In this episode of the Quillwood Podcast, host Eric Garza talks with Harlan Morehouse. Harlan teaches at the University of Vermont and has a keen interest in how people negotiate their futures with regard to 21st century social and environmental uncertainties. He talks with Eric about how catastrophism and apocalypticism show up in modern film and literature, how they tend to favor individualism over collectivism, and how he stays balanced while immersed in these narratives, among other things.

Outline

• 00:00 - 01:47 — Introduction
• 01:47 - 14:19 — What intrigues Harlan and Eric about apocalypticism and catastrophism
• 14:19 - 20:07 — Catastrophic roots of the modern environmental movement
• 20:07 - 27:20 — Catastrophism as an opportunity for the accumulation of capital
• 27:20 - 33:49 — Catastrophism as an object of desire for individualistic people
• 33:49 - 39:14 — Individual versus collective survival
• 39:14 - 52:03 — How Harlan remains well balanced in the face of his research
• 52:03 - 63:54 — Reflecting critically on James Howard Kunstler’s writing
• 63:54 - 64:13 — Episode wrap-up

Links and Resources

• Quillwood Academy
• Harlan Morehouse’s faculty website at the University of Vermont
• The Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich, Sierra Club/Ballantice Books)
• Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, Houghton Mifflin Company)
• The Great Insect Dying: Vanishing Act in Europe and North America (Jeremy Hance, Mongabay)
• Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Rob Nixon, Harvard University Press)
• The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Naomi Klein, Random House)
• Chicago, New Orleans, and rebirth (the op-ed in which Kristen McQueary longs for Chicago’s version of Hurricane Katrina, which Harlan incorrectly attributed to Mayor Rahm Emanuel)
• The Road (Cormac McCarthy, Alfred A. Knopf)
• Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (Roy Scranton, The New York Times)
• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Donna Haraway, Duke University Press)
• A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Raj Patel & Jason Moore, University of California Press
• Erik Swyngedouw’s website with a list of his research and writing
• Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Milkweed Press)
• Zoe Todd’s website, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton College

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