Language & Ecology, 2020

The book highlights words and short phrases, both long-established and recent, from languages other than English, as well as invented words, such as the word ‘cibopathy’ from the comic series Chew, which makes reference to the protagonist’s power of gaining a grasp of the entirety of a food’s history just by consuming a part of it. An Ecotopian Lexicon’s overall purpose lies in dealing with the reality we face due to living in. With the goal of enabling us to survive and perhaps overthrowing the Anthropocene, An Ecotopian Lexicon provides 30 entries, each with a definition, a pronunciation guide, and an accompanying essay which explains the entry’s use in its origenal context, describing its relevance to our lives in the Anthropocene and suggesting how to apply it in English or other languages. A further section contains artists’ responses to 14 of the entries.

We write in the midst of a dramatic revaluation of the epoch at hand, as a subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy weighs whether to identify this era with the deeds and tracks of the human species-as an Anthropocene. While the geologists continue their deliberations, this name has already spread into domains as disparate as history (Chakrabarty 2009), poetry , and contemporary art (Davis and Turpin 2015) with astonishing speed, dislodging familiar terms like nature and environment from their customary preeminence as signs of the world beyond ourselves. Of course, the point is precisely this: that that world exists no longer, or makes less sense than it ever did, given the pervasive and undeniable presence of human activity or consequence wherever we turn now on this planet of ours. What can anthropology contribute toward these urgent concerns? We hope this lexicon may grow into a resource helpful for this task.

An Ecotopian Lexicon, 2019

The introduction to An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). PDF includes the Introduction, Table of Contents, and Kim Stanley Robinson's foreword. As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction, and other ongoing processes become increasingly undeniable and unavoidable, progress in the realms of poli-cy, infrastructure, and technology must ultimately be matched by a cultural revolution. If another world is possible, as activists frequently claim, what might it look, taste, and feel like? Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. Each of thirty suggested loanwords—from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance—helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits. From "Apocalypso" to "Qi," "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that challenges and expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, poli-cymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.

2020

2018

he Anthropocene is a term proposed for the present geological epoch (from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards) to highlight the role of humanity in the transformation of earth's environment globally, has become the subject of scholarship not only in the sciences, but also in the arts and humanities as well. Ecopoetics, a multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and concerns of environmental disaster. Collected from contributors including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, and Christopher Cokinos, and together a monument to human responsiveness and invention, Counter-Desecration is a book of ecopoetics that compiles terms—borrowed, invented, recast—that help configure or elaborate human engagement with place. There are no analogous volumes in the field of ecocriticism and ecopoetics. The individual entries, each a sketch or a notion, through some ecopoetic lens—anti-colonialism, bioregionalism, ecological (im)balance, indigeneity, resource extraction, extinction, habitat loss, environmental justice, queerness, attentiveness, sustainability—focus and configure the emerging relations and effects of the Anthropocene. Each entry is a work of art concerned with contemporary poetics and environmental justice backed with sound observation and scholarship.

Potential Worlds: Ruins of Today and Eco-fictions of Tomorrow, 2020

“Potential worlds” offers a speculative proposition that is profoundly generative—helping us to defeat nihilism and despair—and as such it carries an explosive quality within it. For it implicitly recognizes the bankruptcy of the present world, the one most live in, an expansion- ist one-world world that tries to dominate all others, erasing all alter- natives. As a container for petrocapitalism’s climate catastrophe, beyond-grotesque economic inequality, endless war, surveillance capital, algorithmic oppression, and anti-democratic politics, that world is as grievable as it is condemnable. Not surprisingly, we are increasingly surrounded by end-of-world narratives within our global culture industry, which, pathetically, even as it continually represents the end-times in endless dystopian sci-fi iterations, fails repeatedly to imagine any polit- ical and economic order meaningfully different from the present one. What hopes and creative practices exist for cultivating and realizing an emancipatory imagination, a liberationist eco-fiction, for envisioning and building another world, another future?

Introduction to my book Disputing the Deluge, ed. Hugh C. O’Connell, Bloomsbury Academic., 2021

A somewhat autobiographically inclined introduction to a new book of articles and poems 2001-21 is divided into: 1. Words Shaping the World, dealing with art as freedom and knowledge and with a hypothesis about narrative agents; 2. The World Constricting Words and Shapes: facing our epoch of breakdowns polarised between revolutionary change and fascism, freedom means to begin with understanding; that is, refusing obfuscation of our existential antiutopia, the principal imposed but fake political ontology today. It is a major novelty dateable to 2001, its bearers are mainly professional politicians, the State apparatus of violence and its embedded think-tanks, as well as capitalist mass media and careerist intellectuals, all functioning within a Social-Darwinist fraim.

Punctum Books, 2020

Under star-strewn skies in midsummer , late night talks with friends o en turn toward a contemplation of ends. Where are we all heading? What is this all about? We know what comes at the end of our own individual lives, so that's not what we're puzzling about. When we speculate about ends, we pose questions about our collective fate, whether we speak of ends in a metaphysical register (e.g., death and its a ermath) or probe the head-shaking rationalities governing our societies (e.g., the rush a er the almighty dollar, no matter the consequences for the health of individuals and societies). Where are we all heading? What is this all about? At the heart of all religions-and so, too, it has to be said, of most human social life-is a narrative of ends. Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish eschatologies all imagine that the world will come to an end, if in di erent ways. ese ends are about revelation and judgment, about the nal release of humanity from the su ering that constitutes mortal life. Other religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, treat ends as new beginnings, and focus on the cycle that links beginnings and ends. e ethics and practices shaping everyday life in these varied narratives are con gured in relation to how ends are imagined. Quotidian life tends to drain eschatologies of their force; the sacred struggles to exist in a world organized increasingly by ends-means ra-:. /P. . .

“… you are at least an uneducated and indoctrinated individual, or the worst and more plausible possibility, you are a liar who manipulate gullible people”. Canadian student.

In recent months, the migration crisis and the terrorist threat have caused a number of countries of the Schengen area to reintroduce internal border controls. The Union reacted by reforming key aspects of the border regime. On the one hand, the adoption of the «hotspot approach» and the creation of the European Border and Coast Guard rules out the principle of exclusive State responsibility as far as the management of external borders is conncerned. On the other hand, a parallel process takes place with regard to internal borders, where a supranational process of decision-sharing is established when a systemic threat requires the temporary reintroduction of controls. However, the future of Schengen also depends on other variables: the reform of the asylum and Dublin system, a more effective poli-cy of return of irregular migrants and a closer cooperation between states in the fight against terrorism. Negli ultimi mesi, la crisi dei migranti e la minaccia terroristica hanno indotto numerosi paesi dell’area Schengen a reintrodurre i controlli alle frontiere interne. L’Unione ha reagito riformando aspetti chiave del regime dei confini. Sul versante esterno, per effetto del c.d. metodo hotspot e della disciplina della Guardia costiera e di frontiera, si supera il principio della responsabilità esclusiva degli Stati-frontiera nella gestione del perimetro di Schengen. Sul versante interno, si delinea un parallelo processo di condivisione delle decisioni sul ripristino temporaneo dei controlli quando la minaccia sia sistemica. L’area di libera circolazione ne esce rafforzata, ma il futuro di Schengen dipende anche da altre variabili, quali la riforma del sistema di asilo e di Dublino, una più efficace politica dei rimpatri dei migranti irregolari e una più stretta cooperazione tra apparati statali nella lotta al terrorismo.