Abstract
“The door refused to open. It said ‘five cents, please’. He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. ‘I’ll pay you tomorrow’, he told the door. Again, it remained locked tight. ‘What I pay you’, he informed it, ‘is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you’. ‘I think otherwise’, the door said. ‘Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt’. He found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. ‘You discover I’m right’, the door said. It sounded smug.” In one of my favorite science fiction novels, the Ubik, Philipp Dick (1969) describes a futuristic world where everything, even the door of our house or our fridge, operates with money. This world of the total supreme of money is also a world where science and technology, at their most extreme version, ruin: even death seems to have been defeated since people can come back after they died. This is, nonetheless, only for a limited time period during which the nearly dead are kept in a state of “semi-life” in a “cold-pac moratorium” where those who are still alive can still visit them and talk to them preferably about their unfinished businesses. Ubik, from the Latin word “ubique,” appears most often in the book in the form of an aerosol spray and seems to counter time-regression saving the lives of those to whom it is applied. In a very interesting article in Guardian, Sam Jordison argues that Ubik, as reality, does not make much coherent sense: “the unease, the difficulty, the contradictions are partly the point. It’s all about the realization that things aren’t as they seem – that everything you thought you knew is wrong.” As one of the contributors in the discussion below the Guardian article (with the nickname “Mexican2”) points out, after the first hint in the book that something is definitely wrong, people are trying to construct “some harmonious whole to cover up the chaos” without ever actually reaching any negotiated relationship with what the world is because something always disrupts them. In this weakness to make sense of a world of constant contradictions and see the world “upside down,” as Eduardo Galeano urged us several years ago, is where this book begins.
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Notes
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As Moore (2017) argues by drawing on McBrien (2016) and Dawson (2016) the Capitalocene is also a Necrocene—a system that not only accumulates capital but drives extinction. He further writes (Moore 2017, p. 597): “At stake is how we think through the relations of Capitalocene and Necrocene – between the creativity of capitalist development and its deep exterminism. That exterminism is not anthropogenic but capitalogenic”.
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As Donna Haraway (2016) explains the word Chthulucene is a compound of two Greek roots (khthon and kainos) that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth. Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness.
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See the video here: https://vimeo.com/99079535.
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The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA Central Framework) is a statistical framework consisting of a set of tables and accounts, which guides the compilation of comparable statistics and indicators for policymaking, analysis and research. It has been produced and is released under the auspices of the United Nations, the European Commission, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group. The SEEA Central Framework is a framework for understanding the interactions between the economy and the environment and for describing changes in stocks of environmental assets. It puts statistics on the environment and its relationship to the economy at the core of official statistics. For more information see: https://seea.un.org/content/about-seea.
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Al Gore has invested in a broad array of environmentally friendly energy and technology business ventures, like carbon trading markets, solar cells and waterless urinals (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy-environment/03gore.html). Gore co-founded the Generation Investment Management in 2004, with the aim of pushing forward low-carbon finance and promoting alternatives to the fossil fuel economy (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/01/gore-warns-carbon-bubble).
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For more information see http://www.fern.org/campaign/carbon-trading/what-are-offsets.
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Apostolopoulou, E. (2020). Introduction. In: Nature Swapped and Nature Lost. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46788-3_1
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