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Religion and the Anthropocene

Materials for thinking through the nature and challenges of the "Anthropocene" (sic) in relation to religions past, present and future.

Syllabus: LREL 2330 Religion and the Anthropocene

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Saying Yes: Deborah Bird Rose’s “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed”

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...

Spirits in the Mudflats: Nils Bubandt’s “Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene”

Nils Bubandt is a professor at Aarhus University, the largest and second oldest research university in Denmark, as well as editor in chief of Ethnos , an international, peer-reviewed journal of anthropology. He’s contributed to a wide range of publications, including A Non-secular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change , the third volume in a series of “working papers” published by AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene) and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet , the anthology in which the essay we read, “Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene” can be found. One of the main issues Bubandt addresses in relation to the Anthropocene is the blending of human and non-human causality in relation to natural disasters: “undecidability, I will argue, is simultaneously the signature characteristic, the curse, and the promise of our current moment.” He points to Lusi, a mud volcano on the north ...

Local Knowledge, Global Change: Heather Davis & Zoe Todd’s "On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene"

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 animal...