Environmental crisis article addressed in Sign Systems Studies´ "Semiotics 2021: The year in review" article

I am honored to see my article on "how to solve the environmental crisis", "Anticipating the societal transformation required to solve the environmental crisis in the 21st century" (Open access), being addressed in Sign Systems Studies´ review of the year 2021 in semiotics, written by Frank Nuessel and Ott Puumeister:

"Anticipating the future The future is neither fully pre-determined nor absolutely empty. The future does not exist, but it does insist: we have to behave in a certain manner to fulfil our dreams, we have to envision future states as already existing to make sense of the past and present. Future is an imperative: life has to find a way to continue transforming while maintaining its integrity. Anticipating the future is an interplay between predictability and unpredictability. The special issue of SSS on “Anticipation and change”,5 guest edited by Lauri Linask, Inesa Sahakyan and Aleksei Semenenko, situates itself in the midst of this interplay and asks how we produce predictability in the context of unpredictability, and how the production of predictability hinders the unpredictability at the core of actualization of the future. These questions are especially relevant in the face of the environmental crisis, which requires fundamental transformations in cultural, political, social, economic, etc. spheres – that is, in most spheres of life that have become our “human nature”.

Morten Tønnessen (2021) attempts to envision how ecosemiotics could help model the societal transformation necessary to address the environmental crisis.6 He juxtaposes the positions of ecomodernists and Deep Ecologists, preferring the latter to the former, since they do not rely on continuous growth based on technological solutions and take non-human beings seriously. He advocates for a normative orientation in ecosemiotics, which “constitutes a form of transformative semiotics in so far as human ecology is approached critically in a political, ethical and/or another normative context” (Tønnessen 2021: 55). In other words, semiotics can no longer satisfy itself with being descriptive, but needs to intervene in the sociopolitical field."