Ep 6 - "Planning The Good Anthropocene" with Leigh Phillips

GMU Cultural Studies Colloquium

In the sixth episode of the "Capitalism, Climate Change, and Culture" podcast series from GMU Cultural Studies, Richard Todd Stafford talks with Leigh Phillips, a science and politics writer who may be read in Nature, Scientific American, The Guardian, and Jacobin. He's the author of the books Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn Addicts: A Defense of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff and, with Michal Rozworski, The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundations for Socialism. Stafford and Phillips focus on how Phillips' broader concerns intersect with the arguments he advanced in "Planning the Good Anthropocene," the theme of one of Phillips' widely-shared articles, which was developed further in the penultimate chapter of The People's Republic of Walmart and a lecture he gave at George Mason University.

This podcast series is associated with George Mason University Cultural Studies' Colloquium Series. This year's series is called "Capitalism, Climate Change, and Culture." The industrial revolution liberated human beings from the cycles of nature — or so it once seemed. It turns out that greenhouse gases, a natural byproduct of coal- and petroleum-burning industries, lead to global warming, and that we are now locked into a long warming trend: a trend that will raise sea levels, enhance the occurrence of extreme weather events, and ultimately could threaten food supplies and other vital supports for modern civilization. This podcast series examines the cultural and political-economic dimensions of our ongoing, slow-moving climate crisis. We engage experts from a variety of fields and disciplines to ask questions about capitalism and the environment. How did we get into this mess? How bad is it? Where do we go from here? What sorts of steps might mitigate the damage — or perhaps someday reverse it? At stake are deep questions about humanity’s place in and relationship to nature — and what our systems of governance, production, and distribution might look like in the future.

— Roger Lancaster, Colloquium Organizer

Learn more about the Cultural Studies Program at GMU: http://culturalstudies.gmu.edu

Learn more about Leigh Phillips: https://leighphillips.wordpress.com/

Music: Kevin MacLeod "Acid Trumpet," used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.