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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.

Reflections

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Art • Carolyn • Cris • Dhriti • Gabi • Jess • Quinn • Tao • Tench • Tyler

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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...

Racial Capitalocene: Françoise Vergès asks “Is the Anthropocene Racial?”

Françoise Vergès is a francophone political scientist, feminist, and historian whose expertise lies within the developing field of postcolonial studies. She holds a dual BA from UC San Diego and a PHD from UC Berkeley, and has published a great number of works in both French and English, which include the essay we read, “ Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial? ” published by Verso in the 2017 collection The Futures of Black Radicalism . She has also produced several French documentaries, and often collaborates with artists through the workshop “ Cartographie de l’espace postcolonial " (Mapping of Postcolonial Space). Alongside her own scholarship, Vergès has taught as a professor at both the University of Sussex and the Goldsmiths College in the UK. She cites her interest in “racialized environmental politics” as being “partly biographical”: having grown up in the French colonial island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean within a family of “communist, anticolonial, and f...

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 ...