The remarkable diversity of life on our planet is in grave danger, with research indicating that nearly half of all animal species are currently in decline...
Over the past several decades, it has become clear that global biodiversity has been declining due to human activities including conversion of habitat, use of pesticides and herbicides, and more recently, climate change. It is not known how many species are extinct due to such activities, but scientists have been trying to track species at highest risk of disappearing.
Now a trio of macro-biologists and life scientists has determined that the modern "sixth mass extinction" event is going to be even worse than prior research has shown.
They found that 48% of species have declining populations, and just 3% have rising populations. They also found evidence showing that 33% of species currently classified as non-threatened are actually spiraling toward extinction.
The team concludes that the planet is approaching a mass extinction event far graver than prior research has suggested.
"To date, researchers have mentioned the Anthropocene Epoch as the latest geological period in more than 1,300 scientific papers. While the scientific community has been debating over which year the Anthropocene Epoch began, several Indigenous and Black scholars have shot back against the term.
"The problem, some scholars say, is that the term assumes the climate crisis is caused by universal human nature, rather than the actions of a minority of colonialists, capitalists, and patriarchs. And the implication that the Earth was stable until around 1950, when the ‘Anthropocene’ supposedly began, denies the history of people who have been exploited by those systems for centuries.
"Indigenous scholars have further addressed how the term stands for colonialist ideologies that sever the deep ties and interconnections between humans, plants, animals, and the soil.
“Instead of treating the Earth like a precious entity that gives us life, Western colonial legacies operate within a paradigm that assumes they can extract its natural resources as much as they want, and the Earth will regenerate itself,” said Hadeel Assali, a lecturer and postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Science and Society, a Columbia Climate School affiliate."
"It would see the #IMF and other MDBs “cut the excessive macro-risk premia on #developing countries with $100 billion per year of foreign exchange guarantees,” for financing in more volatile domestic currencies rather than the dollar or euro."
Rich countries developed on the backs of what's now called "developing" countries, which are left with 'volatile" #economies so they pay higher interest rates to rich country lenders.
'During the segment, he said the symbol of the Crown "represented the invasion, the theft of land - and in our case - the exterminating war", referring to a period of martial law in 1820s New South Wales that was used to justify the killings of Wiradjuri people.''
"Decolonizing the Ethnographic Museum" by Christoph Chwatal.
About the efforts of the Weltmuseum Wien (an ethnographic museum) to offer a more open and less colonial perspective of its collections.
"This combination of active engagement and individualism seeks to present a resistance to the totalizing, teleological perspective of the imperial era from which such collections were born. But what if this strategy merely masks those origins, meanwhile echoing the colonial tendencies such institutions have promised to undermine?"
"Your occassional reminder that in 2016 alone, America dropped nearly three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. A staggering 26,171 bombs rained down on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Pakistan - that’s seven Muslim-majority territories. The USA was running special operations in no less than 138 countries, 70% of the world’s nations. Since the so-called War on Terror was launched in 2002, the "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" has been responsible for the deaths of at least four million civilians, and the maiming or displacement of tens of millions more."
learning about how the highly-invasive strawberry guava (psidium cattleianum, also called waiawi) got introduced to the hawaiian islands and the story is just as bad as one would expect...
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
(a thread of threads, quotes, and links)
This is a collection of writings and research concerned with how we got where we are today, which is in fact the story of what has been done to us, and what has been taken from us.
By "us" we're talking about "the 99%", "workers", "wage slaves", all non-owners of private property, "the poor", unhoused people, indigenous people, even plenty of people who swear by capitalism and identify as "capitalist" yet have no capital of their own and no serious hope of ever having any worth speaking of. In other words almost everyone except for the very few who have had the power to exploit us and shape our lives to serve their agenda. We're going to examine institutions and concepts that have deeply altered our world at all levels, both our external and internal realities.
By "here" we are talking about climate crisis and myriad other environmental catastrophes resulting from hyper-excessive extraction, consumption and waste; a world of rampant inequality and exploitation, hunger and starvation; a world of fences, walls, tollbooths, prisons, police, bullshit jobs and criminalized poverty; a world overrun with cars and preventable diseases; a world of vanishing biodiversity and blooming fascism; a world where "democracy" results in being led by some of the worst of humanity; a world ruled by an imaginary but all-powerful and single-minded god: Capital.
Our inspiration and structural framework for this survey is this quote from "The Prehistory of Private Property", an important work from political philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant S. McCall:
"After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries for enclosure, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned."
If you happen to be in Toronto tomorrow morning, come and hear me speak about the creation and early history of the Indian Fund - monies held in trust for First Nations by the Crown. Stick around for Maggie Jones (w/ Feir & Scoones) on Indian Missions in the US and Rob Gillezeau (w/ Feir & Jones) on the causes and effects of treaty-making in Canada. The rest of the program looks great too.
As someone from a formerly colonized country, I am very happy to see all the British people bashing their dumbass king and this stupid-ass coronation. Whenever y'all wanna start throwing shit, gimme a call, and I'll hop right on over. Queen Elizabeth died owing me money, so now this mf gotta pay the bill.
📚 Anti-Coronation Day books: nonfiction reads on the British Empire
As parts of the British population celebrate King Charles' coronation, many subjects will be actively avoiding it - which is why we're highlighting some ugly truths in these nonfiction books.
I’m tired of land acknowledgments. I’m tired of people saying they live on stolen land. I’m tired of them saying they acknowledge this as an act of reconciliation. That’s not reconciliation. That’s rubbing it in. If they want it to mean anything, they should include what they are doing to fight colonialism. At the very least they could make their services affordable for Indigenous Peoples. #LandBack#Indigenous#LandAcknowledgement#colonialism
"$59 Million, Gone: How Bikini Atoll Leaders Blew Through U.S. Trust Fund"
Lines like this: "Recognizing the damage its testing caused, the U.S. government established two trust funds in the 1980s to help pay for Bikinians’ health care, build housing and cover living costs."
Clearly there are problems, and many are tied to post-colonial social disruptions along with permanently irradiated homelands, but this article is an example of victim blaming.
Asking for subjects, er, citizens of Great Britain and its present-day-still-somehow colonies to swear allegiance to a king feels so, so bizarre to me as someone raised in the US.
Very interesting map of the territories and dependencies of the world. (Spoiler: the UK stays at the top of colonialism). #map#colonialism#infographics
Today in labor history April 28, 1789: Fletcher Christian led a group of mutineers against the brutal Captain Bligh on the HMS Bounty. Christian began the voyage as the captain’s mate, but Bligh appointed him acting Lieutenant during the voyage. The story of the voyage and mutiny was later retold by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s “Mutiny on the Bounty.” After their successful mutiny, Christian, 9 other mutineers, 6 Tahitian men and 11 Tahitian women, started a colony on the South Pacific island of Pitcairn. However, the Tahitians rebelled when the mutineers tried to enslave them and killed most of them. But not until after many of the Tahitian women became pregnant. The decedents of the mutineers continue to live there today. Bligh had previously served on the Resolution, as Master, under Captain Cook, on his second and third voyages to Hawaii. And he was present when the native Hawaiians killed Cook.
After reading a bit in Bostrom's "Superintelligence" I ask myself:
What if this #AI takeover idea is but the nightmare of a society that grew out of #colonialism? A knowledge of invasion and technological supremacy is possibly deeply inscribed into our neural networks, as a collective memory. We are afraid of an AI that is like us.
On the 11th of May, we invite Sabine Groenewegen and Riar Rizaldi to present their work on gender, colonialism and ecology, from 15:00-17:00 at KITLV in Leiden.
Discussants: Rachael Rakes & Jo-Lene Ong, moderator Ward Berenschot!
I've just read a very interesting — but disturbing — essay about the direct connection of historical colonialism to deforestation, desertification, pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Ugh.
My first reaction is to be appalled and disgusted (once again) with the incredibly poor "stewardship" shown by European conquerors of indigenous peoples. Time and time again, these "civilized" invaders proved far less capable of effectively managing precious natural environments and resources than had the original inhabitants. Damn them!
And my second reaction is to be fascinated by the suggestion that "Anthropocene" may not in fact be a suitable name for the geological epoch we entered at some point in the past few hundred years. This is because the prefix "anthro" suggests that ALL humans are responsible for the changes wrought by global industrialization, when in truth it was, and is, only a mere sliver of the population, that good old 1%, who are behind the drive to dominate nature and exploit the environment at whatever cost, so long as they can profit from it and solidify their positions at the top.
Here's a short excerpt which amplifies this point...
While the scientific community has been debating over which year the Anthropocene Epoch began, several Indigenous and Black scholars have shot back against the term.
The problem, some scholars say, is that the term assumes the climate crisis is caused by universal human nature, rather than the actions of a minority of colonialists, capitalists, and patriarchs. And the implication that the Earth was stable until around 1950, when the ‘Anthropocene’ supposedly began, denies the history of people who have been exploited by those systems for centuries.
Indigenous scholars have further addressed how the term stands for colonialist ideologies that sever the deep ties and interconnections between humans, plants, animals, and the soil.
“Instead of treating the Earth like a precious entity that gives us life, Western colonial legacies operate within a paradigm that assumes they can extract its natural resources as much as they want, and the Earth will regenerate itself,” said Hadeel Assali, a lecturer and postdoctoral scholar.
I hope you'll read the full essay, and then let me know what you think about its message.
I think Capital is well-served by us thinking that greed is the problem. This is #capitalism 101: blame everything on human nature, claim that people need authorities to control them and blame heinous atrocities on us forcing them to do bad things for our own good.
All this distracts from the reality that Capital is power and that capitalism was forced on us all by a tiny minority of people with power. It did not just "evolve" from our collective actions. It is not some neutral system that has been ruined by greedy individuals.
It is important for people to understand the real evils deeper at the heart of capitalism:
"It took 10,000 years of violent aggression to force almost everybody around the world into the position where they have to follow a boss’s orders to get access to resources essential for survival. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned."