CSC: "Planning the Good Anthropocene" with Leigh Phillips

CSC: "Planning the Good Anthropocene" with Leigh Phillips

Thursday, January 31, 2019, 4:30 p.m.
Johnson Center Assembly Room E

Please join us for the first CSC of the Spring 2019 with Leigh Phillips. He will present his talk "Planning the Good Anthropocene." 

Below is a summary of his talk.

The primary cause of disruption of ecosystem services is the market. If something is profitable but harmful—such as fossil fuels—that commodity will continue to be produced in the absence of some nonmarket intervention to prevent its production. Conversely, if something is useful but not profitable, that product or service will not be produced. This poses a challenge to market solutions to global warming. In this talk, Phillips will sketch a concrete, policy-centric outline of how a global democratic socialism is probably the only pathway to egalitarian and boundlessly freedom-expanding sustainability.

Leigh Phillips, author of Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-porn Addicts (Zero Books, 2015) and The People’s Republic of Walmart (Verso, 2019), is a science writer whose work has appeared in Nature, Science, the New Scientist, the New Republic, and the Guardian, amongst other publications.