The New Yorker: An Ecotopian Lexicon

Review of An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

Presents thirty novel terms that do not yet exist in English to envision ways of responding to the environmental challenges of our generation

The reason we find ourselves verging toward planetary extinction is fairly simple: for quite some time, it’s been profitable for humans to behave this way. For business and government, it’s always been easier to toggle between plunder and neglect than to mind long-term, civilizational time lines. The actual conspiracy is that we are made to feel as though humanity’s fate were purely a matter of personal choice—our desire to buy this, that, or nothing at all, our collective willingness to recycle or compost. This isn’t to say that we possess no power at all. But the scale of the problem is difficult to comprehend, and discussions leave many of us feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed, reduced to myopic debates about whether we are too scared or not scared enough.

 

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