Posts

Showing posts from September 14, 2020

Bad Buddhist: Roy Scranton's "Learning to Die in the Anthropocene"

Image
Roy Scranton is an American writer, veteran, professor at the University of Notre Dame, and alumnus of the New School. Scranton has won the Theresa A. White Literary Award for short fiction in 2009, Mrs. Giles G. Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities in 2014, and Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2017. Scranton draws upon his time and knowledge of the US Army and his time deployed in Iraq when discussing climate change in his books such as We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018). The book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) shares the title with the article we read; the 2013 essay on which the book was originally based was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 . In the essay “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” first published in the Revealer in 2015 as “Climate Change and the Dharma of Failure” and reprinted in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle in 2018, Scranton provocatively writes as a “bad Buddhist” and “bad environmentalist.”  Scranton's main claim in t

On the Threshold: Will Steffen's "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene"

Image
  “ Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene ” was written by an international coalition of scientists led by Will Steffen, an American chemist who specializes in the field of climatology. The coalition includes members with backgrounds in global sustainability, water resource management, oceanography, earth system science, environmental science, geography, development, and many more. The diverse backgrounds represented by this project create a product aimed at a general audience.. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America ( PNAS ), which describes itself as “one of the world's most-cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals, publishing more than 3,300 research papers annually.” PNAS aims “to publish only the highest quality scientific research and to make that research accessible to a broad audience.” Accessibility is a large part of t