Dzień 1. 21 Maja 13:20 – 13:40

Prof. Glenn Albrecht, Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, e-mail: glenn.a.albrecht@gmail.co

Prof. Glenn Albrecht – filozof, emerytowany profesor zrównoważonego rozwoju na Uniwersytecie Murdoch w Perth (Australia Zachodnia). Autor wielu publikacji naukowych na temat etyki środowiskowej i etyki zwierząt, ekologii społecznej i skutków niszczenia przyrody. Obecnie jest honorowym członkiem School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. Pracował również na University of Newcastle jako profesor nadzwyczajny studiów środowiskowych do grudnia 2008 roku. Jego główne dzieło, Earth Emotions (2019), zostało opublikowane po francusku, hiszpańsku, a w 2024 roku także po holendersku. Zyskał międzynarodowe uznanie za swoją koncepcję „solastalgii”. Termin ten opisuje cierpienie wywołane zmianami środowiskowymi, które wpływają na ludzi oraz inne pozaludzkie istoty.

Prof. Glenn Albrecht is a philosopher and retired professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. He is the author of numerous academic publications on environmental ethics, animal ethics, social ecology, and the impacts of environmental destruction. He is currently an honorary member of the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. He also served as an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Newcastle until December 2008. His major work, Earth Emotions (2019), has been published in French, Spanish, and, in 2024, also in Dutch. He has gained international recognition for his concept of “solastalgia”—a term that describes the distress caused by environmental changes affecting both humans and other non-human beings.

The Symbiocene is nothing short of transformational (metamorphic) for a future that must be designed and built by creative people in partnerships with ‘life’ in diverse parts of planet Earth. At a moment in history when many Nation States and their citizens are heading towards a suicidal dead-end, the Symbiocene offers ‘our only future’ for children and complex life on this Earth. The shift from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene will not be ‘revolutionary’ because that implies a circular return or “roll back” to a previous state. We cannot return to a pre-industrial state because the carbon-industrial era (the last 300 years) has irreversibly altered the planet for Indigenous people and now, even the previous generation of the people of the Earth. Such is the power of the Anthropocene. In addition to human-caused collapse of the natural world by greed, stupidity and hubris (Capitalism), we must now add past ‘paradigm failure’ as a major factor in our species’ evolutionary retrogression. The existing ‘nature’ paradigms such as environmentalism, ecologism, sustainability, conservation, resilience and regeneration all deliver us into a form of competitive, conceptual ‘greenlock’. In particular, they do not convey empathetic and emotional engagement with the symbiotic partnerships that characterise collective identity in all life. Despite their usefulness in abstract systems science and academia, they are ‘empty concepts’ with no viable path open for public emotional engagement. To overcome this alienation, ‘we’ need to symbiotically morph into the conceptual, emotional and material beauty of the Symbiocene.

The Symbiocene: Why we need conceptual metamorphosis 13:20 – 13:40

Glenn Albrecht

Stories for the Symbiocene: Three Gifts of Fiction at the Time of Climate Emergency

Mutualistic cities in the biosphere