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Genetic engineering is the latest expression of the desire to control environment, but Ulrich Beck would see this as the culmination of human arrogance and Jean Baudrillard would treat these efforts as a compulsive desire to overachieve. Panic ecology can be described as nature being forced to the edge of a nervous breakthrough, and social theory has not yet developed to the point where it can account for the destruction, much less the resurrection, of nature.

New techniques in the simulation of nature are giving computer-generated environments a more organic appearance. In particular, developments in 'artificial life' modelling promise to populate future cyberspaces with diverse, autonomous beings. This can be viewed as an impending estrangement from 'real' nature, but we might better conceive of virtual natures as a culmination of a lengthy Western tradition of representing the natural world in increasingly exuberant two- and three-dimensional forms. It is suggested that the ecology movement is implicated in the ascendance of simulated nature, and must come to terms with the 'reality' of mediation, rather than privileging the notion of unmediated, 'primordial' nature. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

The theories about the dynamical characteristics of the solar system, galaxy and universe, develops the ideas of an ex-orbitant globality that treats the earth as a system in active and ongoing interchange with its cosmic environment. The openness to the cosmos to further other-than-human influences has repercussions for the way it is responded to environmental change injecting an element of abyssal undecidability into all deliberations.

Colonization that is a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities is discussed. Environmental cosmopolitan that tends to re-enact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture is also described.

Responding to claims of Anthropocene geoscience that humans are now geological agents, social scientists are calling for renewed attention to the social, cultural, political and historical differentiation of the Anthropos. But does this leave critical social thought’s own key concepts and categories unperturbed by the Anthropocene provocation to think through dynamic earth processes? Can we ‘socialize the Anthropocene’ without also opening ‘the social’ to climate, geology and earth system change? Revisiting the earth science behind the Anthropocene thesis and drawing on social research that is using climatology and earth systems thinking to help understand socio-historical change, this article explores some of the possibilities for ‘geologizing’ social thought. While critical social thought’s attention to justice and exclusion remains vital, it suggests that responding to Anthropocene conditions also calls for a kind of ‘geo-social’ thinking that relates human diversity and social difference to the potentiality and multiplicity of the earth itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early engagement with geoengineering by social scientists indicates a certain suspicion over the motives and modes of operation of scientific research in the field. In part, this reflects the prominence of the critique of the politics of emergency in recent social and political thought: a thematisation that links securitisation measures with foreclosures of the political. This paper turns the attention back on the social sciences, arguing that recent styles of ontological and political thought do not prepare us well for engaging with geologic issues in general, and geoengineering in particular. It is suggested that, rather than viewing geoengineering discourses and imaginaries as a retreat from politics, we might view them as playing an important role in opening up new kinds of politics oriented towards earth systems and their dynamics. This new 'geologic politics' involves a turn from issues hinging on territorial divisions of the earth's surface toward the strata that compose the deep temporal earth. As a political challenge, the question of how to live with dynamic and stratified earth systems not only promises to extend the scope of politics, but also points to the 'inhuman' limits of the political per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent revival of the theme of hospitality in the humanities and social sciences reflects a shared concern with issues of belonging, identity and placement that arises out of the experience of globalized social life. In this context, migration — or spatial dislocation and relocation — is often equated with demands for hospitality. There is a need to engage more carefully with the ‘proximities’ that prompt acts of hospitality and inhospitality; to attend more closely to their spatial and temporal dimensions. Is the stranger or the Other primarily one who is recognisably ‘out of place’? Or is there more to being estranged than moving from one territory to another? This brings us to the question of human finitude, and to the possibility of encounters with others that do not simply only occur in time or space, but are themselves generative of new times and spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is said that the European colonial project was in part an attempt to propagate "new Europes" elsewhere on the planet. Having failed to remake the tropics in its own image, European attention was turned to those temperate regions girdling the Southern Hemisphere, which included the south-west and east of Australia, and almost all of New Zealand. The aim of this paper is to examine the performance of life in the colonial periphery. It seems that a peculiar sensitivity to the performative dimensions of life has been percolating through the former colonial for some time, and not always in conversation with discourses on the performative elsewhere. What is notable, particularly at Europe's "antipodes," is the almost pre-emptive conjoining of interest in human and non-human performances. Indeed, as Australian/New Zealand artist John Lyall proposes, the introduced organism running loose in an alien environment might be taken as the paradigmatic experience of the Australian settler society. Lyall has been exploring the permutations of the "feral": the transplanted entity that begins its tenure of a new land as a familiar, domesticated being before passing over the frontier in the direction of the wild and unknown.

Spearheaded by Ulrich Beck and the "world risk society" thesis, contemporary commentators in search of evidence of political renewal "from below" have discerned a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities. But through its foregrounding of the destabilization of matter by new technologies, the "environmental cosmopolitanism" tends to re-enact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture. Drawing on the pivotal role of bioinvasion in the European colonization of the temperate periphery, an alternative perspective on ecological globalization is presented in this article. The perspective takes account of the "weedy opportunism" and inherent mobility of biological life. In this way, "globalization from below" takes on the meaning of an opening of culture to the "unsettling" influence of biological and geological histories that manifest themselves at global scales.