Week Three: Supporting Materials
Directions
Keep the following questions in mind as you read Heather Houser’s, “Human/Planetary.” The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.
What, according to Houser, separates the “human” from the “planetary (i.e., nonhuman).”?
Why/how do the realities of climate change force us to rethink the way we conceive of human and nonhuman relationships?
What does it mean to say that human and nonhuman systems are fused or blended?
According to Houser, what are the advantages to living in “geological time” (144)? OR why must “we all get on geologic time if we are to understand and address climatic disturbance” (145)?
What’s the problem with the “(incomplete) bifurcation of human and planetary time” (145)?
How do the representational tools of “inhuman time give access at once the rift between human and planetary time, but also to their integration” (145)?
What sorts of timescales are humans used to operating on?
How is the manipulation of these timescales an example of human exceptionalism?
“One of the unique characteristics of the present, however, is that the range of time concepts keyed to human phenomenological experience will not suffice for apprehending environmental crisis.” (145).
To what does the word “Anthropocene” refer?
What are the drawbacks and advantages to a term like Anthropocene?
“How might climate change media conceptualize humanity in terms of the planetary or block that correspondence” (147)?
What makes it so hard to communicate climate change to audiences?
“Might carbon calculators make climate threat sense-able by quantifying it in the dollars and cents that fuel households, businesses, and governments rather than the datasets that fuel climatological research and modeling” (148)?
What are the representational drawbacks of carbon calculators?
What are the representational benefits of carbon calculators?
