Anthrozoology, Ecophilosophy, Mysticism, Marginality, (Bio)semiotics, #dreampunk, Trans & Queer Ecology, (Crypto)Animism, Science Fiction, Wildlife Tracking,, Neoichnology & Tracemaking, Cybernetics, History and Historiography, Data Science/New Media, (retro)futurism, Ludology…

Some more personal context…

I’m a queer first-gen Greek-American, in(ter)dependent scholar, writer, and apocalyptic naturalist who often finds myself thinking and feeling at the edges and transition zones of genders, cultures, disciplines. My work is heavily inspired by #dreampunk & speculative genres, the interweaving of ‘personal’ storytelling with research-based writing, as well as the notion of storytelling about/with the more-than-human as an endangered skill of mythic remediation.

My understanding of “apocalypse” comes from the Greek apokalypsis, meaning an uncovering or revealing. This sense of the word is becoming more widespread in public consciousness and is part of what I am acknowledging by using an alternative spelling with a ‘K’. This new/old spelling intends to remind us of the emergence of other worlds/next worlds as opposed to the “end of ‘the’ world.” Apokalyptic Ecology is certainly about the ecological & cybernetic relationships and kinship networks that emerge in times of eco-social fracture (both contemporary and historical), but perhaps more emphatically (and to tap into its rich linguistic and textual history) it is about reclaiming mythic imagination & visionary / oracular consciousness from its hegemonic & kyriarchical uses. Indeed, apocalyptic literature in the Western & Christian tradition is rooted in ancient Jewish narratives expressing hope & longing for justice amidst the ordeal of exile. However, apocalyptic thought, especially in certain Christian manifestations, has ironically served as a medium for moralism, discrimination, and ill-will toward anyone seen as Other. It also, in some popular genre forms, can help uphold certain systems of power & empire by scaring us into imagining what it would be like without them. The apocalyptic, though, is part of the fugitive imagination, and to that it should return. The apocalyptic is also not necessarily “bad,” but has developed a negative valence due to its association with suffering, destruction, & collapse. Apocalypses can be liberatory just as they can be catastrophic, or they can be both.

Ecology, too, is not just the study of ecosystems, but for me, the study of belonging—for the root word “oikos” means home, household. Truly, ecology is also the logic of home, the study of the systems by and through which we dwell. Because of this, ecology (and discussions of belonging) are always political.

This site is somewhat of a spiritual sequel to “Green Hermeneutics/Farmpunk” my old blog that was started in 2007 which combined a cyberpunk aesthetic and hacker ethos with a neo-agrarian one. The work here is also influenced by my ongoing work as a co-steward of Queer Nature (2015) & notions of queer ancestral futurism envisioned with my spouse Pinar.

Why not “post-apocalyptic ecology?” I don’t believe that given my own lived experience, I can claim to live or have lived (at least, yet) in a post-apocalyptic world. I am wary of the uses of “post-apocalyptic” by folks of Euro/Settler descent because of this genre’s close association with mainstream entertainment. I think that many people, especially those who do not have ‘apocalyptic memory’ (ancestral memory or lived experience of genocide or intentional displacement), are too eager to fast forward through an ‘apocalyptic’ world to get to a post-apocalyptic one. Of course, both of these temporalities exist in the spectrum of human experience today, overlapping with one another—"the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” as William Gibson said, and the same thing can be said about the post-apocalyptic. The apokalypse, however, is not just a moment or inflection point in time, it’s a political & ecological consciousness that can manifest as both enchantment and despair, hypnosis & breaking the spell, atonement or further grasping for control, cognitive dissonance or surrender…therefore, the apockalyptic is not something to rush through, for some of us.

Apokalyptic Ecology is also not an attempt to claim that I, as a person with the array of privileges I carry, is experiencing the collapse of my world. Nor is it an attempt to romanticize collapse. Many communities that have been treated as casualties or commodities of Empire, such as Black Americans, Indigenous communities of Turtle Island (as well as Abya Yala, South America), nations who have been affected by nuclear bombing or testing, and others too numerous to name, have survived the end of their worlds as they knew them.

In some ways, the field of ecosystem science was born and grew up in the shadow of ‘apo(c/k)alyptic’ change in the 20th century—downgraded ecosystems with their overgrazed fields and overhunted apex predators, the so-called “Green Revolution” and multinational agribusiness with its modus operandi of monoculture, World Wars of unprecedented magnitude, Rampant nuclear testing, the Sixth Mass Extinction, not to mention (on a the positive side) civil rights movements and many other struggles for liberation. Yes, the field within Western science has always been carried out within the apocalypses (both catastrophic and liberatory) of human and non-human others.

Apokalyptic Ecology as we practice it, is speculative, situated, local, open-ended. It is about deep listening. It is about bearing witness. It is about welcoming stories written on and through the earth. Not catching them, welcoming them; saying, you have a home here, in my attention, in my memory, in my heart. You will live on through me. It is about practicing ‘science’ in our backyards, so that we can better protect the natural communities we live within. It is about critical ecology and post-normal science. It is about relationship building with the more-than-human world. It is about the power of enchantment in times of despair. It is about the de-centering of Western science and the uplifting of Indigenous & place-based ways of knowing. It is about the connection between the soil, and soul. It is about the role of the mystical in our relationship with the earth and the extra-human, and it is about visionary consciousness, imagination, and relationships as survival skills.

The silhouette of a jackal is shown above, to honor them as an ongoing refugee and marginal figure of/within European civilization that also manages to survive through persecution (there are parallels with how the coyote is treated on Turtle Island by settlers). In the Hebrew Bible, the jackal is a post-apocalyptic character—they are the one who are imagined to dwell in the ruins of even the most powerful civilizations. In this way, the jackal is a dystopian hero who marks the fall of oppressive and power-hungry empires that have lost touch with their humanity. They indicate “desolation,” inhabiting the allegedly uninhabitable—yet viewed from a biocentric perspective, the jackal is the one who actually remains current with the lore of the earth, for whom a “wasteland” is a place where they get free.

To be honest, this site… this cyberspatial topos that is Apokalyptic Ecology… does not feel complete, or even coherent. However, there is something that feels necessary about the incompleteness, the ellipsis. I trust it. I feel strongly that it this ‘place’ where our imaginations meet—you and I—is an invitation and an invocation to co-dream.

Thanks for visiting!