann’s methods, refracted through these traditions, place embodied action at the center of efforts to form more ethical relations.

Without a Debate on Sufficiency, a Circular Plastics Economy will Remain an Illusion

To tackle the “plastic crisis”, the concept of circular economy has attracted considerable attention over the past years, both by practitioners and scholars alike. Against this background, this article reflects from a political scientist’s point of view on key issues currently under discussion regarding the implementation of a circular plastics economy. To do so, the article covers issues raised at the 2021 edition of the Tutzing Symposion, an annual event organized by DECHEMA, the German Society for Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. These issues include renewable feedstock, life cycle assessments, chemical recycling, appropriate regulatory frameworks, and the allocation of responsibilities to curb plastic pollution. In addition, the article draws on mainly social scientists’ research to point out limitations of the most common understanding of the circular economy concept which describes the circular economy as a holistic approach that enables eco-economic decoupling and thus prevents ecological collapse while still allowing for economic growth. As a result, the article calls for a paradigm shift that challenges this popular, technocratic vision of the circular economy and puts forward sufficiency, i.e., an absolute reduction in production and consumption, as a prerequisite for the realization of a truly circular plastics economy.

Clenched and Empty Fists: Trauma and Resistance Ethics in Han Kang’s Fiction

Broadly speaking, the literary history of human–nonhuman metamorphoses conveys certain ethics regarding human-to-human relations by mediating these relations through metaphors of inhumanity. Where such transformations appear in the literature of the present, however, the human is often decentered, fostering an uneasy consort between human and nonhuman beings and ways of being. Taking the fiction of South Korean author, Han Kang, as a case study, this essay examines the political or civic value of reinvigorating vegetal or arboreal transformation in contemporary stories that unfold against a backdrop of global climate change and ecological collapse. I argue that Han’s work depicts the mimicry of or engagement with nonhuman forms of life as both passive strategies for resisting human acts of violence and exploitation and alternative models of sociality and care. Drawing especially on the unruliness of plants and non-animal organic matter, Han’s translated works invite readers to consider what human subjects can learn about both individual and networked, interspecies modes of protest from green subjectivity.

A Postmodern Criticism of the Enlightenment: Anthropocene Disorder and Nihilistic Anti-humanism in Charles Bukowski’s Pulp

Abstract The anti-detective novel, Pulp, the last book Charles Bukowski wrote, is among his most significant works. This article illustrates Bukowski’s hostility towards the Enlightenment and modernism Through a postmodern outlook, Bukowski parodies the rationality of the Enlightenment by depicting a world that is replete with irrationality and meaninglessness The narrative involves a drunk detective who takes cases that are highly peculiar and irrational. Bukowski’s detective constantly finds himself in irrational and meaningless conversations and in the author’s attempt to portray the miserable condition of postmodern man Moreover, from an ecocritical perspective, this article asserts that Bukowski is a nihilistic anti-humanist who fails to sympathize with humanity and finds no solution for the environmental collapse that is caused by the disorder in the Anthropocene The only response to the parasitic nature of humanity is hatred and disgust for both himself and his species As a result of his despair with the cause of humanity and anthropocentrism, Bukowski’s Detective Belane is enraged with humans and frequently causes violent scenes

"Trans Arts of Cultivating Resilience": Trans Care and Climate Emergency

"Trans Arts of Cultivating Resilience":Trans Care and Climate Emergency Davy Knittle (bio) 1. Trans Arts of (Wildfire) Resilience In September of 2018, the state of California passed Senate Bill 901, which focuses on fire prevention, forest health, fuel reduction, and other initiatives related to wildfires. Among the initiatives supported by the bill is the design and implementation of the Wildfire Resilience Program. Resilience, in its applied ecological valence, is "the capacity of an ecosystem to regain its fundamental structure, processes and functioning despite stresses, disturbances, or invasive species" (Cushman and McGarigal 2019, 142). The Wildfire Resilience Program works to enlist residential and commercial property owners in California forests in the project of managing forest ecologies so that when they burn, they can continue to be forests, rather than being changed so much as to become another ecological category. The program responds to the fact that wildfire damage has been exacerbated by the effects of climate change in concert with fire management approaches that have privileged fire suppression and relentless construction in the wildland-urban interface.1 The ecological resonances of resilience are also integral to Hil Malatino's discussion of resilience as a primary focus of trans care. As he describes trans care webs, Malatino writes, "I want our care webs to be as resilient as possible" (2020, 5). The goal of a trans care ethic is to build "a resilient care web," which "coheres through consistently foregrounding the realities of burnout and the gendered, raced, and classed dynamics that result in the differential distribution of care—for those receiving it as well as those giving it" (2). A trans theory of care emphasizes "trans arts of cultivating resilience" (7). Trans care is a method focused on enabling the resilience necessary for trans people to help one another survive. As he describes trans care, Malatino relies on a series of ecological concepts. Trans care is about resilience, but also about "flourishing," and "cultivating" [End Page 188] and "webs" and "collective survival" (5, 7, 5, 34). These ecological resonances, however, are not merely metaphorical. As Malatino explains how trans people make life survivable and even gloriously mundane for one another, he articulates an approach to care that centers trans life as it is sutured to networks of interspecies support and belonging. Care, for Malatino, is a concept that exceeds human relation. He asks, for instance, "How could we ever actually quantify the daily acts of care that circulate in the interspecies milieu we inhabit" (45)? Malatino's description of trans care underscores that our survival as trans people requires the resilience of our interspecies relations. Those relations take the form of connections with non-human animals (my mutually sustaining relationship with my dog, Hobbes, for instance, but also with the squirrels that ate my neighbor's Halloween pumpkins). They also take the form of relations with other species including bacteria and plants, with which we engage collaboratively in systems from the circulation of communicable diseases to the modes of agriculture and food production on which our lives depend. As he describes the characteristics and necessity of trans care webs, Malatino reiterates that for many trans people, it is the fissures created by trans-exclusionary conceptions of family that require trans care webs to develop and become resilient. Many trans and gender non-conforming people, Malatino argues, are harmed by a "heterocisnormative investment in the family as the primary locus of care" (6). Trans care webs help us "when our lives fall into the gaps between institutions and conventional family structures" (3). The failures of a heterocisnormative investment in the family to provide care to trans people is intensified by larger scale forms of harm. As Malatino describes it, the goal of trans care is "to develop an ethic of care that ensures trans survival and flourishing in the midst of ongoing racialized depredation, rampant and metastasizing economic inequality, and imminent environmental collapse" (44). Malatino invites us to think towards trans resilience by "decentering the family" to more accurately describe trans care webs (7). Thinking with Malatino, I found myself wondering how the environmental resonances of the "trans arts of cultivating resilience" make the process of decentering the family both more...

Against Anthropocentrism: A Stray’s Quest in Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness

ABSTRACT This essay examines the representation of an ecological collapse in Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020) in the context of the interrelated concepts of straying and stray ethics, proposed by Barbara Creed in her work Stray: Human-Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene (2017) as the new ethical paradigm for the Anthropocene era. Drawing upon the definition of straying as a process of identity (re-)formation, we discuss Cook’s narrative in terms of its socio-political engagement with the reality of the climate crisis from the perspective of a stray, identified in our analysis as a liminal abject figure that transcends species boundaries. By positing stray ethics as the novel’s interpretative pivot, we propose to read the experience of becoming a stray through the lens of its implicitly disruptive but also transformative potential, engendered by the essentially sympoietic, non-anthropocentric relationship between human and non-human animals.

Metabolic rate and climate change across latitudes: evidence of mass-dependent responses in aquatic amphipods.

Predictions of individual responses to climate change are often based on the assumption that temperature affects the metabolism of individuals independently of their body mass. However, empirical evidence indicates that interactive effects exist. Here, we investigated the response of individual standard metabolic rate (SMR) to annual temperature range and forecasted temperature rises of 0.6-1.2°C above the current maxima, under the conservative climate change scenario IPCC RCP2.6. As a model organism, we used the amphipod Gammarus insensibilis, collected across latitudes along the western coast of the Adriatic Sea down to the southernmost limit of the species' distributional range, with individuals varying in body mass (0.4-13.57 mg). Overall, we found that the effect of temperature on SMR is mass dependent. Within the annual temperature range, the mass-specific SMR of small/young individuals increased with temperature at a greater rate (activation energy: E=0.48 eV) than large/old individuals (E=0.29 eV), with a higher metabolic level for high-latitude than low-latitude populations. However, under the forecasted climate conditions, the mass-specific SMR of large individuals responded differently across latitudes. Unlike the higher-latitude population, whose mass-specific SMR increased in response to the forecasted climate change across all size classes, in the lower-latitude populations, this increase was not seen in large individuals. The larger/older conspecifics at lower latitudes could therefore be the first to experience the negative impacts of warming on metabolism-related processes. Although the ecological collapse of such a basic trophic level (aquatic amphipods) owing to climate change would have profound consequences for population ecology, the risk is significantly mitigated by phenotypic and genotypic adaptation.

Technically Nothing: Enframing Life and the Properties of Nature

This essay will examine what it takes to be two foundational aspects of traditional metaphysics—the “concepts” of nothingness and nature—to offer a critical reading of how they enframe our understanding of “life.” It asserts that these two concepts are the limit point for metaphysical thought: the tangle that emerges when trying to overcome or reimagine them is an impasse encountered in pressing humanist concerns like ecological collapse, nihilism, alienation, and extinction. Readers of this journal may value a detailed, technical attempt at such an untangling; this article will suggest that a heightened sense of technics can be productive of a new image of thought, one that might escape the anthropocentric basis of these concerns.1 In doing so, the argument will insist on the flaw within certain metaphysical schematisms’ desire to appropriate, to form and hold sense into static and reproducible properties—a desire notably critiqued in Bernard Stiegler’s reading of technics. This flaw, it suggests, is constitutive of a sense of nature and nothingness based on property, one Stiegler notes is how we enframe being(s). It will then discuss Gilles Deleuze’s notable critiques of such “proper” enframing’s impossible limits and, following Deleuze, will turn to Marcel Proust’s writing as suggestive of a new image of thought—one that, focused on imagining (or enframing) nothingness through writing, inscribes an indelible remainder as that very imagination, suggesting that it is nothingness “it”self that will always remain.

COVID-19 and the ecological crisis: What do they have in common?

This lecture transcript is divided in four parts. First, I examine the main public-health strategies in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there are numerous factors capable of explaining national differences in COVID-19 mortality that are not attributable to merits or demerits of governments, I have identified five lethal errors (lack of preparation, misinformation, medicalisation, a policy approach based on a 'laissez-faire' attitude to the virus and social inequity) and four vital actions (testing, tracing, isolating with support, timeliness and immunisation) that best distinguish success or failure in tackling the pandemic. In the second part, I analyse the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and major risk factors for emerging zoonotic diseases (e.g. exploitation of animal wildlife, deforestation, agricultural intensification and climate change) to be addressed to prevent future pandemics. Then, I discuss the interrelationships between the COVID-19 pandemic and the ecological crisis in the context of the so-called neoliberal variant of capitalism. Both crises are largely determined by anthropogenic risk factors influenced by a model of economic development that prioritises infinite economic growth, free trade and a global self-regulating market over any other values of society (including human survival). An alternative economic approach, capable of creating a new balance between the health of humans, animals, and the environment (by modifying their structural drivers), is the most important antidote against new spillovers and climate change. It is the humanitarian immune response we need to protect global health from future pandemics and ecological collapse.

Guattari \ Heidegger: On Quaternities, Deterritorialisation and Worlding

In his final writings Guattari designed a four-functor meta-model with which to map subjective resingularisation against the backdrop of what he saw as the late-modern admixture of ecological collapse, social deterioration and subjective decomposition. I examine here Guattari’s fourfold in neo-structuralist terms and then engage in a discussion on the difference between worlding and deterritorialisation, reassessing in this sense Guattari’s concept of machinic indices in conversation with the works of anthropologists. Further, I show that Guattari’s fourfold is reminiscent of Heidegger’s Geviert, which I place at the very core of Heidegger’s project of overcoming the modern Ge-stell. Lastly, from the fact that Guattari’s fourfold opens onto the question of worlding and that Heidegger points to our incapability to tune in and sing back to the earth’s song, I draw the conclusion that they put forward an eco-cosmo-poetics that points beyond the flat ontology of today’s new materialism and the subtractive logic of speculative realism.

Anthropocene, Technocene and the Problem of Philosophy of Education

The term Anthropocene began to appear more often in scientific discourse more than 20 years ago. It was an attempt to come closer to understanding the depth and seriousness of the impact of man and his activities on the planet Earth, with the intention in the future to mitigate these effects and prevent a possible globally catastrophic environmental collapse, which might involve the collapse of civilization itself. However, to date, our approach to the world has hardly changed at all. After the pandemic comes the threat of a world conflict, a nuclear war. Since our scientific wisdom seems powerless, even the most obvious and frightening scientific knowledge cannot somehow change the course of global society, we want to think about this situation from the perspective of the cosmological philosophy of education. We want to think about this situation from the perspective of the cosmological philosophy of education. Its central motive is the philosophical disclosure of the original ontological ground of our humanity, which is the world, the cosmos. This is a direct confrontation with the hitherto prevailing “market education”, which serves to maintain and consolidate the power schemes of capital policy.

The bioeconomics of planetary energy transitions—a theoretical note

Evidence is mounting that unprecedented economic growth experienced by human societies over the past two centuries has induced a state of crisis for the Earth’s ecological systems—a crisis that threatens human society’s existence and heightens the risk of violent conflict. This article presents a simplified model of bioenergetic evolution on a planetary level. It examines human energy exploitation based on three strategies vis-à-vis the natural world: (1) predation, (2) competition, and, more cursorily, (3) mutualism. Predation involves the capture of energy pre-processed by the biotic community (living organisms sharing a common environment). Competition involves appropriating lands to capture solar-generated energy, edging the biotic community out. Mutualism involves engaging the biotic community in a mutualistic effort to harvest energy (and discard energy waste in the form of heat) outside of the planetary system. The model implies that, theoretically, substantial government investment in Earth-based solar generation may be required to effect a planetary energy transition to avert ecological collapse. The model suggests that this transition is not likely to happen automatically as a function of substitution by individual economic actors prior to ecological collapse; rather, it requires top-down coercive and/or incentive measures applied by government.

Counterpointing Care

An intricate lace-like net of chitin, acids and enzymes dwell in the interstices of life and nonlife, between plants, animals, biomass and the atmosphere, working in and through others; always dismantling, repairing and remaking matter. These are the ecologies of mycelial networks and fungal bodies that have given rise to biospherical life as we know it. Now, on the eve of planetary environmental collapse, calls to care for these vital fungal relationships are growing louder. What does it mean to care for something so obfuscated yet ubiquitous, something often regarded as abject yet gastronomic in some cultures, something that moulds human life but is yet abstract and unsympathetic to it? We argue that care in all its complexity and generality is in crisis because it is based on certain anthropocentric assumptions that do not account for the difference and indifference of fungi. Drawing on three discrete performative acts, we explore the possibilities of an abstract care when fungi is engaged as an ‘actor’ or agent, in which normative performances of ecological care are troubled. Through Wendy Wheeler’s biosemiotics, Jakob von Uexkull’s Umwelt and Merlin Sheldrake’s vital mycology, we ruminate on how these nets, cast wide into human and nonhuman guts, genes, brains and affects, themselves perform abstractions that are not mechanical but rather driven by semaphore and semiosis. We focus on the biosemiotics of eating (with) fungi as a performative act for care for more-than-human and human entanglements. As Jane Bennett suggests, a partial material overlap occurs through eating that is ontologically constitutive, moulding a kind of radical care through the communicative exchange of bodies and matter. Taking seriously these interdependent abstractions by mycelium’s sympoetic and holobiontic entanglements defines intuition as non-cognitive but sympathetic (after Bergson), enacting unequal and perhaps ‘care-less’ collaborations.

Perfection and Disaster

Academic essays typically and quite rightly advance theses and defend them with arguments. In this essay, I do not propose or defend a thesis. Instead, I try to ask, in a sustained way, a straightforward question: what’s the sense in talking about ethical or political perfectionism in a world facing cataclysmic environmental collapse? At what kind of perfection might one aim in a world fundamentally out of balance: a world of mass extinction and dwindling biodiversity, collapsing ecosystems, super-sized droughts and storms, extreme heatwaves, rising and rapidly warming and acidifying oceans and seas, massive displaced populations, increasingly limited access to clean water and adequate food, spreading pandemic disease, and the economic collapse and political chaos that such cascading disasters will bring in their wake? In such a world, is the good life even conceivable?

Towards an Ecographics

What role do comics have to play in cultural conversations about and in the face of environmental collapse and mass extinction? This article takes bande dessinée as a case study to propose the concept of ecological storylines as part of an ecographics that recognises the specificities of comics as a drawn and narrative medium as well as its shifting place in culture. This is developed with reference to a range of graphic texts and along three axes. The article first explores drawing as material practice in ecographic engagements with radioactivity, gender and landscape. It then turns to redrawing as a mode of contestation as well as repair on a postcolonial planet, before closing with a discussion of flowlines across panels, pages, human and non-human bodies and across cityscapes, seascapes and petroscapes.

“Do you think it is a Pandemic?” Apocalypse, Anxiety and the Environmental Grotesque in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), set in the post fossil-fuel, post turbo-capitalist country of Thailand, portrays the shocking after effects of bioengineering and gene-hack modifications in food crops. The narrative depicts a country tottering on the brink of an agricultural apocalypse on account of food production being severely affected by crop driven anomalies and rogue diseases such as “cibiscosis” and “blister rust” transmitted by variants of mutating pests. Natural seed stock becomes completely supplanted by the new genetically engineered seeds which become sterile after a single seasonal cycle of sowing and harvesting. The native population of Thailand is adversely affected by the pandemic scenario, which becomes aggravated by an expedient “scientocracy” that is at the heart of the neocolonial enterprises of American megacorporations and calorie companies like Agrigen, PurCal and Redstar who hail gene hacking as the new future of food resources and market profiteering. The consumption of the gene-hacked produce spreads through crops and affects the human body in unimaginable ways thereby resulting in a considerable rise of health issues including digestive and respiratory failures.
 This paper intends to articulate the idea of a pandemic, its historical understanding and affective influences in the context of a post techno-fossil fuel economy set in Thailand. It will analyse the idea of epidemiological colonialism; diseases introduced by colonising forces that reshape the natives’ existing environment thereby bringing forth a deep pandemic anxiety that percolates the collective memory of the Thai people. It also highlights how the novel portrays the conflict between traditional ecological knowledge systems and modern extractive enterprises that acts as a catalyst to hasten the destruction of sustainable systems of agriculture and food production that have endured the impact of climate change and ecological fallout. The paper will study the relevance of the pandemic as an agency of ecocatastrophe and its function in an eco-speculative science fictional narrative. Finally, the paper looks into the concept of the posthuman android, genetically modified humans in a “technologiade”, a society reconfigured by technoscience to resist the impact of environmental collapse, and explores how this trope is incorporated in Bacigalupi’s narrative to celebrate human striving for hope and survival in an imagined environmental future marked by a self-created agro-scientific grotesqueness.

Nursing for the Chthulucene: Abolition, affirmation, antifascism.

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over-reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future.