fergie maxwell

Canadian Content at ASLE 2025 8 - 11, 17-18 July - Hybrid - The American Society for Literature and Environment (ASLE) is holding its biennial conference at the University of Maryland, College Park, July 8-11, 2025, and virtually,...

We've got your guide to all the Canadian Content at #ASLE2025 next week! - @asle-us.bsky.social

niche-canada.org/2025/07/05/c...

#envhum #envhist #ecocriticism

I’m not saying AI is evil — god forbid I be that moralistic and clear — I’m saying it is worse than that. It’s MID. Too mid to do much more than externalize some risk, produce some mid documents, and accelerate climate risk as a cute little benefit.

looking to volume, we can attend to the processes through which sky came to be rendered empty in the first place, and ask what kinds of other arrangements of the human and non-human might be made available when the availability of anonymous, empty matter is not assumed as ontological condition. 6/6

Today, the sky fills up both materially (with GHG emissions and wildfire particulate and various forms of solar radiation management) and imaginatively (as a site of risk and opportunity) 5/6

The maintenance of heritage facades on new build condos in Toronto indexes these processes of volumetric uneven development; assets crowd into the blank volume newly revealed inside of and above existing structures 4/6

They amass anonymous “aggregate” matter into the excavation and development of assets (in this case condos) to capitalize on unevenly developed margins and to integrate these within the scalar relations of global capitalism 3/6

These imaginaries are subtended by an ontology of empty volume extending into the air and into the ground 2/6

Emptiness has a long + well documented history as a colonial technology and as many critical geographers have noted it persists in the speculative imaginaries of urban real estate 1/6

My new article in Urban Studies, where I look at the discourse of empty volume in neoliberal urban development and beyond:

Under the paving stones at the Bloordale Beach: Sub-terra urbs nullius and volumetric colonialism in Toronto. Urban Studies, 0(0). doi.org/10.1177/0042...

every book is like, what if the CLIMATE could HAVE SEX

The Bill Gates Era of Climate Giving Has Ended Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.

Bill Gates has liquidated his climate policy and advocacy organization, laying off dozens of staff in Washington, Brussels, and elsewhere.

It’s another giant retrenchment for the billionaire, who had already slashed his climate grant budget last month. heatmap.news/climate/brea...

this is spot on. would you be willing to share the name of the full citation?

This is the most wretched campaign of deliberate, explicit persecution the United States has perpetrated against a minority group in decades. Many of the most important people in politics and journalism are busying themselves trying to figure out how little to say or do about it.

It takes a very cold heart to think that somehow, a person who is alive but constantly wishes they were dead is an acceptable outcome.