Franklin Ginn's guest appearances

Franklin Ginn

Critical Environments

Philip Steinberg

Wendy Wheeler

Monika Bakke

John Mowitt

Daniel Fernández Pascual

Alon Schwabe

OwlTail

This talk deals with four lures proffered by the Anthropocene. The first three: hyper-modernisation, or the colonisation of deep time by the anthropos; apocalypse therapy, or melancholic revelry in the end times; the significance sky hook, or “cfp: X in the Anthropocene”. These three are lures to be avoided. I then note a latent underspecified tendency shared by many – from progressive policy folk to biophilosophers – to invoke gardening as metaphor for planetary ethics. Drawing on my research into real and imaginary gardens, I outline something of what such an ethic might partake: anticipating life with vegetal philosophy; domesticating decomposition and death; flourishing awkwardly while fighting wars against the enemy. These take us to a final, more attractive lure. Beginning from nomadic points of difference, we might glimpse beyond the Anthropocene the utopian lure of new collectives and new kinds of humans, composed for more sanity and for feeling more deeply the earth and all its knotty difficulties.Franklin Ginn is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh, where his work focuses on geographies of nature, the more-than-human and environmental politics. His forthcoming book, Domestic Wild: Nature, memory and gardening in suburbia explores how memory and time are implicated in ecological consciousness. His current research explores cultures of everyday apocalypse and the Anthropocene, and as part of an AHRC-funded project, spiritual responses to climate change.

This talk deals with four lures proffered by the Anthropocene. The first three: hyper-modernisation, or the colonisation of deep time by the anthropos; apocalypse therapy, or melancholic revelry in the end times; the significance sky hook, or “cfp: X in the Anthropocene”. These three are lures to be avoided. I then note a latent underspecified tendency shared by many – from progressive policy folk to biophilosophers – to invoke gardening as metaphor for planetary ethics. Drawing on my research into real and imaginary gardens, I outline something of what such an ethic might partake: anticipating life with vegetal philosophy; domesticating decomposition and death; flourishing awkwardly while fighting wars against the enemy. These take us to a final, more attractive lure. Beginning from nomadic points of difference, we might glimpse beyond the Anthropocene the utopian lure of new collectives and new kinds of humans, composed for more sanity and for feeling more deeply the earth and all its knotty difficulties.<br><br>Franklin Ginn is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh, where his work focuses on geographies of nature, the more-than-human and environmental politics. His forthcoming book, Domestic Wild: Nature, memory and gardening in suburbia explores how memory and time are implicated in ecological consciousness. His current research explores cultures of everyday apocalypse and the Anthropocene, and as part of an AHRC-funded project, spiritual responses to climate change.

Franklin Ginn - Planetary gardening for the Anthropocene