Environment and climate
The Planet Needs Collective Action – Not Tech
All three books help characterize how and in what ways digital solutions are featuring in environmentalism and to what end. More data about environmental systems and models are certainly useful, but asking how the data animates new forms of collective action is critical.
Archives of Loss
Reading the losses arrayed in this anthology to write this review – even as they were tempered by expressions of joy or hope at ecological resilience, or calls for action – I felt somewhat overwhelmed. In that state, I recalled the classic Freudian account of melancholy as a mourning of loss that becomes pathological, because it is perpetual.
All Tomorrow’s Warnings
Nonfiction-as-speculation feels oxymoronic. The two words tug against each other, ‘nonfiction’ leaning toward documentation, ‘speculation’ toward imagining. A strange hybrid genre results that strives to offset the bloodless abstraction of scientific projections and the future’s unreality.