{"id":14381,"date":"2015-11-13T08:01:09","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T13:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14381"},"modified":"2015-11-13T08:01:09","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T13:01:09","slug":"promethean-porn-and-malthusian-mistakes-a-letter-to-leigh-phillips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14381","title":{"rendered":"Promethean porn and Malthusian mistakes: a letter to Leigh Phillips"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Promethean porn and Malthusian mistakes: a letter to Leigh Phillips<\/a><\/h3>\n
Dear Leigh<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n

Hello, my name is Mr Puck. I heard about your new book,\u00a0Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn-Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff<\/em>. Now, a title involving the word \u2018porn\u2019 that isn\u2019t actually about, er, porn usually indicates something that\u2019s well worth not reading (yes, reader, I know, I know \u2013 but you\u2019ve come this far already). However, I\u2019m interested in these issues so I decided I\u2019d at least take a look at the\u00a0blurb for your book<\/a>\u00a0and the puff-piece you wrote for it in\u00a0The Guardian<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Your publisher, Zero Books,\u00a0sets itself against<\/a>\u00a0what it calls the \u2018cretinous anti-intellectualism\u2019 of contemporary culture. That\u2019s refreshing. And your book blurb promises a \u2018combative and puckish\u2019 style. Well, we greens do have a reputation for humour-free self-righteousness, and I\u2019m all in favour of the mordant wit and trenchant analysis I associate with puckish writers. So, bracing myself, I settled down to read a little of your writing. Unfortunately, rather than the puck-wit I was expecting, another word soon came to mind that sounds very similar but means something different. I\u2019ve spent a fair bit of time recently combatting the idiocies of so-called \u2018ecomodernism\u20191\u00a0and I\u2019ve tried to swear off further critique to focus instead on a more positive agenda of localist producerism, which is what I\u2019ll be turning to in my next cycle of blog posts. But everybody needs to sound off once in a while, and after reading your epically fatuous thinking on this topic for me that time is now. The \u2018progress-through-growth\u2019 and ecomodernist tropes seem to acquire a spurious gravitas by simple repetition, so though I don\u2019t have the luxury of a\u00a0Guardian\u00a0<\/em>article to play with, I do feel obliged to do what I can to prevent the deluge and try to put my finger, however small, in the dyke.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Promethean porn and Malthusian mistakes: a letter to Leigh Phillips Dear Leigh Hello, my name is Mr Puck. I heard about your new book,\u00a0Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn-Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff. Now, a title involving the word \u2018porn\u2019 that isn\u2019t actually about, er, porn usually indicates something that\u2019s well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[10599,8075,391,10600,9738,6917,10598],"class_list":["post-14381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-anti-growth","tag-ecomodernism","tag-growth","tag-pro-growth","tag-small-farm-future","tag-the-guardian","tag-zero-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14382,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381\/revisions\/14382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}