The emerging epistemic community of ecosemioticians and the multidisciplinary field of inquiry known as ecosemiotics offer a radical and relevant approach to so-called global environmental crisis. There are no environmental fixes within the dominant code, since that code overdetermines the future, thereby perpetuating ecologically untenable cultural forms. The possibility of a sustainability transition (the attempt to overcome destitution and avoid ecocatastrophe) becomes real when mediated by and through ecosemiotics. In short, reflexive awareness of humankind's linguisticality is a necessary condition for (...) transforming ecologically maladaptive cultural forms. As a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary research program integrating the human and natural sciences, ecosemiotic inquiry closes the gap between biophysical ecology and human ecology. A provisional outline of a pragmatic theory of ecoserniotics attempts to describe the processes by which adaptive cultural changes might be facilitated and points toward substantive content areas that constitute sites for further research. Ecosemiotic inquiry frames cultural codes as these shape and reproduce the ongoing stream of individual and societal choices that shape distinctively human existence in a larger context of biophysical realities that drive natural selection. However, while ecosemiotics is a necessary condition for the sustainability transition, it is not a sufficient condition. (shrink)

This article examines the human placenta not only as a scientific, medical and biological entity but as a consumer bio-product. In the emergent placenta economy, the human placenta is exchanged and gains potentiality as food, medicine and cosmetics. Drawing on empirical research from the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Japan, the authors use feminist cultural analysis and consumer theories to discuss how the placenta is exchanged and gains commodity status as a medical supplement, smoothie, pill and anti-ageing lotion. (...) Placenta preparers and new mothers cite medical properties and spirituality as reasons for eating or encapsulating the placenta, reinstating ideas of the liberated good mother. Meanwhile, the cosmetics industry situates the placenta as an extract and hence a commodity, re-naturalizing it as an anti-ageing, rejuvenating and whitening bio-product. The authors conclude that, in the emergent bio-economy, the dichotomy between the inner and the outer body is deconstructed, while the placenta gains clinical and industrial as well as affective value. (shrink)