Dear subscribers,
I’m glad to share a new text with you. It is an essay which started out as a review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent book The High Sierra A Love Story, but which expanded into a discussion of most of his bibliography. I focus on the concept of psychogeology (which he coins in the book), but argue that this together with our planetary existence, the fact that we always live on and by planets is a central and important thread throughout his books. This is complicated by the fact that we now collectively act as a geological force, which actually changes the course of climate and ultimately the most basic forces creating the world we live on.
Continue reading on Tillfällighetsskrivande:
… In a fundamental way, Robinson’s whole oeuvre attests to our psychogeological human condition. That we every day wake up on a specific point on the Earth’s crust and that all our experiences, challenges, and opportunities are directly and ultimately dependent on that fact.
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Inadvertent psychogeology requiring conscious geological action on a planetary scale. Our inventiveness and creativity, a psychological trait which we share with other animals, but which have flourished or gone haywire depending on your perspective have also made us a planet changing species. Our psychogeological and planetary state of being has turned on itself with enormous consequences, not least for ourselves. We experience the effects of our own volitional actions, changing the biosphere, extinguishing species, effecting erosion and flooding on an ever increasing scale. …