We live in a time when it is crucial to meditate, but also, as Bernard Stiegler put it, “an emergency whose urgency means that it precisely excludes meditation”. Reading is a form of meditation, a form of thinking and feeling. It is a way of challenging time. Let’s read together in these next twelve months: twelve books that challenge time and provide therapy for climate madness.

On my desk sits a pile of books that I’ve been meaning to read. I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink, and I seldom go to many parties. I buy books I mean to read. Some of them have become like friends. I’ve read them from front to back, scribbling in the margins and on the blank or semi-blank pages in the front and back.

These books help me make sense of the climate madness we’re living through. I like the concept of global weirding. Hunter Lovins coined it in the 1990s[i] and it was popularized by Thomas Friedman.[ii] Katherine Hayhoe – one of the most famous (and most therapeutic) climate scientists – has been using it as the name of her podcast series.[iii] Saying that we need to meditate, read and think is like saying we need good concepts.[iv] Global weirding is an example of what Mieke Bal calls ‘travelling concepts’.[v] They are words that can be developed, take on new meanings and shed old ones. In 2009, ecologist John Waldman wrote that global weirding

“describes the consequences of the rise in average global temperatures, which are expected to amplify the abnormal: hotter heat spells, longer and sharper droughts, more violent storms, and more intense flooding. Given anticipated warming trajectories, many of these physical changes are statistically predictable and can be fairly accurately modeled. But as an ecologist, I fear it is the alterations to the living realm where “weirdness” will be a most apropos, if not downright tepid, label. This is certainly the case in my area of study — the aquatic realm — where global weirding is already well underway.”[vi]

Weirdness manifests in the unpredictability and instability of earth’s systems. It also travels to our societies, our social structures and our psyches that developed in an age of relative stability since the. Geoscientist Marcia Bjornerud writes that

“in many ways, our advanced technologies make us less flexible than previous societies in the face of change. We have made huge infrastructural investments in coastal cities based on a bet that sea level will remain constant. We have built sprawling cities in the desert on the assumption that snow and rain will keep refilling reservoirs. We have a food production system that is predicated on the belief that old, familiar weather patterns will always return. But the weather is getting weird.”[vii]

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people have been acting pretty mad in relation to climate. Whether you think throwing soup at paintings is mad, or that it is an act of sanity in a world that has lost touch with reality by ignoring climate science, global weirding now manifests as climate madness.

“An alteration of the relation to the world: this is the scholarly term for madness”, writes Bruno Latour,[viii] and he lists five types of madness: the science deniers that believe dark forces have manipulated the science and there is a worldwide conspiracy amongst climate scientists; the ecomodernists that look to geo-engineering to solve the climate crisis; the eco-depressed that either doesn’t know how to get out of bed in the morning or, if they do, glue themselves to highways (and, in some cases, talk show tables). The fourth group are the ones that avoid climate altogether or have succumbed to doomerism and resigned themselves to their garden or their bubble. But the maddest of all according to Latour (and I count myself among them) are the ones that believe somehow it’s not too late to act. I believe that facing our existential fears and acknowledging our climate madness is both the cause and solution to our current predicament. The Anthropocene will turn into a healthier and saner age, I’m sure of it. It will be too late, yes. But it is already too late, and it has been for a while.

All of these mad groups must read. In the coming months, I will discuss one book a month and hope that you will read it too. Or if you don’t have time, that you will take one or more of the concepts it introduces or develops.

I read these books as part of a project that explores the philosophy of time as a therapy for climate madness. Timefulness,[ix] a wonderful concept introduced by Marcia Bjornerud, could be developed further. But first, we must come to grips with why we are not timeful – or no longer timeful – in the first place. Infinite distraction, introduced by media scholar Dominic Pettman,[x] is a diagnosis of this condition in which social media and the attention economy are so all-pervasive that we don’t have the bandwidth to concentrate on the greatest challenge of our century because there’s something urgent and important happening on all our timelines. Matthew Crawford finds an answer to this question in the relationship that ‘we’ have with the world beyond our heads,[xi] and he blames Kant for introducing a concept of the autonomous individual subject that is cruising through life in a safe, modern isolated car.

These three books are optional reading. We’ll start our series officially next week with the first installment: SAD PLANETS by Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker.[xii] And if you want to read ahead, next up is Marcia Bjornerud’s TURNING TO STONE.[xiii]

Published 19-08-2024

This series of book reflections and reviews is conducted by Mario Veen, an interdisciplinary philosopher and writer who is fascinated by global weirding. Mario is the host of the podcast Life From Plato’s Cave and the author of ‘Hoe Plato je uit je grot sleurt’ . Over the next twelve months, a new book review is published each month on Future Based. Additionally, two reading groups will be organized in the upcoming year to come together and discuss books, but more specifically: Climate Madness.

 

[i] https://e360.yale.edu/features/with_temperatures_rising_here_comes_global_weirding

[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/opinion/17friedman.html

[iii] https://www.youtube.com/@globalweirding

[iv] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is philosophy? Columbia University Press, 1994.

[v] Bal, Mieke. Travelling concepts in the humanities: A rough guide. University of Toronto press, 2002.

[vi] https://e360.yale.edu/features/with_temperatures_rising_here_comes_global_weirding

[vii] Bjornerud, Marcia. “Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world.” (2018): 1-224.

[viii] Latour, Bruno. “Facing Gaia.” Six lectures on the political theology of nature. Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh (2013).

[ix] Bjornerud, Marcia. “Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world.” (2018): 1-224.

[x] Pettman, Dominic. Infinite distraction: Paying attention to social media. John Wiley & Sons, 2016.

[xi] Crawford, Matthew B. The world beyond your head: On becoming an individual in an age of distraction. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

[xii] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Sad+Planets-p-9781509562374

[xiii] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250875891/turningtostone

 

Editor: Victoria Libucha