This is a rant about a topic very close to my heart that coincides with some of the events happening in the world at the moment. In a way one can say this issue has been around for a long time, and there’s no doubt it will continue to plague human society far into the…
The film An Inconvenient Truth was released 15 years ago. It triggered a monumental shift in the media and public awareness regarding climate change (then recognized more widely as global warming), both in the US and internationally. The film also immortalized an illusion that the politics and economics of climate change have come to embody.…
I’ve had a particularly acute fit of anxiety in which I just couldn’t escape doubts and worries about my existence in this world and what I ought to make of my life and future. All I would do all day was to sit and feel helpless about every situation I could possibly envision, which then…
If you ever exist in a society (which I figure you do, since you are able to read this text on the Internet), you have most likely been experiencing in one way or another this thing called social comparison. Depending on how fortunate you are to have been raised by a family or community who…
Everywhere I turn on the Internet, there are floods of messages about all the challenges the world faces today (clearly the algorithm tracks my online behaviors and sends signals my way). It’s dispiriting to experience the bombardment of news about climate change, poverty, inequality, wars and conflicts, and other atrocities that seem to only multiply…
The past fifteen years or so have been marked by the rapid growth of two things: smartphones and social media. While the social media industry now seems to struggle at times to not fall from grace, the toppling of smartphones is nowhere in sight. The presence of smartphones is projected to only rise especially when…
I recently read the book Under A White Sky (2021) by the science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Through snippets of her trips to various locations around the world to report on strategies of combating environmental destruction, Kolbert introduces in this book a whole new dimension to what we typically refer to as the Anthropocene. Her previous Pulitzer-winning volume The Sixth…
Earlier this year, Michael E. Mann, who is widely recognized as one of the creators of the famous “hockey stick” graph depicting historical increase in global temperature, published a book titled “The New Climate War”. Despite being written by a renowned climate scientist, the book is fully politicized in its argument against climate “inactivism”, broadly defined as…
At first glance, a climate change documentary titled Disobedience already seems to promise tenacity of a message. Created by a company that goes by the name Disobedient Productions, the relatively short documentary fulfills my initial expectation of its being a stronghold of creative space. What is even more remarkable about this film, however, is its…