Big ups to the good folks over at Red Orbit for naming Ecopolitology as a “Red Hot Blog of the Day” in their Technology category. Once again, I applaud Red Orbit for their impeccable taste.

From the site:

“RedOrbit.com is committed to providing stimulating, original content and presentation, with over 1,500,000 pages covering the vast ideological spectrums of space, science, health, and technology…. RedOrbit.com promotes a friendly and open environment, enhancing user loyalty and community, while advancing RedOrbit’s goal of providing the world with a virtual Utopia for intelligent, curious minds.

RedOrbit.com averages over 5 million unique visitors per month. With subject matter a bit more intellectually oriented than most…”

Hi folks, and welcome to the official launch of the new and improved ecopolitology. Sorry for the mess, but we are in the process of migrating all of our old posts to the new domain, organizing tags, repopulating pages, and making adjustments and tweaks to the layout/theme. You should be able to find all of the previous posts but in their proper place. However, If the need arises, you can still access all of that good stuff right here. Stay tuned for lots of new stuff here at ecopolitology over the next couple of weeks as I will be incorporating several changes into this project.

Finally, I would be remiss to not say a special ‘thank you’ to Aleksander Rodic, who adapted his award-winning “Energy Plant” for the beautiful new ecopolitology theme, he has certainly outdone himself. Alex is a very talented designer and graphic artist who has helped me tremendously with the tech aspects of building a new web page - without his hard work this website would just not be the same.

Please remember to adjust your bookmarks. And thanks for visiting.

Timothy B. Hurst, Publisher

ecopolitology [EE-koh-pol-i-TOL-uh-jee] n. The emergent discipline of inquiry concerned with the theory, description, and analysis of the inescapable intersectionality of ecology and politics…or something like that.

Although ecopolitology is a word, it isn’t considered one in the English language - at least not yet. If you google ecopolitology you’ll find mostly references to this blog, but you will also find a couple of Russian and Eastern European uses of the word to describe the academic study of humans and nature.

To be honest, I thought I had made it up along with a couple of colleagues of mine a few years back in grad school. I was taking an environmental political theory seminar and we were were reading lots of postmodern and post-structural works about the politics of nature, the social construction of nature, the role of science in democracy, etc. I believe we had been reading Bruno Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, in which he had talked about the different ‘-ology’ suffixes used in various disciplines of scientific inquiry (i.e. zoology, biology, geology, theology, sociology, etc.).

My colleagues and I wondered why there was no ‘politology’ in US parlance, just ‘political science.’ I honestly think that the earliest practitioners of political science, as a field of academic inquiry, were so self-conscious about it’s position relative to the other sciences that they had to add the word ’science’ to help bring some legitimacy to the fledgling discipline. Can you think of (m)any other disciplines where they have felt compelled to add the word ’science’ to the end of it? Personally I like ‘politology’ and I’m going to stick with it.

Anyways, because I was reading all of these French postmodernists who like to make up words, I decided to slap an ‘eco’ together with a ‘politology’ and use the word to broadly describe environmental politics. It wasn’t until months later when I decided to start a blog as a means to flesh out ideas for my dissertation research, that I instantly knew that ecopolitology had to be the name of it.

Thanks for visiting and please come back again.

Best,

Timothy B. Hurst
Fort Collins, CO

info [at] ecopolitology [dot] org

As some of you may already know, I have begun to publish some of my work on the Green Options network. While this has been mostly at Jeff McIntire-Strasburg’s long-running, sustainablog, I have also done a few posts at Planetsave. While I will continue contribute to these and other GO projects, one of the blogs that I was brought on board for has finally launched, and I am very excited to be a regular contributor at CleanTechnica.com, where I will publish every Friday (and as timely news rolls in). The folks at GO have assembled a collection of authoritative voices on clean energy technologies, the cleantech industry, renewable energy policy, and more. There should be lots of good stuff going on at CleanTechnica, and I am happy to be a part of it.

Here at ecopolitology, business will carry on as usual. I’ll still provide the same brand of comparative ecopolitical analyses and continue with my less formal takes on the (re)emergence of the global green energy movement (and probably more regularly, too).