Mian Crist
speaker
152 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Mian Crist’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It sort of eventually did in the sense that, you know, global civilization didn't fall apart.
But it certainly showed how just how much more fragile many of these systems that we rely on actually are.
That sense of a civilization being able to have a robust and resilient response to shocks is part of what helps the civilization continue.
And part of what Scranton is saying is global civilization is not, in fact, robust enough to recover from the kinds of shocks that climate is going to be handing us in the coming decades.
And something has to change.
I mean, this is part of the argument.
There's also this argument about energy use, right, that the civilization that we currently live in
And I should say also, when he says civilization, he is talking about a particular globalized, developed world civilization, which, you know, you can argue about whether and how that is a thing.
But I think it's it's fair to say that we lived in an internationally networked, developed civilization that has all kinds of connections across continents and cultures.
He is arguing that this thing, which has been fed on this glut of fossil energy, particularly in the last, you know, 80 years maybe, is now very fragile and cannot necessarily deal with the shocks that are coming.
Welcome to the sixth episode in this series of close readings for the LRB, Nature in Crisis, hosted by me, Mian Crist.
In the last episode, we looked at James Lovelock's Gaia, which was first published in 1979 and put forth the theory that the whole Earth is something like a living organism.
Today, we'll keep hold of the idea of more-than-human life functioning as an interconnected entity, but we'll move back down the scale from Earth to ecosystems and specifically to rivers.
Robert McFarlane is one of the most celebrated living writers of the natural world, and his most recent book, Is a River Alive?, is a mind-bending invitation to consider rivers as living entities deserving of legal rights.
And Peter, before we dive in, let me ask you, before you read this book, if I had asked you, is a river alive?, what do you think you might have said?
Okay, good to know this.
You're walking in as a bit of a skeptic here.
So let's think for a second, I just want to set up the Rights of Nature movement because this is a legal movement and it's sort of, I think the germ of this book comes out of this legal movement.
So as McFarlane tells it, this begins sort of early 1970s when this academic whose name is Christopher Stone is giving a seminar on property law at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
And he is trying to keep his students' interest.
Showing 81–100 of 152 · page 5 of 8
← Previous
Next →