Red, Green, and Blue Named 'Red Hot Blog of the Day'

I am pleased and humbled to announce that the good folks over at RedOrbit have named Green Options' environmental politics blog, Red, Green, and Blue as the ‘Red Hot Blog of the Day‘ for May 23, 2008. As many of you already know, I've been the lead writer at Red, Green, and Blue since its inception in the Spring of 2008. I am proud of the place we have carved out within the niche thus far, and I look forward to the places it will go in the future.

RedOrbit provides mountains of wide-ranging content contained covering the vast ideological spectrums of space, science, health, and technology. Launched in in 2003, RedOrbit averages over 5 million unique visitors per month, “with subject matter a bit more intellectually oriented than most” (I love that last part).

About ecopolitology

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

Three Cheers for the Red, Green, and Blue

I am proud to announce my position as the lead writer in an exciting new endeavor on the Green Options Media network. Red, Green, and Blue will focus on "environmental politics from across the spectrum."

I cannot think of a better time to be launching a niche blog that is focused on environmental politics. Record numbers of people (especially young people) have already turned out to vote in their state’s primaries and caucuses. Nearly everywhere we go and virtually everything we consume is being infused with green hues (or attempting to be infused with green hues). With that said, politics are as natural as the trees, oceans, and mountains.

This blog is not intended to be only about American environmental politics. In computer parlance, “Red, Green, and Blue” refers to three color model that is used to create a broad spectrum of colors from just those three primary colors. And that is what we are aiming for as a blog. By welcoming and encouraging thoughtful and informed discussions about American and global environmental politics from across the political spectrum, we hope to fill a gap in the blogosphere which is critically underdeveloped.

Read more...