Ecology

ECOLOGY: This time, MODERN TIMES looks at a book that, in its breadth and depth, treats our time and future, ecologically as well as culturally – as when culture is naturalized. About India: Here the most meticulous rituals are performed to keep the world in balance. About China: the Chinese emperors who used music to harmonize society. In Europe's stormy history, the dream of harmony and order is projected into the afterlife. Erland Kiøsterud tries to find a cosmology that can create a certain order and meaning in the world, while at the same time demanding total honesty. (See also our film about Kiøsterud here).

USA: The explosive power of the atomic bomb has seduced and dazzled politicians for over 80 years. With the atomic bomb came a victim mentality, invoking an 'urgent necessity' – but this was exaggerated and used to trivialize human suffering and ecological destruction. As an example of the tests we struggle with today, the contamination that will affect humans and other life forms in Great Bear Lake for at least 800 years to come.

POLICY: In a time when right-wing radicals create false security in connection with myths about nation and family, the left must also learn to speak to emotions. It matters little whether one is right; one must also appeal to people's emotions. Our vulnerability needs a language that politicians understand.

ENVIRONMENT: While politicians either downplay the climate crisis or focus on illusory sustainability, Kohei Saito shows what both reinforces the eco-crisis and social inequality – exemplified through "Jevons' paradox" and the "Netherlands error".

ECOLOGY: Must the limitations of democracy bear the responsibility for our collective climate defeat? What crime does the Norwegian state commit, for example, when it allows the mining company Nordic Mining to dump the toxic substance SIBX in the Førdefjord? in Odin Lysaker's theory of democracy, love and care become political, and ecology existential.

PHILOSOPHY: Can a way of thinking where becoming, growth and change are fundamental, open up new and more ecologically fruitful understandings of and attitudes towards the world? For Deleuze and Guattari, desire does not begin with lack and is not desire for what we do not have. Through a focus on desire as connection and connection – an understanding of identity and subjectivity as fundamentally linked to the intermediate that the connection constitutes. What they bring out by pointing this out is how Oedipal desire and capitalism are linked to each other, and to the constitution of a particular form of personal identity or subjectivity. But in this essay by Kristin Sampson, Anti-Oedipus is also linked to the pre-Socratic Hesiod, to something completely pre-Oedipal. MODERN TIMES gives the reader here a philosophical deep dive for thought.

ECOLOGY: On the one hand, plastic replaces more polluting building materials. On the other hand, we have enormous amounts of plastic waste. We have produced 7 billion tonnes of plastic as of today.

DEMOCRACY: MODERN TIMES has chosen two angles on the same book. What about community-led initiatives as a contribution to the European Green Deal?

DIRECT DEMOCRACY: We need a new social system with commons and decline. And it is possible to achieve it. We have enough experience and knowledge from previous times. It's just a matter of getting started, writes Yavor Tarinski in a recent debate book.

Environmental campaign: The productivity of nature itself must be taken into account – other species, ecosystems, soil, the atmosphere and the sea. This was Bruno Latour's last book.

Ecology: What does this overwhelming information maze of a book really say about ecofascism? Have we ended up in a downward argument that only leads us deeper into conflict-creating dichotomies – us/them, left/right and nice/naughty?

Nature: What about the world's last five megaforests and the people who live in them? The intact forest landscapes are of inestimable importance for the climate.

ECOLOGY: With the planet as an anchor point, various themes are highlighted here – growth and non-growth, the anthropocene and our understanding of nature, tipping points, disasters and possible futures, geoengineering, fabulous animals and biopolitics.

ECOLOGY: Marit Bendz has met gardeners, agronomists, farmers and enthusiasts who in various ways run an agriculture contrary to government recommendations.

ECOLOGY: Despite this book's general critique of anthropocentrism, one could go even further in practicing an ecocentric ethic.

ECO VILLAGE: Communal house, own organic farming, a professionally run livestock farm, various network models in permaculture and economics.