Philosophy & Culture

Alexi Barnstone interviews philosophy Professor Moira Gatens on the power of the imagination.

“That’s where the time came in, that I have all this time, but I’m not using my time well or managing my time well, or being productive or I couldn’t account for my time.

And it just became incredibly apparent that all of that language was capitalist language and that I needed another language because capitalist language wasn’t serving me. Right? I did things all day, I had lists, but I felt like shit at the end of the day. And that doesn’t make for a good parent.”

The Red Rebels fulfil this same function amid the many public demonstrations that are occurring in response to the environmental crisis. However, they do so without speech or song: rather, they mutely embody the emotional landscape surrounding the protest. In one of our first actions, our local Red Rebel Brigade led protesters from the Climate Strike on a march to the office of our Member of Parliament. Collectively we delivered a letter of appeal for more effective action to address climate change, which had brought prolonged drought and extreme bushfires to our region.

Effective Altruism is a movement that sprung up roughly a decade ago around an assortment of academic philosophers, jaded finance professionals and rationalist internet bloggers with the intention of finding a way to unite generosity, philanthropy and altruism with scientific principles and a kind of precision that its proponents felt was missing in the broader charity sector.

This prepubescent movement has, like all good social phenomena, experienced its fair share of growing pains. There are lots of ways the movement could easily go astray and only a few ways it could truly succeed.

In 2015 Elizabeth Kolbert won a Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Her book, The Sixth Extinction:An Unnatural History, argued that we are in the midst of a manmade sixth extinction. In the book she claims that by the end of the 21st century between twenty and fifty percent of all the living species on earth.

Kolbert presents a morbid, confronting account of reality in the anthropocene. That contemporary society, in its present form, flourishes at the expense of nature.

A revolution is surfacing in design. Within contemporary culture, many have become disconnected from nature and reliant on the facade of man-made environments. Those that currently hold power in design based industries view nature as raw material for use and disposal that makes mass production possible on a scale large enough to satisfy modern material culture.

In 1948 the poet W. H. Auden used the word Topophilia while introducing John Betjeman’s poetry book Slick but Not Streamlined, a humorous and satirical reflection of the author’s love for Victorian architecture. Auden explained that the word had less to do with a love of nature and more a dependency on a landscape infused with a sense of history.

When Environmentalism erupted in the 1960s the Land Art movement emerged alongside it as a sensitive and conceptual consideration of our relationship with nature, as well characterizing a greater shift towards viewing the landscape as more than an ocular phenomenon.