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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...

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...

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...