ethics

The Extinction Studies Working Group is a group of humanities scholars researching and writing on the themes of time, death, generations, and extinction.

The Environmental History Network for the Middle Ages (ENFORMA) website is a networking portal for researchers working on medieval environmental history, a place to share publication news, conference information, and research ideas.

In this commentary piece, Tom Greaves responds to J. Baird Callicott, arguing that the historical narrative that Callicott derives from Aristotle regarding the development of philosophical thought from natural philosophy to social and moral concerns, is not the best way to conceive of the project of the Presocratics.

Petra Tjitske Kalshoven combines ethnographic studies with ornithological testimonies to present the re-creation and reenactment of the extinct great auk, or garefowl. The author aims to achieve contiguity with lost species through expressions and shaping of human perceptions and imaginations of past, and eventually future, environmental disasters.

Looking at Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012), Katey Castellano shows how the environmental humanities can be employed to rearticulate scientific data as innovative multispecies stories.

In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism warns the reader about the possibility that we have already entered a catastrophic time, determined by the apparently uncontrollable impact of anthropogenic activities and the incapability of governments and authorities to respond effectively.

In Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, Joanna Zylinska outlies an ethical framework that could help humans assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe across different scales. Her goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink “life” and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist’s method; it also includes a photographic project by the author.

This article addresses philosophies of becoming by reconsidering Thomas Nagel’s negative view on heterogeneity in his 1974 essay as a form of self-understanding in the context of a shared and heterogeneous world.

In Stolen Future, Broken Present, David A. Collings investigates the relationship between our present impact on the Earth and our perception of the future. He argues that an understanding of our infinite responsibility for ecological disaster could avoid the strange incoherence felt by many in everyday life.

The Neganthropocene is a collection of essays and lectures focusing on the Anthropocene and the vast semantic horizon it encompasses, from philosophy to politics and the arts, through a renewed thought of the concepts of entropy and negentropy.