Posts filed under ‘Publications’
My review of Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire
Art in the Anthropocene
“Art in the Anthropocene,” in Jan Freuchen: Columna Translantica, (Oslo: Press, 2015), 112-121.
Global warming is now at the forefront of public debate, along with a host of related environmental concerns. Indeed, humans are changing the face of the earth so dramatically that geologists use the word “anthropocene” to describe a new planetary epoch formed by human impact. Artists have increasingly begun reflecting on how to engage in the climate debates about the degradation of our shared environment. Jan Freuchen’s Columna Transatlantica may belong within this new school of environmental art.
Download article in English here or Norwegian here.
A pioneer country? A history of Norwegian climate politics
“A pioneer country? A history of Norwegian climate politics” Climatic Change, (Online March 2016), 1-13. Journal edition 151:1 (2018), 29-41.
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The shift away from ecology towards climatology in Norwegian environmental policy in the late 1980s and 1990s was not accidental. A main mover was the Labor Party politician Gro Harlem Brundtland who did not want to deal with unruly and highly vocal Deep Ecologists. Better then to start afresh with a different set of environmental scholars appealing to the technocratic tradition within the Labor Party. Instead of changing the ethical and social ways of dealing with environmental problems as the Deep Ecologists were advocating, she was looking for technological and economic solutions. And she mobilized an international regime of carbon capture storage (CCS), tradable carbon emissions quota (TEQs), and clean development mechanisms (CDMs), all of which eventually were approved in Kyoto in 1997. This move towards technocracy and cost-benefit economics reflects a post-Cold War turn towards utilitarian capitalism, but also a longing to showcase Norway as an environmental pioneer country to the world. The underlying question was how to reconcile the nation’s booming petroleum industry with reduction in climate gas emissions. Should the oil and gas stay underground and the country strive towards the ecologically informed zerogrowth society the Deep Ecologists were envisioning? Or could growth in the petroleum industry take place without harming the environment as the Labor Party environmentalists argued?
Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned
Peder Anker, Louise Harpman, Mitchell Joachim, Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Munich: Prestel, 2014).
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This book examines the possibilities for scaling design solutions to address global warming.
Global warming poses new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can designers make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local cultures and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, this book proposes a new global design initiative. The aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. These featured projects showcase leading-edge design innovations at multiple scales. Global Design directors Peder Anker, Louise Harpman, and Mitchell Joachim discuss various ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation between humans and the natural world.
Review
Shaunacy Ferro, “7 Ways Architecture Can Tackle Global Warming” at FastCompany, Feb. 2015.
My review of The Silwood Circle
Hannay Gay, The Silwood Circle: A History of Ecology and the Making of Scientific Careers in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Imperial College Press, 2013).
My review of Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur Tansley
Peter G. Ayres, Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur Tansley (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
My review of The Gaia Hypothesis
Michael Ruse, The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2013).
From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A Short History of Ecological Design
“From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A Short History of E
cological Design,” in Behind the Green Door: Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability, Helle Benedicte Berg (ed.), (Oslo: Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2013), 129-139.
Order the catalogue here.
The Call for a New Ecotheology in Norway
“The Call for a New Ecotheology in Norway,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 7:2 (2013), 187-207.
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The call for a new ecotheology in Norway began in the early 1970s with environmentally concerned deep ecologists and continued within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway and the university system. Church officials and intellectuals saw ecotheology as an effective way of engaging the young in caring for the Creation. Alongside the eco-philosophical projects of redefining the natural, the deep ecologists also sought to renew religious faith. Norwegian theologians found their questioning of economic growth, technocracy, and industrialism appealing, and they sympathized with their call to save wilderness and their endorsement of outdoor life, rural communities, and modest lifestyles. Deep ecology represented for theologians an opportunity to revive the Church, mobilize a new and younger audience, and address the question of how to behave towards God’s Creation.
The Parable of the Cats
Many years ago I published a translation of the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe’s famous “The Parable of the Cats” (from his book On the Tragic, 1941), with a short introduction by David Rotheberg and myself. I still find Zapffe’s parable thought provoking.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, “The Parable of the Cats,” Terra Nova 2:1 (1997), 151-153.
Peder Anker 