No Time to Defend the Pre-Post-Truth World

As much as the post-truth needs to be challenged and countered, the humanities can play a crucial role in keeping alive the understanding that the pre-post-truth world ought not to be conserved, but transformed positively. After all, this was a world marked by accelerating anthropogenic climate change, by ongoing and transforming colonialism, by racism as a structural pillar, by misogyny and sexism. The environmental humanities must retain their historic radical mission, and they will founder if they surrender such a potential

SESSION 1.2: Teaching BC Literature: Ecocriticism, Eco-grief, and Rage

Ecocriticism’s potential to unsettle literary studies and English departments, through instruments as various as climate change anxiety, animal ethics, and the love of nature, has been a regular theme of field-surveying overviews. From Cheryl Glotfelty’s introduction to the 1996 Ecocriticism Reader, through Ella Soper and Nick Bradley’s to their 2013 Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context, such overviews provide ecocritics with ready solace and strength for their potentially transformative missions as green researchers, writers, and teachers. This potential, however, remains unrealized. While such principled statements are enabling and empowering, ecocriticism remains to some extent a liberal fantasy and neoliberal distraction. Such, at least, has been my recent experience with a variable-content environmental humanities course I’ve taught regularly over the last decade, which this year featured Rita Wong’s undercurrent, Theresa Kishkan’s Winter Wren and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu. And yet I remain convinced, as do my students, that a peculiar potency resides within place-attentive literature from and of a place where a course is running. In this paper, which will draw heavily on my students’ contributions, I will describe how we managed to open up to and about our eco-grief and rage, in reading these three literary works and through successive encounters with key ecocritical texts (notably Wong’s “Decolonizasian”). The act of placing our intellectual and emotional responses to environmental crisis helped us, as one student put it, to “bring everything we’ve ever learned, to bear on everything we’re doing”: to productively unsettle ourselves and our studies

No Time to Defend the Pre-Post-Truth World

As much as the post-truth needs to be challenged and countered, the humanities can play a crucial role in keeping alive the understanding that the pre-post-truth world ought not to be conserved, but transformed positively. After all, this was a world marked by accelerating anthropogenic climate change, by ongoing and transforming colonialism, by racism as a structural pillar, by misogyny and sexism. The environmental humanities must retain their historic radical mission, and they will founder if they surrender such a potential

Metallic Icosahedron Phase of Sodium at Terapascal Pressures

Alkali metals exhibit unexpected structures and electronic behavior at high pressures. Compression of metallic sodium (Na) to 200 GPa leads to the stability of a wide-band-gap insulator with the double hexagonal hP4 structure. Post-hP4 structures remain unexplored, but they are important for addressing the question of the pressure at which Na reverts to a metal. Here we report the reentrant metallicity of Na at the very high pressure of 15.5 terapascal (TPa), predicted using first-principles structure searching simulations. Na is therefore insulating over the large pressure range of 0.2-15.5 TPa. Unusually, Na adopts an oP8 structure at pressures of 117-125 GPa, and the same oP8 structure at 1.75-15.5 TPa. Metallization of Na occurs on formation of a stable and striking body-centered cubic cI24 electride structure consisting of Na12 icosahedra, each housing at its center about one electron which is not associated with any Na ions.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, PRL (2015