12 January 2020

Timothy Morton is a British writer and philosopher. Currently he holds a position as professor of English and Philosophy at Rice University, Houston, Texas. He has written quite extensively on his feelings and concepts regarding climate change. I often find him to be just the right voice I need to hear.

And now he has a podcast about our psychological relationship with global warming. He asks, why is it so difficult for many of us to engage with it? How can we cope and what can we do for our planet?
It is a quirky, moving, unusual mix of thoughts, interviews, quotes and music.  Strangely uplifting and I had a couple of oh yes moments.

This mornring, we listened to the second episode and there is an interview with Hilton Kelley about hurricane Harvey and the aftermath and thoughts on the future and I have been thinking of Ellen a lot since.  We, i.e. the basement of our and our neighbour's houses, have been flooded twice during sudden short unprecedented flash floods in the last six years but nothing like what people experienced during Harvey. 
Anyway, this podcast is just half an hour long, and I promise, not at all depressing. 

I hope this link works:


If not, try searching for: BBC Radio 4, Timothy Morton, The end of the world has already happened.

3 comments:

Secret Agent Woman said...

Thanks, I will look that up.

ellen abbott said...

thanks for the thoughts Sabine but we were lucky in that only half our house flooded and we only got 18" and it was the half of the house that was work related and so what furniture we had in there wasn't all that great (and we had talked about remodeling that part of the house but would probably never have done it) and we were lucky that we had the money in reserve to cover the repairs (and upgrades) that FEMA didn't. most people on my street had their whole house flood and a neighborhood across the freeway, those people got 5' or more in their houses. so many people lost everything.

humans are like ostriches, prefering to put their heads in the sand (though they don't really do that, the ostriches I mean). they just don't want to believe that the world as they know it is coming to an end and that it is happening in their lifetime! we are the frogs in the kettle.

Steve Reed said...

That sounds fascinating (if also sobering). I'll definitely give it a listen. I think climate change just seems so large, and so disconnected from any meaningful change we feel we can make as a single person, that people just go blank when they think about it.