THE COMING STORM: Prophetic Dreams and the Climate

The poetry of Hosea employs and engages the religious imagery from the Baʿlu cult in its construal of Israel's deity, YHWH, as a storm god. The present article focuses on the varied uses of storm god imagery in Hos 6:1-6 and offers a new explanation for the abstruse imagery of verse 5 and for the polemical dynamics at play within 6:1-6. In particular, it treats the final colon of Hos 6:5, which has defied explanation by interpreters: wmšpṭy kʾwr yṣʾ.

G lobal warming and sustainability was the subject of a jam-packed panel at the 2008 Integral Theory Conference (August 7-10, Pleasant Hill, California). What could Integral Theory contribute to the complex, controversial problem of climate change? Two lines of response were tabled for exploration: 1) a boost to the comparatively limited consideration of interiors vis-à-vis exterior objective foci, and 2) an embrace of the seeming paradox, for some at least, that climate change represents simultaneously the worst of our prospects (as a species courting extinction) and our best prospect for unprecedented development of worldcentric consciousness. Prefaced in part by a series of challenging questions organized by quadrant (terrains of behavior, experiences, systems, and culture), which can be found in the book Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World (Esbjörn-Hargens & Zimmerman, 2009, pp. 342-343), the panel discussion was lively, but ultimately only scratched the surface of the two underlying questions. For those whose appetites were whetted, but not sated, the two books reviewed here, especially when taken together, provide rich insights for an integral response to climate change. An odd pairing in several respects (one is a broad-ranging, ultracomprehensive aspiritual doctoral dissertation; the other an exquisite, eclectic, often gut-wrenching spirituality-embracing rant), the books are surprisingly complementary, sharing a paradigm-shifting agenda that is particularly congenial for an integrally inclined audience. Both authors are driven by a concern with climate change, one from a futures bias, the other valuing history, and both are very much about promoting, and addressing the need for, more attention to the inner/interior dimensions of experience. Each author engages the integral and the spiritual, but with very different emphasis: one is integral, yet appears aspiritual, while the other is very spiritual, but questionably integral. Both authors have their own way of relating to the paradox outlined above: each seeks a form of balance, and manifests an underlying hope. Each is a case study in some respects-one focusing on Australia, the other on Scotlandbut both are much larger in reach than such geographies. Both books are valuable, but they have the potential to be even richer by integrating the learning from the other.

Strange weather is one of the growing ways human beings experience climate change phenomenologically or beyond abstract scientific data. Even those who do not “believe” in climate change experience it. Odd weather is also one of first things human beings talk about with one another or share, today and at least since the great flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This article considers how increasingly violent weather is ushering in a new type of narrative and art and announcing a new political and climatic regime. It considers a series of contemporary works of art about strange weather as a more precise example or microcosm of a certain reinvention of epic in our time. It then considers how this shared narrative of violent weather is intruding on, disrupting, and reconfiguring our political systems at the same time as it is collectivizing, historicizing, and politicizing the public before the growing threat of climate change.

This paper discusses the employment of fear eliciting images characteristic of environmental apocalypse as a means of influencing the attitude of audiences in regard to manifestations of climate change in selected poems from East Africa. The analysis draws on Stephen O'Leary and Greg Garrard's understanding of comedy and tragedy as modes of thought applicable to apocalyptic stories. Following this thought, I analyse renditions of scenes of destruction in the poems to understand how harnessing emotions of fear and pity may be valuable in environmental discourse. I argue that far from enhancing the notion of an inescapable calamity towards which humans are fast careering, the emotions of fear and pity in the poems potentially enhance meaningful engagement with the ecological crisis, and promote culpability among audiences. I assert that reading apocalyptic representations as attempts to achieve rhetorical effects might be more beneficial in the context of environmental literary criticism than consideration of the truth value of apocalyptic projections. The article points out some of the ways in which the song mode of poetry may be supportive to this way of reading. Introduction: The written poetry of East Africa is significantly influenced by oral recitations, incantations and songs alongside which the genre thrives. Among other qualities 'deterritorialized from traditional orature,' to use Evan Mwangi's term, 1 this poetry is context sensitive. Much of it is composed in response to certain socio-political conditions prevailing in the respective primary settings. In conformity, the anthology Echoes Across the Valley 2 , from which I select the poems for this paper, brings together over 200 poems clustered under themes such as: domestic and armed violence, political betrayal and corruption, poverty and deprivation as well as environmental issues. To date this is probably the only poetry collection from the region that dedicates a full section to environmental issues. The poetry engages with these issues in ways that indicate the purpose to influence the attitude of audiences concerning specific matters, in resonance with Tanure Ojaide's remark that the African poet sees him/herself as 'obliged to enlighten the people'. 3 Such socio-political responsiveness renders the poetry valuable for environmental discourse.

Pray Tell Blog, 2021

It is worse, much worse, than you think." So begins David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, the most recent book on the climate crisis. With un inching starkness, the book paints an unfortunately accurate picture of the changes coming to the planet in the next few decades. Even the best-case scenarios are grim. The scienti c predictions that the book summarizes have led to widespread psychological distress or "climate despair," according to a recent study, especially among young people. Climate despair: hopelessness and powerlessness Climate despair names not only the feeling of hopelessness but also and especially the feeling of powerlessness to intervene in a problem that is so vast. Wallace-Wells calls climate change a "hyperobject": a "conceptual fact so large and NEWS

De Gruyter eBooks, 2021

Environment, Space, Place: Vol.5, no. 1 (Spring, 2013)

Employing the rabbinical practice of midrashic reading in order to unfold a passage from The Song of Songs, the manner in which a European/colonial affirmation of the seasons, particularly the season of spring, might become a mode of injustice in a non-temperate climate is explored. The wilding of seasons imposed by colonial usurpation of country finds a particular case study in the invasion of Arrente lands in Australia by buffel grass even as the effects of climate change are being felt. In conclusion, an argument is made for recasting the practice of midrashic reading in order to render the seasons as they are found in The Song of Songs vulnerable to unanticipated intonations of the seasons as they emerge in Arrente country.

Nordic Journal of Art and Research, 2023

This is a text based on a keynote address that I gave at the IDIERI, 2022 conference in Warwick. 2 The theme of IDIERI, 2022 was "Navigating mess and complexity in uncertain times." It is particularly relevant to this issue because the project described in this keynote emerges from, and is embedded in, our on-going work at Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF) and addresses Sustainable Development Goals 1, 4, 5, 10 and 13. The project is about teenage girls in Lucknow, India. It includes critical dialogues, poetry and drama, and culminates in a collectively curated script and performance. As girls in India, it reveals their fears and concerns about their current lives and their view of their future. Their embodied voices and poems show us what their lives are like and how they feel about the uncertainties shaped by their experience. Strict patriarchal social norms leave them feeling insecure, unsafe and unfree at home and in their immediate environment. It emerged that while they have a caring, connected relationship with nature, the climate crisis seems too distant. Their concerns about securing their present lives are more immediate.

Environmental Humanities, 2018

The climate catastrophe to come is traumatically affecting, whether in its micro and macro manifestations, in the threat it poses to existing ways of life, in its upending of entrenched understandings of the workings of the world, or in the injury it is doing to particular lives and wider ecologies. It works on ecologies and bodies alike as a kind of wounding, one not simply or solely to the everyday stuff of biological life but to the very constitution of experience and expression. Critiquing and extending writing on climate, trauma, and aesthetic experience by E. Ann Kaplan (2016), Timothy Morton (2013), and others, this article argues that these affects of climate catastrophe are traumatically affecting without necessarily being traumatizing: they are jarring, rupturing, disjunctive experiences of future crisis in the now. This article traces these affects of apocalypse as they circulate traumatically in three texts: George Miller's film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Marina Zurkow's animation Slurb (2009), and Briohny Doyle's novel The Island Will Sink (2016). Climate catastrophe, that most threatening yet elusive of hyperobjects, marks and emerges irresistibly from within these works, not simply as theme, setting, or symbol but as the form of their affectivity. This intensity presses into the present from the future, shaping how the catastrophe to come is felt today and exposing crucial tensions between aesthetic expression and lived experience.