Nature’s Broken Clocks Reimaging Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis

Public ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (63) ◽  
pp. 129-131
Author(s):  
Alysse Kushinski

This article reviews Paul Huebener’s Nature’s Broken Clocks, which asserts the current climate crisis as a “a crisis of time,” critically engaging the criss-crossing temporalities imbricated with natural and cultural time.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-18
Author(s):  
Ian Miles ◽  
◽  
Veronika Belousova ◽  
Nikolay Chichkanov ◽  
Zhaklin Krayushkina ◽  
...  

Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) are problem-solvers for other organizations. The coronacrisis affects KIBS directly, but also means that their clients are confronting new problems. How are KIBS addressing these two sets of challenges? This paper draws on material available in the trade and industry press, on official reports and statistics, and the early academic studies addressing these themes. We find that KIBS have been active (alongside other organizations) in providing a substantial range of services aimed at helping their clients (and others) deal with various contingencies thrown up by the crisis. Not least among these is the need to conform to shifting regulatory frameworks, and requirements for longer-term resilience. KIBS themselves have had to adapt their working practices considerably, to reduce face-to-face interaction with clients and within teams collaborating on projects. Adaptation is easier for those whose tasks that are relatively standardized and codified, and it remains to be seen how far a shift to such activities - and away from the traditional office-based venues of activity - is retained as firms recover from the crisis. KIBS are liable to play an important role in this recovery from the crisis, and policymakers can mobilize their services. Some KIBS are liable to be critical for rendering economies more resilient in the face of future pandemics and we argue that these firms are also important for confronting the mounting climate crisis.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul L. Leshota ◽  
Ericka S. Dunbar ◽  
Musa W. Dube ◽  
Malebogo Kgalemang

Climate change and its global impact on all people, especially the marginalized communities, is widely recognized as the biggest crisis of our time. It is a context that invites all subjects and disciplines to bring their resources in diagnosing the problem and seeking the healing of the Earth. The African continent, especially its women, constitute the subalterns of global climate crisis. Can they speak? If they speak, can they be heard? Both the Earth and the Africa have been identified with the adjective “Mother.” This gender identity tells tales in patriarchal and imperial worlds that use the female gender to signal legitimation of oppression and exploitation. In this volume, African women theologians and their female-identifying colleagues, struggle with reading and interpreting religious texts in the context of environmental crisis that are threatening life on Earth. The chapters interrogate how biblical texts and African cultural resources imagine the Earth and our relationship with the Earth: Do these texts offer readers windows of hope for re-imagining liberating relationship with the Earth? How do they intersect with gender, race, empire, ethnicity, sexuality among others? Beginning with Genesis, journeying through Exodus, Ruth, Ecclesiastes and the Gospel of John, the authors seek to read in solidarity with the Earth, for the healing of the whole Earth community.


Climate Law ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 211-244
Author(s):  
Diana Azarnoush Arsanjani Reisman

Abstract In the face of massive, unanticipated and even disjunctive changes, the balance of the respective interests of the state parties to existing treaties may no longer survive the changed—or changing—climate landscape. While, ideally, the co-contracting states to such treaties could mutually agree to terminate or revise their treaty obligations to accommodate such changes and redress the now imbalance of interests in the treaty, some scenarios are bound to be contentious. In such cases, is there any other procedure that can provide for an orderly and fair adjustment of treaties so as to avert a breakdown of the network of treaties and a destabilization of world order? This article proposes that the rebus sic stantibus doctrine may function as a stabilizing doctrine for maintaining and possibly adjusting treaty regimes in an orderly fashion. Unlike the doctrine of necessity or many explicit treaty carve-outs, such as the security exception of the US Model Bilateral Investment Treaty, the doctrine of rebus sic stantibus may allow for both an objective test and also one that must be pleaded before a third-party arbiter. For this reason, rebus operates within controlled limits. Rebus offers an international tribunal the opportunity to set out a fair termination or revision of a climate-impacted treaty. I trace the evolution of rebus as a stabilizing doctrine and illustrate the potentialities of its application to the climate crisis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (77) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Hoff-Clausen

In 2014 Greenpeace posted a short video appealing to Lego to end its cooperation with Royal Dutch Shell. The video raised an informal accusation and invited its audiences to support it, which more than one million people did. A reputational crisis was inflicted upon the two companies. The article discusses the rhetoric that enabled this activist success and asks to what extent the example set by Greenpeace might be worthy of imitation. It is argued that the mobilizing effect of the video cannot be explained merely by studying its spectacular form and content. The unusual effect must be seen in light of the climate crisis as an affective context that gave the emotional appeals of the video a strong resonance. It was the current climate crisis, implied in the video, which helped create a burning platform for change in the conduct of Lego and Shell


2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (4) ◽  
pp. 679-692
Author(s):  
Simon Hollnaicher

Abstract According to a well-known problem in climate ethics, individual actions cannot be wrong due to their impact on climate change since the individual act does not make a difference. By referring to the practical interpretation of the categorical imperative, the author argues that certain actions lead to a contradiction in conception in light of the climate crisis. Universalizing these actions would cause foreseeable climate impacts, making it impossible to pursue the original maxim effectively. According to the practical interpretation, such actions are morally wrong. The wrongness of these actions does not depend on making a difference, rather these actions are wrong because they make it impossible for others to act accordingly. Thus, apart from imperfect duties, for which has been argued convincingly elsewhere (Henning 2016; Alberzart 2019), we also have perfect duties to refrain from certain actions in the face of the climate crisis.


Author(s):  
Peter L. Bond

This chapter raises difficult questions regarding the validity and motive for prolonging current forms of economic development and competition in the face of the much heralded global environmental crisis threatened by humankind’s success as a species. In response, a living systems theoretical framework is introduced that provides many elements of a possible new paradigm of economic development one that closes the gap between the social and natural sciences. New forms of explanation for organization and culture are developed from the perspective of complexity science to produce a synthesis of knowledge management and new philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and, distinctively, biological perspectives of technology, which effectively reconciles the practices of technology, knowledge and cultural change management.


Author(s):  
Courtney Catherine Barajas

Guðlac A details the eponymous saint’s relationships with the holy landscape surrounding his hermitage and its other-than-human inhabitants. The poem suggests that the work of Guðlac’s sainthood is sustained devotion to the Earth community. As an exemplum of Old English ecotheological living, Guðlac’s legend offers a challenge to the concept of environmental “stewardship” of the Earth community in favor of a model of mutual custodianship calls for sustained and deliberate devotion to the created world for its own sake and as a manifestation of the Creator’s love and glory. It also suggests that sustained engagement with the natural world even in the face of environmental crisis or collapse will be rewarded, in this life or the next.


Author(s):  
P. E. Perkins ◽  
B. Osman

Abstract This chapter explores the livelihood and care implications of the climate crisis from a gendered viewpoint that includes the implications of this approach for climate decision making at multiple scales, from local to global. The focus is on grassroots political organizing, activism, and movements as well as women's community-based actions to (re)build social resilience in the face of climate chaos. Challenges and policy implications are discussed as governments struggle to meaningfully and equitably address climate change. Also highlighted are the transformational imperatives of care and livelihood priorities which cast into stark relief the unsustainability of the long-established gender inequities that serve as the foundation for economic systems everywhere.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-416
Author(s):  
Brooks Berndt

Today’s climate crisis provokes dystopian and utopian narratives of the future faced by humanity. To navigate the theological terrain between the present and an uncertain future, this article explores passages pertaining to the journey of Moses and the Israelites to the Promised Land. The guiding point of orientation for this exploration comes from a verse that captures the seeming powerlessness of the Israelites in the face of the giants inhabiting the Promised Land. Numbers 13:33 reads, “To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” Of crucial importance in coming to terms with such honest self-assessment is the period of discernment and growth that comes from being in the wilderness with the presence of a God who loves and empowers grasshoppers in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Because the future of the Body of Christ is inseparable from how the climate crisis is confronted, the journey through the wilderness becomes not merely a story for self-coping but rather a story about churches finding a way forward, even as some dystopian narratives place churches on the road to irrelevance and ultimately extinction. This article explores how the story of exodus provides a sacred ground for imagining a different, even if difficult, future.


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