Nothing Else Matters

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Blok

Abstract If the world in which we are intentionally involved is threatened by climate change, this raises the question about our place on Earth. In this article, we argue that the ecological crisis we face today draws our attention to the Earth as ontic-ontological condition of our being-in-the-world. Because the Earth is often reflected upon in relation to human existence, living systems or material entities in the philosophical tradition, we argue for an ontological concept of the materiality of the Earth as un-correlated being in this article. We develop five principles of the materiality of the Earth: the conativity, non-identity, responsiveness, performativity and eventuality of the Earth. We will argue that it is this notion of Earth that matters to us in the age of global warming.

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ichwanudin Mawardi

Current human activities have the potential to increase gas caused by the greenhouse effect. Increasing the temperature is not constant, but in the long time scales indicates that there has been global warming. In connection with efforts to save the earth from climate change in poor countries in the world through the UN session held in Bali have agreed to: (1) Bali Roadmap; (2) agreement on action to perform activities of adaptation to the negative impacts of climate change. Many people who took out the activities of carbon dioxide, kloroflorometan, nitrogen oxides, methane, aerosols, and heat or clearing land for housing, agriculture or logging. The greenhouse effect in nature has been going on for billions of years. Without water vapor and CO2 in the atmosphere,the temperature of the earth will be cooler 33 ° C compared to the current condition, so the earth becomes unfit for habitation. Thus, the greenhouse effect caused by water vapor and CO2 has a positive effect for human life. The problem right now is a greenhouse gas concentrations increasing beyond normal levels of natural as well as the emergence of several new greenhouse gases such as CFCs and CFC successors, which would cause further warming and increasingly threatening the environment carrying capacity. The world has undergone changes in temperature, season, and also increased the frequency of the most dramatic climate that requires continuous regulation to control the global climate system strictly.Keywords: greenhouse effect, global warming, climate change


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-14
Author(s):  
Robert Gnuse

Psalm 104 is a majestic hymn to creation, a dynamic corollary to the more formal presentation of the creation of the world in Genesis 1. Reflection upon some of the passages provides us with insight into the biblical author’s appreciation for nature, an attitude that needs to inspire us in this age of ecological crisis. Though the biblical text is unaware of such an ecological crisis; nonetheless, passages shine forth that can speak to us in our modern age of global warming and environmental collapse.


2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-766
Author(s):  
Lillian C. Woo

In the last fifty years, empirical evidence has shown that climate change and environmental degradation are largely the results of increased world population, economic development, and changes in cultural and social norms. Thus far we have been unable to slow or reverse the practices that continue to produce more air and water pollution, soil and ocean degradation, and ecosystem decline. This paper analyzes the negative anthropogenic impact on the ecosystem and proposes a new design solution: ecomimesis, which uses the natural ecosystem as its template to conserve, restore, and improve existing ecosystems. Through its nonintrusive strategies and designs, and its goal of preserving natural ecosystems and the earth, ecomimesis can become an integral part of stabilizing and rehabilitating our natural world at the same time that it addresses the needs of growing economies and populations around the world.


1996 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Michaels ◽  
Paul C. Knappenberger

Climate data support the “moderate” prediction of climate change (l-1.5°C) rather than the more extreme scenario (4°C or more). The moderate point of view was originally marginalized in the IPCC “consensus” process in both the 1990 First Assessment on Climate Change and in the 1992 Update prepared specifically for the Earth Summit and to provide backing for the Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is now accepted, based on ground-based data, that the errors in those models are currently between 160% and 360%. If one compares them to the satellite data combined with the land record, the error rises to a maximum of 720%. In some recognition of this massive error, the 1995 IPCC “consensus” is that warming has been mitigated by sulfate aerosols. However, when that hypothesis is specifically tested, it fails. Further, data required to test the validity of the sulfate enhanced greenhouse models was withheld by the IPCC. despite repeated requests.


2021 ◽  
Vol 250 ◽  
pp. 01005
Author(s):  
Manuela Tvaronavičienė

Adaptation strategies to the climate change include measures that can be taken to take account of the new climatic conditions. This paper aims at assessing the effects of climate change on environmental sustainability. This sustainability constitutes a major problem in many countries and regions around the world that experience industrial pollution, degradation of land as well as natural disasters caused by the global warming. The paper shows that adaptation strategies are often parallel strategies that can be integrated simultaneously with the management of natural resources. They can make resources more efficient and resilient to climate change. The paper shows that reducing the carbon footprint by more than 50 percent by 2030 and eliminating it by 2050 might be a viable solution how to tackle the climate change and support the environmental sustainability.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Susana Borràs

<p>In the new 'Age of the Anthropocene', the Earth's atmosphere, like other elements of Nature, is rapidly being colonized by a minority of the world's population, at no cost, threatening the security of all humanity and the stability of the planet. The development processes of the great emitters of greenhouse gases have transferred social and environmental costs to all the world population, especially the most impoverished ones. This article is a critical analysis of how the legal climate change regime continues to legitimize the onslaught on the atmosphere. It reflects on the need to move to a new "climate justice law", characterized by responsibilities and obligations centered on the prevention, repair, restoration and treatment of damage and related risks linked to climate change, while protecting human rights and the atmosphere, as a common interest of humanity and the Earth.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Atmosphere, climate change, common concern of humankind, climate justice law<strong></strong></p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-84
Author(s):  
Sumaira Nawaz ◽  
Dr. Shah Moeen ud Din Hashmi

Article endeavors to analyze the prophetic guiding principles regarding human behaviors related to plants and trees being an important component of our environment. The discussion mainly deals with the key environmental issues emphasizing plantation and its significance for balancing the equilibrium of the environment. Additionally, it thrashes out that humans are urged to seedling the plantation even the world is to be ended in Islam. The present study is delimited to the present ecological crises faced by society and a great challenge to the globe. The current ecological problems i.e global warming and climate change are interpreted just to analyze the environmental behaviors in Hadith literature. However, a profundity descriptive study has been conducted in the most influential way to examine the prophetic rules for human behaviors related to trees and plants being environment friendly. Furthermore, the existing practices of humans related to such an environmental sphere also been aptly figure out to highlight all possible ways in the light of prophetic guidance to deal with prevailing environmental issues. Inconsistency between religious teachings and human behaviors need the keen interest of religious scholars and social scientists to carefully harmonize both for maintaining the ecological balance in nature.


Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-241
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Chung

Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside this philosophy's foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics.


Soundings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (78) ◽  
pp. 50-63
Author(s):  
Dipesh Chakrabarty ◽  
Ashish Ghadiali

The notion of the planetary allows us to distinguish between the global of globalisation and the global of global warming. Globalisation is the process through which humans created the world we live in, how we converted the planet into a spherical human domain, at the centre of which are the human stories of technology, empires, capitalism and inequality. Global warming is what has resulted at the planetary level as intensified human consumption of the globe's resources has turned humanity into a geological agent of change. The global is 500 years old, while the planetary is as old as the age of the earth. The physical world has its own deep history: over time it has experienced profound changes. If climate change is to be addressed this mutability must be recognised – the unchanging nature of the world can no longer be taken for granted. The interview covers the rise of atmospheric sciences during the Cold War, when the Earth became, effectively, part of a comparative study of planets; the relationship between Marxism and the idea of 'deep history'; the human-made ecological disaster of bush-fires in Australia; the influence of Rohith Vemula and Rabindranath Tagore on planetary thinking and ideas about connectivity; biopower, zoe and the pandemic; and the difficulty of thinking politically about deep history.


Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins

My own interest in the topics of this book dates back a good many years. In fact, it predates the emergence of the modern field of climate history, or the identification of global warming as an incipient menace. In saying that, I am claiming no status as a prodigy, still less a prophet. Rather, in my teenage years, I read a great deal of speculative fiction, science fiction, in which themes of climate change and cataclysm have long percolated, at least since the latter years of the nineteenth century. We can debate how accurate the scientific analyses or predictions were in many of these works—in many cases, the level of accurate knowledge was minimal—but those works had the inordinate advantage of thinking through the human and cultural consequences of catastrophe, commonly speculating about religious dimensions. Obviously, some works succeeded better than others in that regard, but the essential project was critically important. If we are foretelling that the world will be assailed by lethal menaces, then we cannot fail to go on to imagine what the political or cultural consequences would or should be....


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