A volcano emerged from a cornfield in Michoacán, Mexico, on February 20, 1943. Its sudden appearance alarmed residents in surrounding villages and excited outsiders who traveled to the Meseta Purépecha to see the spectacular natural phenomenon. Within the first two years of activity, the residents of two of the towns nearest the volcano had to evacuate before their communities were completely covered with lava. The Mexican government took advantage of the natural disaster to show off generous aid to Indigenous communities (...) and promote an agenda favoring modernization. In recovery from the Mexican Revolution in the mid-twentieth century, the federal government reshaped national policy to focus on modernization. The miraculous birth of a volcano in a remote western village provided the perfect opportunity for national newspapers to tout effective government aid for the seemingly helpless Indigenous communities. What newspaper articles omitted was the tireless work of local leaders to shape the government assistance. Most local advocates already had a platform, while women and non-Spanish speakers had limited opportunities to communicate their ideas widely. Initial government assistance was not formulated with the well-being or culture of the residents in mind, but local highlanders soon realized that the government relied on their compliance. This gave local leaders the power to advocate for their needs. (shrink)

In Saving Animals from Volcanoes, readers will meet the courageous people and organizations that rush in to save animals when disasters strike. from rescue ...

Earthquake and Volcano Deformation is the first textbook to present the mechanical models of earthquake and volcanic processes, emphasizing earth-surface deformations that can be compared with observations from Global Positioning System receivers, Interferometric Radar, and borehole strain- and tiltmeters. Paul Segall provides the physical and mathematical fundamentals for the models used to interpret deformation measurements near active faults and volcanic centers. Segall highlights analytical methods of continuum mechanics applied to problems of active crustal deformation. Topics include elastic dislocation theory in (...) homogeneous and layered half-spaces, crack models of faults and planar intrusions, elastic fields due to pressurized spherical and ellipsoidal magma chambers, time-dependent deformation resulting from faulting in an elastic layer overlying a viscoelastic half-space and related earthquake cycle models, poroelastic effects due to faulting and magma chamber inflation in a fluid-saturated crust, and the effects of gravity on deformation. He also explains changes in the gravitational field due to faulting and magmatic intrusion, effects of irregular surface topography and earth curvature, and modern concepts in rate- and state-dependent fault friction. This textbook presents sample calculations and compares model predictions against field data from seismic and volcanic settings from around the world. Earthquake and Volcano Deformation requires working knowledge of stress and strain, and advanced calculus. It is appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in geophysics, geology, and engineering. Professors: A supplementary Instructor's Manual is available for this book. It is restricted to teachers using the text in courses. For information on how to obtain a copy, refer to: https://press.princeton.edu/class_use/solutions.html. (shrink)

The eruption of Krakatau in 1883 has been studied more as a global event than a moment of change for Indonesia. The eruption has a prominent place in world history and many interdisciplinary studies of both site and event, positioned as a moment that was pivotal to the advancement of volcanology as a field of study and the establishment of infrastructure that enabled colonial knowledge-making. Little is known about the site before the colonial period. Further obscuring historical changes in sociopolitical (...) governance of the archipelago resulting from the eruption is the undue attention paid to religious, particularly Muslim, extremism as a disaster response. This essay, however, argues that the instrumentalization of science, not religion, was central to statist management of the volcano in the twentieth century. The Krakatau eruption posed a management challenge for the state, which attempted to insulate the surrounding populations from risk while sanctioning visits on the site for science and tourism. This essay surveys state-led efforts to corral, conserve, and commercialize the volcano from 1921, when the Dutch colonial state first declared the site as a nature reserve, to 1991, the year the Ujung Kulon Marine National Park that encompassed the Krakatau area was formally established. The modern management of the site and its attendant politics created new vulnerabilities even as the state moved toward domesticating and (imperfectly) anticipating its hazards. (shrink)

ArgumentIn Italy, only 2 per cent of the population consider scientists and experts to be society's leading personalities. Scientists are classified among the “weak social groups” and more precisely as those who have little influence either because they lack representation in the media, or because they lack resources. This article contributes to the current debate on science policies in Europe and addresses the question of why science has such a low reputation in Italy. How did this situation emerge and what (...) methods should be taken to tackle it beyond merely increasing financial resources? An historical overview of how Marcello Carapezza and Alberto Monroy created leading research centers in geochemistry and developmental biology in Palermo offers insight into the opportunities and threats posed by Italy's academic system. This brief analysis of the Italian academic system should interest international readers who want their country to evolve from a closed, corporative, centralized system into a country that can compete at an international level to attract talented students and resources and achieve a higher scientific reputation. (shrink)

The plague of 541–542 ad started in Pelusium, a town in Egypt, and reached Constantinople in 542 ad. The following series summarizes the event and its repeated appearance until 746 ad.

_This article focuses on the poetry of Albert Saijo, one of the lesser-known figures in the Beat literary movement. I suggest here that Saijo’s work should be better-known, and in drawing out some resonances between Saijo’s poetry and Nietzsche’s philosophy, I make a case that Saijo should be taken seriously as a poet and philosopher. Saijo has been described as “a post-apocalyptic wisecracking prophet, speaking the language of the human future,” and here I provide some justification for this statement. One (...) could say that the Beat literary movement developed around the intersection of Existentialism and Zen, and this article explores that juncture in examining the play between language and silence in the writings of Saijo and Nietzsche. In addition to taking Saijo seriously, this article perhaps also opens another perspective on Nietzsche. I draw attention to the rhapsodic nature of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and suggest that the thought of eternal recurrence might be something like a Zen kōan, or even a joke by another post-apocalyptic wisecracking prophet. The thought of eternal recurrence is compared with the bodhisattva vows, and Saijo’s poem on those vows is highlighted as a great example of his “Zensational” rhapsody._. (shrink)

The literature on the venerable aesthetic category of the sublime often provides us with lists of sublime phenomena — mountains, storms, deserts, volcanoes, oceans, the starry sky, and so on. But it has long been recognized that what matters is the experience of such objects. We then find that one of the most consistent claims about this experience is that it involves an element of fear. Meanwhile, the recognition of the sublime as a category of aesthetic appreciation implies that (...) attraction, admiration or pleasure is also present.1However, there is also a sense of fear and attraction when we watch car chases or fights. Neither of these is an occasion for the sublime so much as a visceral sort of excitement.2 As .. (shrink)

Summary Analogue models are actual physical setups used to model something else. They are especially useful when what we wish to investigate is difficult to observe or experiment upon due to size or distance in space or time: for example, if the thing we wish to investigate is too large, too far away, takes place on a time scale that is too long, does not yet exist or has ceased to exist. The range and variety of analogue models is too (...) extensive to attempt a survey. In this article, I describe and discuss several different analogue model experiments, the results of those model experiments, and the basis for constructing them and interpreting their results. Examples of analogue models for surface waves in lakes, for earthquakes and volcanoes in geophysics, and for black holes in general relativity, are described, with a focus on examining the bases for claims that these analogues are appropriate analogues of what they are used to investigate. A table showing three different kinds of bases for reasoning using analogue models is provided. Finally, it is shown how the examples in this article counter three common misconceptions about the use of analogue models in physics. (shrink)

This study examines the entanglements of natural disasters and cultural changes from an ecosemiotic point of view. Taking the case of Mt. Merapi’s periodic eruptions and the locals’ interpretations of such constant natural hazards, it is based on empirical data gathered through longitudinal qualitative fieldworks on the local communities surrounding this volcano. In order to adapt to the constant natural hazards in their environment, disaster prone societies develop unique sign systems binding cultural and natural processes. This study shows that traditionally, (...) unique sensorial-environmental sign systems have formed the basis of communication between human and environment, allowing the locals to perceive the eruption as a communication involving them and local environmental agencies. Recently, the eruptions have triggered the adoption of new livelihoods of local people, as well as the acceptance of new scientific signs for the interpretation of the activities of the volcano. The latter has been accompanied by significant cultural changes, including the adoption of the idea of progress and the transformation of the previous entanglements of local culture and its natural environment. The study concludes that natural disasters, entangled with ongoing social transformations, may play a fundamental role as triggers of semiotic change in a community. Such semiotic change can in turn modify the interpretation of the natural disaster itself, and in that way shift the way humans perceive and interact with their environment. (shrink)

We discuss explanation of an earlier event by a later event, and argue that prima facie cases of backwards event explanation are ubiquitous. Some examples: (1) I am tidying my flat because my brother is coming to visit tomorrow. (2) The scarlet pimpernels are closing because it is about to rain. (3) The volcano is smoking because it is going to erupt soon. We then look at various ways people might attempt to explain away these prima facie cases by arguing (...) that in each case the 'real' explanation is something else. We argue that none of the explaining-away strategies are successful, and so any plausible account of explanation should either make room for backwards explanation, or have a good story to tell about why it doesn't have to. (shrink)

The objectives of this article are (i) to identify the most challenging ethical dilemmas and questions arising from the experiences of communities and professionals affected by or involved in volcanic eruptions, including risk management, the dissemination of information, and tourism; and (ii) to provide arguments for intercultural ethics to address these dilemmas. Intercultural ethics provide invaluable resources to disaster ethics across all three phases of the complete disaster management cycle. In this article, intercultural ethics is viewed as an ethics grounded (...) in ongoing dialogue, facilitating the examination and establishment of norms and a critical reflection on values and their evolution. This approach recognizes power dynamics that may influence fair participation in dialogues and aims to address them, while also integrating elements of deliberative ethics to ensure that dialogues genuinely contribute to legitimizing decisions. Intercultural sensibility helps bridge the gap between experts and non-experts in both directions (a) by emphasizing the duty of transferring scientific knowledge (for experts) and the responsibility of acquiring scientific literacy (for citizens); and (b) by highlighting the importance of a ‘knowledge dialogue’ that acknowledges the non-scientific knowledge of citizens, rooted in their cultural background and experiences of dealing with past disasters, and shaping life in volcanic territories. (shrink)

From the early-to-mid-twentieth century, major debates were underway about the very structure and development of the earth. During this period, geopolitical disputes abounded, and in some regions of the earth, geology played a central role in territorial claims. On the Antarctic Deception Island, claimed by the United Kingdom, Chile, and Argentina, records of what would now be considered clear indications of volcanic activity date back to its discovery in 1820. Yet despite regular and widely published observations of earthquakes, hot springs, (...) and fumaroles, Deception was very often identified as an extinct volcano, surprising many with two unpredicted eruptions in 1967 and 1969. This article will use the case of Deception Island to argue how the island’s extinct status was pivotal in a region where occupation had become vital for making territorial claims. As such, our understandings of geology are often deeply intertwined with local geopolitics. (shrink)

God's public image has perennially suffered from the apparent botch He has made of Creation, or our portion of it, at any rate. “What's so good about God”, people ask, “when He permits volcanoes in Lisbon, famines in Ghana, earthquakes in San Francisco?” Why is there always, in fact, whichever way we bite it, a worm in the apple?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 431 Cynthia Belmont and Angela Stroud Bugging Out: Apocalyptic Masculinity and Disaster Consumerism in Offgrid Magazine Popular conceptions of survivalism in the United States typically feature the eccentric, backwoods, working-class figures found in television shows such as Doomsday Preppers and Prepper Hillbillies. Offgrid magazine, which first hit the stands in the summer of 2013, however, sells a compellingly (...) bourgeois personal connection to disaster in the vein of men’s self-improvement literature, wherein successful masculinity requires courage, preparedness for calamity, and the resources to shop. Each issue of Offgrid focuses on a “real-life” survivalist or a singular catastrophic event that is dramatically represented on the cover by a self-sufficient man decked out in gear that will allow him to survive a crash landing, escape a city devastated by an earthquake, navigate the hazards of a hacker-created blackout, or evade the destruction of an erupting volcano.1 Filled with articles offering tips on how to prepare, self-defense strategies, profiles of survivalists, disaster scenarios, gear reviews, and advertisements, Offgrid mainstreams prepper culture by retooling the The authors contributed equally to this article; the order listed is alphabetical and should not be construed as implying differing contributions. 1. The terms “survivalist” and “prepper” apply to anyone committed to honing the skills and acquiring the resources required to survive in any context, including disasters, and are used interchangeably in Offgrid. 432 Cynthia Belmont and Angela Stroud face of apocalyptic survival as a regular-guy protagonist whose low-profile normalcy disguises the smoldering heroic potential that will ignite within him when disaster strikes. In this article, drawing upon insights from the sociology of masculinity, environmental feminism, and ecocriticism, we examine the representation of gender, nature, and disaster in issues of Offgrid, spanning nearly three years, from June 2015 through February 2018. While vivid depictions of cataclysm might seem provocative enough to captivate the Offgrid reader, we argue that its principal appeal is that it gives its ninety -one-percent male audience the opportunity to engage directly in what Casey Kelly terms “apocalyptic manhood,” an emergent version of American masculinity that “confirm[s] the necessity of masculine skills as society meets its demise.”2 Thus, Offgrid provides an occasion for readers to salvage a masculinity that feels perpetually threatened within contemporary American culture—a highly effective strategy in promoting the expansion of what we term disaster consumerism. We concur with ecofeminist Greta Gaard’s contention that “masculine gender identity has been constructed as so very antiecological, and thus its interrogation and transformation seem especially crucial” at this time of environmental crisis; this concern resonates particularly poignantly with regard to the apocalyptic imaginary.3 Marketing Disaster, Selling Masculinity Scholars have long argued that commercial media play an important role in circulating gender ideals that are “rooted in consumer capitalism wherein profit can be produced by generating insecurity about one’s body and one’s consumer choices.”4 Of course, despite their influence, advertisers do not create insecurities out of whole cloth; rather, they operate within the context of shifting gender discourses and cultural anxieties. Whereas the authors of a 2005 study found that alcohol ads portrayed men as affable losers who, rejected by strong women, 2. “2018 Recoil Offgrid Media Kit,” Recoil Offgrid; Casey Ryan Kelly, “The Man-pocalypse: Doomsday Preppers and the Rituals of Apocalyptic Manhood,” Text and Performance Quarterly 36, no. 2–3 (2016): 96. 3. Greta Gaard, Critical Ecofeminism (New York: Lexington Books, 2017), 167 (italics in original). 4. Susan M. Alexander, “Stylish Hard Bodies: Branded Masculinity in Men’s Health Magazine,” Sociological Perspectives 46, no. 4 (2003): 551. Cynthia Belmont and Angela Stroud 433 were driven to drink with their buddies, an analysis of Super Bowl commercials just five years later demonstrated that the tone had become “a simpler, angrier one [that was] crafted to galvanize men to buy.”5 The authors of the latter study suggest that the masculine aggression in the ads they analyzed reflects men’s economic insecurities, which advertisers exploit by encouraging men to feel nostalgic for and frustrated about their diminished power. Ads telling men to “wear the pants” and take a stand... (shrink)

In this essay I outline core themes in the political geology of twentieth-century volcano science. The essay explores volcano science at the intersection of cross-disciplinary preoccupations with the role of the earth sciences in shaping the social and environmental crises of the present and how to find a way out of them. The essay then turns to volcanology in Indonesia at the turn of the twentieth century to destabilize persistent narratives in the historiography of volcano science that center European and (...) North American actors. I show how starting an account of twentieth-century volcano science from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes reveals the roles of Indonesian intellectuals and knowledge traditions in shaping volcano science and, more broadly, modern theories of the earth, its evolution, and structure. The aim and provocation of starting from Indonesia are to open new epistemic pluralisms in the earth sciences, in particular around conceptualizations of the relationship between geological matter and society, history and ancestrality, and the politics of the earth. (shrink)

This article examines the philosophical issues that arise when preserving urban geological sites or urban geosites. These are preserved not only because of their geological value but also because of aesthetic, cultural, and economic reasons. To do so, it examines the geosite constituted by Olot and its surroundings, a city in Spain that extends amid four dormant volcanoes. It explores the metaphysical paradox that these geosites have become what they are due to the preservation of destruction: human-caused interventions, mostly (...) extraction of materials and exploitation of the land, are precisely what made these geosites visible as sites worth preserving and determining their metaphysical status. It further explores the preservation criteria and shows how they have determined the status of the geosite. Second, it shows how in such urban geosites the collapse of two diametrically opposed conceptions of time – the geological eon and the lived human time – occurs. Lastly, it discusses aesthetic aspects of such geosites by considering aesthetic experience as a primarily cognitive endeavor and shows how metaphysical, epistemological, and aesthetic issues of preservation of geosites are inextricably linked. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 593-610 [Access article in PDF] The Desire to Know the Secrets of the World Edward Peters I. The letter to Ferdinand and Isabella that Christopher Columbus intended to serve as the preface to the Libro de las profecías began with a remarkable observation about his own career and the particular temperament it had shaped in him: From a very young age (...) I began to navigate the seas, and I have continued to do so until today. This art inclines those who follow it to desire to know the secrets of this world. 1Although Columbus was certainly not unlearned, there is an artlessness and directness about his remark that suggest that whatever Columbus may have meant by "the secrets of the world" and the desire of navigators to know them, he was probably not speaking reconditely or mystically. 2 [End Page 593]Nor was Columbus the only early sixteenth-century practical man who spoke this way. The letters of Hernán Cortés, hardly a philosopher or a navigator, pointed out to correspondents that it was "a universal condition of man to want to know," and that he was first of all desirous of knowledge "of the secrets of these parts"; that "many new secrets" had been learned from the discoveries; of a volcano, "I wished to know the secret of this, which seemed something of a miracle." 3If practical folk could speak thus at the turn of the sixteenth century, it is not surprising that in the course of that century their rulers should appropriate the language of secrets, including the secrets of distant places, and the desire to know them and in doing so to transform their realms into information-gathering states, using detailed questionaires to assemble and organize new data just as they assembled cabinets of curiosities, libraries, zoos, observatories, and botanical gardens. As J. H. Elliott put it: But curiosity also had its due place within a wider Christian framework. At the end of the century, José de Acosta, in his great Natural and Moral History of the Indies, likened men to ants in their refusal to let themselves be deterred, once they had set out on their quest for facts. "And the high and eternal wisdom of the Creator uses this natural curiosity of men to communicate the light of His holy gospel to peoples who still live in the darkness of their errors." This assumption, that all knowledge was subordinated to a higher purpose and fitted into a providential design, was crucial for the assimilation of the New World of America by sixteenth-century Christendom. 4Elliott's characterization of an honorific Christian intellectual curiosity represented a very small part of a very complex semantic universe that centered on the Latin term curiositas and its vernacular cognates, not all of whose meanings were neutral or honorific. Just three years before Acosta wrote there had, after all, appeared the first printed history of Doctor Faustus, another sixteenth-century practical man who was also interested in the secrets of the world. 5 And not [End Page 594] too many years after Acosta wrote, another practical being, Milton's Lucifer, also went forth boldly to seek new worlds. 6 Only in a restricted sense could the desire to know the secrets of the world be understood in the way that Columbus, Cortés, Philip II, and Acosta celebrated it. In many cases it had to be extricated from a semantic universe in which it had long been identified with less honorable motives and more dangerous or ephemeral objects.The most influential exploration of part of that semantic universe appeared in Hans Blumenberg's long essay entitled, "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity," first published as part of a larger work in 1966, later slightly revised and separately reprinted, and translated into English in 1983. 7 Blumenberg's particular understanding of the history of philosophy, however, and his narrow focus on the natural sciences as the arena of "theoretical" curiosity limited both his conceptualization and his argument. In... (shrink)

Is the creative act like a volcano: an outburst that lights up the universe? This volume connects reason with desire and the arts in ways that enable us to imagine how creativity can bring us closer to the truth. The artistic quest for freedom stands in stark contrast to philosophy's call to subordinate art to reason and tradition. The struggle between them has culminated in artistic attempts to subsume philosophical matters within the domain of art. One central question in this (...) study is what the consequences will be of a final dissolution of the boundary between the two domains: will all that remains of the artwork be an abstract howl of the rock – our rock, the planet – itself? (shrink)

The Reveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme are one of the important books of the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this text, Senancour limns an image of the world in accordance with the scientific thought of his time. It is a disenchanted image, dominated by mechanical necessity, and in it the distinction between good and evil no longer holds. God is absent; the world is not his creation. And Senancour expresses no regret:Everything in nature is indifferent, for everything (...) is necessary: all is beautiful, for all is determined. The individual is nothing, as a being apart: his cause and his end lie beyond him. Only the whole exists absolutely, invincibly, with no other cause, with no other end beyond itself, with no laws but those of its nature, with no other product than its permanence…. The beautiful, the true, the just, evil, and disorder exist only for the weakness of mortals…. The same earth contains happy orchards and ruinous volcanoes. The villain triumphs, the hero dies; the orchard withers, the volcano is snuffed out; one and the same destruction devours both the animate and the inanimate, shrouded in the same oblivion; and in a world reborn, there remains not a trace of what was abhorred or deified in a bygone world. (shrink)

In his latest book, the prolific writer and thinker Alphonso Lingis brings interdisciplinarity and lyrical philosophizing to the weight of reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Lingis seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences and those of others as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows, (...) reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of things. Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses? Lingis’s investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds. (shrink)

When I proposed having the future at the center of this issue, which marks the 10th anniversary of Humanist Studies & The Digital Age, I was aware of the complexity of this controversial topic. The possibility of magnifiche sorti e progressive — a “splendid and progressive destiny” — made possible by human technology inspires hope in some and critique in others. The expression comes from one of Leopardi’s last poems, Ginestra o il fiore del deserto (Broom, or the flower of (...) the desert), where he uses it ironically to suggest the powerlessnesss of humanity in the face of natural disasters. The poet argues with all those who praise the human condition and progress acritically. He condemns their hubris and bitterly invites them to visit the arid slopes of Vesuvius, reduced to a desert by the volcano’s eruption. (shrink)

This paper on the occasion of the 500th birthday of the great Saxon humanistic scholar Georgius Agricola deals with his contributions to geology in the narrow sense. These, contrary to his voluminous works on mining, metallurgy and mineralogy (De re metallica and De natura fossilium, resp.) are parts of the booksDe ortu et causis subterraneorum andDe natura eorum, quae effluunt ex terra. In those we find statements on the causes of earthquakes, on volcanos and the subterranean fire as well as (...) the effects of the running water in mountain-building. Agricola's ideas on geological time and his statements on dynamics of the Earth's crust are remarkable. (shrink)

To avoid the deadends, I redeploy[52] the idea that integral human freedom (and understanding) has two modes. One is "natural" and the other "supernatural," though dividing the matter that way supposes the "natural" is the residue after the integrated whole is lost, because the supernatural[53] contains the natural "eminently" the way olympic winning routines envelop the qualifying skills.[54] In my account, humans were never "merely" objects in nature at all-- that is, objects, alongside stones and tigers and dinosaurs, that are (...) entirely consequences of matter and biotic life, or explicable the way trees and volcanos are. Humans never had a "completion"-- a fulfilment-- that can be defined by conditions of earthly life or attained by "flourishing," as other living things do.[55]. (shrink)

In this chapter, we offer an account of fear and risk in anticipation of catastrophe. We draw on the narrative response to the Mount Enta volcano in medieval Sicily to frame an evaluation of how fear can be seen to impact the understanding of risk when the event of that risk is the catastrophic suffering of an entire community. We aim to demonstrate how an exploration of the philosophical questions surrounding the emotion of fear and the understanding of risk can (...) contribute to broader, interdisciplinary dialogue on the experience of the disastrous and deadly. (shrink)

Friedrich Georg Jünger's The Failure of Technology was written under the shadow of World War II - the threat of a German sky black with enemy aircraft that splattered fire and death on the burnt-out caves of industrial man. "Lava, ashes, fumes, smoke, night-clouds lit up by fire" - the landscape of twentieth-century man erupts, in Jünger's pages, like a volcano returning man's boasted artifacts to that first wilderness that stretched back beyond the age of the gods. This book is (...) the sombre meditation of a poet who has looked into chaos, even into hell, and who has not flinched. (shrink)

SummaryIn the first part of the 19th century, geologists explained volcanoes, earthquakes and mountain-formation on the assumption that the earth has a large molten core underneath a very thin (25–50 mile) solid crust. This assumption was attacked on astronomical grounds by William Hopkins, who argued that the crust must be at least 800 miles thick, and on physical grounds by William Thomson, who showed that the earth as a whole behaves like a solid with high rigidity. Other participants in (...) the debate insisted that there is evidence for a fluid or plastic layer not far below the crust. It was also suggested that the interior of the earth is a supercritical fluid. By the end of the century many geologists had incorporated the doctrine of a completely solid earth into their theories. Acceptance of a relatively small liquid core, indicated by seismological research, was delayed for another two decades. (shrink)

She laughs to herself, and her whole body shakes with it—she's got a volcano to choke off. So she curls the fingers of one hand into a fist, and sears down its throat with her awareness, not burning but cooling, turning its own fury back on it to seal every breach. She forces the growing magma chamber, back, back, down, down …We know surprisingly little about rock. Rock is red-hot, creeping, viscous stuff that we rarely see, and touch at our (...) peril. For living things like us to enter into an intimate relationship with the lithic - to become enmeshed with rock - is to become rock. It is to meet with sudden, certain, cessation of life.At least, that's how it would be if we could encounter the bulk of the Earth's rock.... (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore the idea of human moral responsibility for (the outcomes) of natural disasters. First, I discuss the claim that there is often a human causal contribution to negative outcomes of even such paradigmatic natural disasters as earthquakes, typhoons, and volcano eruptions. Second, I attempt to move away from discussions attributing human causal responsibility to discussions attributing human moral responsibility for such outcomes (and to the obstacles to such attributions). I suggest that in most (...) (perhaps even all) cases of moral responsibility for the outcomes of natural disasters moral responsibility is grounded in culpable negligence, including culpable failure to prevent the side-effects of our actions or omissions. (shrink)

In this commentary I criticise Doris Gerber's intentionalistic reading of history. While an intentionalistic philosophy of history has some plausibility, a *purely* intentionalistic view is often irreconcilable with the most elementary common sense. For example, that history ought to be considered exclusively as the history of human action and not of things that simply happen to humans as well - like the outbreak of the volcano Vesuv in the year 79 which lead to the destructions of Pompeii. Or that historical (...) value judgments should always be judgments about the reasons for human action, which raises the questions if and how the unintended consequences of human action are to be judged. (shrink)

The 1911 eruption of Taal Volcano in the Philippine province of Batangas took an estimated 1,700–2,000 lives and rocked the foundations of the American colonial state in the archipelago. Since 1898, Americans colonized the Philippine future by shifting the benchmarks for a promised but perpetually delayed independence. Central to this strategy was the contention that colonial Bureaus of Agriculture, Forestry, Lands, and Science would attract investment in tropical commodities on the promise of great future returns by managing territory and discipling (...) so-called tribal peoples into a modern labor force. Forecasting was built into the logic and projects of colonial capitalism. Anticolonial critics, in turn, argued that the American failure to react to seismographic readings—to forecast for disaster—exposed the weakness of American claims to the future while the immediate sale of photographs of the dead and tours of the “volcano zone” hindered the relief. Ensuing contests over settlement on volcanoes, the purpose of monitoring, and the visual importance of Taal shows the centrality of volcanoes to colonial science and technocratic nationalism, and of volcanology to the development of humanitarian science and governance. (shrink)

As James Caesar highlights in Reconstructing America, the word “globalization” seems sometimes to be synonymous with “Americanization” or “Americanism,” evoking negative images. Globalization may bring indigenous cultures to their death and cause national individualism to disappear into a shapeless muddle. On Americanism, Heidegger declared that it was “the future monstrosity of modern times.” This would be homogenization, the rubbing out of cultural specificity, life in one universe, one dimension. Extremists like Alexandre Kohève take it further still. It would be the (...) end of history. Third world nations, particularly the Caribbean countries, would be predesignated victims of such an order, without power in political or economic realms, only making the front page of newspapers during cataclysm and natural catastrophes like Hugo, George, and Mitch. The tiny island of Montserrat, never before known to the West, rose to international fame when its volcano La Soufrière began to erupt. Rwanda would be known for genocide, and the Congo for a civil war and the assassination of its leader. (shrink)

In the beginning of Star Trek Into Darkness, Mr. Spock descends into the heart of a raging volcano on the planet Nibiru. His mission: to detonate a cold fusion device that will solidify the bubbling magma before it erupts and destroys an entire civilization. Meanwhile, Captain James T. Kirk is on the bridge of the Enterprise facing a dilemma. He's duty‐bound never to violate the Prime Directive. One way to address the problem of the Prime Directive is to follow the (...) criteria used by Vulcans: reason and logic. This approach has been highly revered in the history of moral philosophy, and was most convincingly articulated by Immanuel Kant. Confucius and Aristotle would agree that while the Prime Directive is usually correct, there will be cases where it's wrong not to break it. The Prime Directive symbolizes just how difficult making good moral decisions can be. (shrink)

Geo Maher’s _Anticolonial Eruptions_ is a force to be reckoned with. As a reading experience, it’s a bloody delight, even as – and maybe because – Maher guides us down in to the depths of the volcanoes stoking the explosive fires of rebellion. We also get to follow the moles below and high above ground as they wait for their moment to emerge, shock, and rebel. These moles are blind in one sense, while in another sense they can tell (...) time, or more accurately they create time in the form of political time; marking the potential beginning of a new era. This political time is created in the moment of the emergence of these moles from the shadows in order to ambush and take advantage of the “hubris” of colonizers who are comfortable in their own blindness, in not-seeing what they cannot grapple with, that which is right before their eyes; colonization and all it has wrought upon the colonized. A new political moment is then birthed, time starts anew, and this is a result of the colonizer’s limitations in grasping the depths and heights of their oppression of the colonized. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Adverse environmental and economic impacts of Icelandic volcano triggered discussions about nature’s astounding and unpredictable fury, alongside the inadequacy of human ingenuity and science to deal with factors that are totally independent and practically impossible to control.The first part of this article discusses questions related to understanding of deep uncertainty and possibility of effectively combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. Apparently the problem of incorporating surprise, critical threshold and abrupt changes is well studied in finance, but its poor application led to (...) the latest financial crisis. It would be far more complicated when applied to complex or “wicked” events like deforestation, the conservation of endangered species, industrial pollution and climate change. The authors identify a range of problems in global idea of ‘sustainability’ and explore complexity of uncertainty. The second part reviews innovative approach that pretends to reconcile the needs of local communities with the protection of the natural world. (shrink)