John Scanlan, The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life. Announcement for book talk with cover on right side.
Due to technical difficulties with no internet service for the author, our #envhum book with John Scanlan on The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life (Reaktion Books, 2025) will be NEXT MONDAY, 27 April, at 4pm in Norway / 3pm in UK.
newnatures.org/greenhouse/e...
I'm thrilled to talk about some of my latest scholarship next week at Colorado State University's Sustainable Landscape Collaboratory. If you are in Fort Collins, please stop by. Excited to discuss shelterbelts.
Now available for preorder (publishes in June 2026):
Unsettling Extinction, edited by Roman Bartosch, Ursula Heise & Kate Rigby
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/unsettlin...
I have an article in this called "Extinction as Cultural Heritage"
Excited to see this project with the University Library of Agder and Center for Gender Equality with Dr. Hilde Røsstad. Only wish I lived closer to attend these in person.
“A.I. chatbots contain the sum of all human knowledge” is so egregiously wrong that I don’t know what to say.
Chatbots have been trained on corpus of digital(ised) text - ABSOLUTELY NOT the sum of all human knowledge. Paper, experience, embodiment, oral tales all missing.
These people are fools!
Overview of the events happening at the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities during March 2026. For more information about the center, visit the website https://www.uis.no/en/greenhouse. For information about the book talk series, see also https://newnatures.org/greenhouse/
Spring has started to sprout and the @greenhouseuis.net is looking forward to full month with events on everything from climate justice in education over the sea urchins on the menu to the architecture of low-voltage cabins.
🌿
#envhum
When the NSF was founded in 1950, it was after 5 years of debate and resistance that the agency would be too independent of congressional/presidential oversight...
www.science.org/content/arti...
So like early Skynet?
"...any metric of agricultural intensity was always the best predictor of acceleration of the decline.”
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/c...
Proud PITCH lead in front of an engine with yellow sign and a banner Carbon Culture
Woman in front of exhibition sign: Carbon Culture. We are dependent!
Man looking up at a locomotive back with yellow fuel canister with sign in it.
Official opening of the PITCH project intervention “Carbon Culture. Museum of the Fossil Fuel Age” at the German Museum of Technology in Berlin tonight.
Special congrats go to curators Nora Thorade & Eike Heine who have done a fantastic job.
Someone asked me last week what I thought the worst thing about AI products in higher ed was - I replied that they eroded and destroyed the social compact of trust and expertise between teacher and student.
If this passes, it will be a broken promise (even if less than originally planned) that will be hard to forgive. The arts and humanities are the lifeblood of our state. This is poisonous. And the rationales for going forward with this are equally in bad faith. I'm sad for our state.
New article: Carbon cultures of progress in history of technology museums, by me & Nora Thorade.
We examine how #histtech #museums narrate our industrial heritage and make its energy reliance visible or invisible.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
#envhist #petrocultures
Humanities Here. Some questions about A.I.: Aren't the short-term risks and hazards too dangerous for very, very maybe positives? How many learning and job casualties are acceptable? Why give our freedom to know over to a machine that steals and flattens for profit?
"I made a lot of money by stealing the work of other people. How should I share my wealth?"
"The computer has begun to be an instrument for the destruction of history. When society legitimates only those 'data' that are in 'one standard format' and that 'can easily be told to a machine,' then history, memory itself, is annihilated." (Weizenbaum, Computer Power & Human Reason, 1976)
It is so important to keep hammering in this point. People always ask me why I would have to go visit archives - why not just look at a scan? Because they haven’t been scanned! And they are never going to be! There are millions & millions of pieces of paper in every archive.
Tomorrow, if you can make it. Kearney Public Library.
On "wishful worries" and other myths of technology (“When someone says ‘algorithm,’ start searching for the people.”)
@dcbrock.bsky.social's 2019 essay is worth a re-read
lareviewofbooks.org/article/our-...
We need an additional "I might be a robot" button for websites.
I am running a course on the Histories of Energy Transitions this spring, starting 2 March!
The course is fully online and asynchronous and it is open to students at ECIU universities as well as anyone enrolled at Norwegian universities.
#energyhistory
For more information, see below ⤵
We have an online information meeting about our new Masters in Public Environmental Humanities program TODAY (Jan 27) at 14:00 Central European time. If you are interested in finding out more, register to attend the meeting (near bottom of this page): www.uis.no/en/studies/t...
#envhist #envhum
Book title about both books: "Unnecessary"
Coming up in about 20 min!
Hope to see many of you there for the live talk and discussion.
