Syllabus: LREL 2330 Religion and the Anthropocene






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Paleo-Sangha: Jill Schneiderman’s “Awake in the Anthropocene”

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Jill Schneiderman is an earth scientist, an environmental justice activist and a Buddhist. She’s a professor at Vassar and author of four books, including The Earth Around Us: Maintaining a Livable Planet (2003) and Liberation Science: Putting Science to Work for Social and Environmental Justice (2012). A pioneer in work at the intersection of science and activism, she’s also a committed meditator. In 2009 she was a fellow of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education , where she helped develop curriculum on geologic time and contemplative practice. The essay we read, “Awake in the Anthropocene,” touches on many of these concerns. It appeared in 2012 in Contemporary Buddhism , an interdisciplinary academic journal.  The main argument of “Awake in the Anthropocene” is that Buddhist thought has something important to offer those who seek to respond effectively to problems of violence and anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s ideas of “slow violence” and J
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Saying Yes: Deborah Bird Rose’s “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed”

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  Deborah Bird Rose was a leader in multidisciplinary ethnographic research through her work in Australian Aboriginal cultures. With care and open mind, she immersed herself in the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingarra to work on her Doctor of Philosophy and returned frequently to these communities throughout the span of her life. In her essay "Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed" (from the collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene ), Rose explores the rich, pulsating beauty available throughout all symbiotic nature and specifically, how it can be seen in the joyful relationship between the great family of flowering trees known as Angiosperms and the flying foxes that pollinate them. “Shimmer” refers to the radiance of interaction among what Rose calls the “matrix of power, desire, and lures” across the biosphere. The concept of shimmer was first taught to Rose by the Aboriginal people in the Vi
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Local Knowledge, Global Change: Heather Davis & Zoe Todd’s "On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene"

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  Heather Davis and Zoe Todd worked together to write their essay, “ On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene ” in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies . This journal aims to provide a platform for critical work about “space and place” in the social sciences. Davis' collaboration with Todd was vital to the credibility of the entire article. In speaking about African slaves, Davis and Todd write, “We do not wish to appropriate these narratives.” As a white Canadian woman, Davis makes clear she doesn’t wish to appropriate the stories of black and indigenous people when writing about the subject. Todd can speak to her experiences as an Indigenous Canadian, but they both make clear the african experience is not their own.  Zoe Todd is of Métis descent. She learned about her Métis heritage through her father, and has gone on to include her ancestry in her studies.The central focus of her research is the relationship between humans and animals (pa
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