The Long Ecological Revolution

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Mon Jul 30, 2018 3:56 pm

A better word is 'idealistic'. That's been the problem since 1970.
Idealistic for sure, but that discounts the Malthusian element ("too many of them"). It is doctrinaire in the sense that they have made "useless eaters" into doctrine.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 30, 2018 5:09 pm

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Mon Jul 30, 2018 3:56 pm
A better word is 'idealistic'. That's been the problem since 1970.
Idealistic for sure, but that discounts the Malthusian element ("too many of them"). It is doctrinaire in the sense that they have made "useless eaters" into doctrine.
Funny you should mention that, I've just started reading 'Biology as Ideology' by RC Lewontin. Should have read it years ago. Yeah, it is sort of implicit, Darwin having taken some inspiration from Malthus's essay, 'evolution' hatched during capital's heyday, could it be otherwise? So the booj shading is inevitable, which is why the work of Stephen Gould is so invaluable.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Mon Jul 30, 2018 5:36 pm

I like Lewontin. When I had a subscription to Monthly Review one year his articles were always highlights. Especially his emphasis on "accommodation to power" which is a major pitfall in science (which we were just talking about in the case of climate change).

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 27, 2018 2:48 pm

No Empires, No Dust Bowls
Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History
by Hannah Holleman
(Jul 01, 2018)

Image

Hannah Holleman is an assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College and the author of Dust Bowls of Empire, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Today we are living in a new Dust Bowl era, defined by egregious levels of inhumanity and profound shifts taking place in the earth’s land, climate, and water systems. Like the 1930s Dust Bowl, contemporary ecological crises are associated with high levels of racialized social inequality, imperial expropriation, social dislocation, and fascistic politics. Accordingly, scholars and scientists are now studying the 1930s disaster as an analogue to our current period, as they seek to understand the dangers posed by climate change, land degradation, and freshwater scarcity. They are studying agricultural technology and practice, government policies, and migration patterns—and they are warning us to be prepared.

However, by treating the 1930s Dust Bowl as merely the outcome of poor policy, a regional phenomenon isolated from broader social issues, a case study in New Deal administration, or a purely climatological disaster, most of these analyses miss the crucial lessons from this period, which connect it to the present not as an analogue, but an antecedent. An honest and historically informed look at the present situation reveals the imperial system of capitalism as the primary driver of “dust-bowlification,” then and now. The racialized division of nature and humanity at the heart of this system cannot be transcended without transcending the system itself. No sustainable agricultural or social policy stands a chance against the overwhelming destructiveness of the existing social order.

However, a major barrier to an environmental politics that takes history seriously is the persistent segregation of the environmental movement and the prevailing belief among mainstream environmentalists, especially in wealthy countries, that a reformed capitalism can solve the problems outlined above. Likely because they themselves are unlikely to bear the costs of these crises, too many environmentalists and policy-makers have failed to face the violence and injustice behind the ecological devastation now dispassionately reported by organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, and many environmental NGOs.

Some continue to hope that the same political and economic elites who led us into the new Dust Bowl era will somehow lead us out, placing historically unfounded hope in international climate agreements and voluntary efforts by industry and individuals. They are effectively joining forces with the defenders of capital’s bottom line rather than those on the frontlines of capitalism’s catastrophes, who are fighting for a different world altogether. In the meantime, land and water grabs, the documented increase in violence against earth and water protectors, renewed attacks on indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection, the persistence of slavery and human trafficking, and an unprecedented number of refugees illustrate that at the systemic level, capitalism shows no signs of putting people and the planet ahead of profit.1

It is my hope that activists will take to heart the lessons of the 1930s Dust Bowl, briefly sketched below, and stop repeating the devastating mistakes of self-identified progressives and environmentalists of previous eras who promoted or made peace, however uneasy, with the racialized, imperial class system organized around production for profit. Not only because ecological justice demands it, but because the alternative—expecting capitalists or a reformed capitalism to save us—just will not work. We have more than a hundred years of historical experience since the idea of “greening” capitalism was proposed—from the first global dust bowl to today—as proof.

Preconditions of the First Global Dust Bowl
In the 1830s, the U.S. government under President Andrew Jackson hastened the violent removal of indigenous peoples from their lands, especially in the southeast of the country, to Indian Territory. To make way for the expansion of a plantation economy based on slave labor and white supremacy, the government promised indigenous nations land and life in the area “as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty.” Jackson, Donald Trump’s favorite president, wrote, “there your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to land.”2

However, as history teaches us, no such Trail of Tears can ever lead to “peace and plenty.” Rather, Northern industrialists and Southern planters joined forces to demand further white territorial expansion, including, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the lands promised and held in Indian Territory by tribes removed from the southeast by Jackson’s army. The accelerated expropriation of native lands for white settlement was the precondition for the expansion of cash crop agriculture and resource extraction across the continent. This expansion led to ecological devastation and human misery on a vast scale and set the stage for the socioecological disaster on the southern plains that a few decades later would be known as the Dust Bowl.

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes that “at the end of the Civil War the US Army hardly missed a beat before the war ‘to win the West’ began in full force. As a far more advanced killing machine and with seasoned troops, the army began the slaughter of people, buffalo, and the land itself, destroying natural tall grasses of the Plains and planting short grasses for cattle, eventually leading to the loss of topsoil four decades later.”3 Northeastern elites like Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes promoted the privatization and allotment of remaining tribal lands held in common in the 1880s to make way for white settlement and promote the interests of private capital, especially railroads, manufacturers seeking cheap raw materials (like cotton), extractive industries, bankers, and land speculators.

Westward expansion in this period was part of the renewed seizure of indigenous land underway around the world. The new imperialism that took off in the wake of the U.S. Civil War and abolition of slavery encompassed wars of conquest waged by colonial powers for the expansion of white territorial control, as well as the removal of indigenous peoples from their lands to make way for white settlement. Anglo-European and U.S. imperial regimes learned from one another, shared expertise, and developed a trans-imperial approach to the administrative challenges associated, from their perspective, with taking up “the white man’s burden” on a global scale. As a result, their policies of land theft—including the privatization and expropriation of indigenous lands held in common—looked similar, whether employed in French Algeria under Napoleon III and then the Third Republic, or the Cape Colony under Cecil Rhodes, or Indian Territory in what would become the state of Oklahoma.4

Harry Magdoff explains that by the start of the First World War, “as a consequence of this new expansion and conquest on top of that of preceding centuries, the colonial powers, their colonies, and their former colonies extended over approximately 85 percent of the earth’s surface.”5 This is the period in which the United States seized Hawai’i, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands, and waged a war of atrocity against the Philippine Republic.6 The gospel of colonial expansion, which W. E. B. Du Bois identified as the “new religion of whiteness,” taught its followers that “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”7 The new imperialism was thus underwritten by “the doctrine of the divine right of white people to steal.”8

One result of this phase of capitalist globalization was the racialized division of nature and humanity on a world scale, resulting in what historian David Anderson has called the “first global environmental problem,” described in the 1930s as another “white man’s burden.”9 This was a massive soil erosion crisis associated with colonial land use changes, especially the expansion of cash crop agriculture and deforestation, and the integration of the first global agriculture and food regime.

Dust Bowls of Empire
As scholars of racial capitalism, colonialism, and white settler colonialism have shown, capitalist development depends on a racialized division of humanity. This process is mirrored in the racialized division of nature. Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster explain that the division of nature under capitalism is central to the system’s ecological rifts:

Capital accumulation requires the continual expansion of the division of nature as well as the division of labor. The division of nature is no longer, however, a social division of nature, in which the earth’s different landscapes and species are utilized by human beings within a context that maintains the reproduction of nature itself. Instead, it is a detailed/alienated division of nature that breaks the circle of natural processes, creating ecological rifts. Nature is remade in such a way as to promote a single end: the accumulation of capital, irrespective of the lessons of rational science and conditions of sustainability.10

The racialization of the division of nature was part and parcel of the new imperialism. Lands and people were identified as the natural property of white men, and modes of land tenure that differed from capitalist property relations (likewise identified with whiteness), as well as the people practicing them, were treated as backward and exploitable or expropriatable.

At the heart of every major ecological crisis of capitalism has been the idea that (white) property owners, businessmen, and policy-makers can do with the land as they please in the name of profit, and assume access to land and resources further afield once they have destroyed the areas where they started. In the United States this attitude was summed up by Teddy Roosevelt, who remarked that in the view of the American settler, “when he exhausted the soil of his farm, he felt that his son could go West and take up another…. When the soil-wash from the farmer’s field choked the neighboring river, the only thought was to use the railway rather than the boats to move produce and supplies.”11

By the 1930s, colonial soil scientists described the massive soil erosion problem then plaguing colonies and frontier regions around the world, including the U.S. Southern plains, as the result of the imperial “rape of the earth” of preceding decades.12 This ecological crisis, predicated on the attempted domination and decimation of entire cultures, involved a then-unprecedented level of destruction and erosion of the living soil complex upon which practically all terrestrial life depends. Lush and lovely prairies, woodlands, pampas, and forests were shorn of their protective layer and the landscape scraped bare to make way for the desolate monoculture of capitalist agriculture.

By the end of the 1930s, tens of thousands of people had been displaced on the U.S. Southern plains and elsewhere, after decades of so many lives being mutilated or sacrificed on the altars of profit and white supremacy.13 One U.S. official called the Dust Bowl “the most spectacular mass sacrifice to strictly commercial mores in the history of mankind.”14 This disaster developed in spite of decades of warnings about the growing problem of soil erosion and broader land degradation across the colonial world, as well as its impact on communities losing their livelihoods. There was already a large body of knowledge about how to prevent erosion, as well as shared expertise across colonial contexts about how to remediate it, adequate technology, and many conservation-oriented elites working to address the growing ecological crises of the new imperialism. However, as with the ineffectual climate conferences held in recent decades by the United Nations, world leaders in the 1930s could not ultimately prevent or resolve the crisis of soil erosion because of their commitment to maintaining the global social and economic status quo—the racialized class system in which we still live. Like dust-bowlification today, the ultimate source of the crisis was social, not technological, and thus required social change to address. Prominent British colonial soil scientists Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte, authors of The Rape of the Earth, recognized even then that this refusal to disturb the status quo would make it impossible to truly address the global crisis of soil erosion:

Where land-utilization practices are firmly established and have become the basis of the country’s economy, the adoption of a new land-utilization programme conforming to the limits imposed by the natural environment, may well involve a social and political revolution.

Therein lies the supreme difficulty of applying effective erosion control. We now know fairly precisely what agricultural, pastoral, forest and engineering principles must be adopted to stop the earth from rotting away beneath our feet, but we cannot, or dare not, apply them forthwith on a scale commensurate with the gravity of the situation.15

While in the United States New Deal agricultural programs addressed some of the technical problems of agriculture, and met some of the needs of down-and-out white settlers—the Tom Joads depicted in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—the broader social conditions that allow for such destruction have remained in place. This is why, as I argue and illustrate in great detail in my forthcoming book, we now face even worse ecological crises than in the 1930s—a new global Dust Bowl.16

The New Global Dust Bowl
At the heart of the new Dust Bowl are land degradation, climate change, and freshwater scarcity. It is the result of increasingly extreme expropriation—in both scale and technique—of the land, of the planet’s hydrocarbon deposits, and of freshwater systems. Industrial agriculture has contributed significantly to each of these problems, as “heavy [fossil-fueled] tilling, multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability.”17 These practices have masked the effects of land degradation, especially in its most destructive form, the loss of soil to erosion. Because of the ongoing mining of the soil for profit, the earth has lost a third of its arable land to erosion and pollution since the 1970s. Plant and soil biologist Duncan Cameron has warned that “you think of the dust bowl of the 1930s in North America and then you realize we are moving towards that situation if we don’t do something.”18

While soil erosion receives little attention in the media—perhaps because, as one scientist said, “soil isn’t sexy”—the problems caused by climate change are more widely covered.19 The earth’s warming climate is driving a shift in the global hydrological or water cycle that is essentially making wet places wetter and dry places drier—with awful ecological and social consequences. NASA’s Earth Observatory cites the alteration of the hydrological cycle as one of “the most serious Earth science and environmental policy issues confronting society.”20 According to World Bank economist Richard Damania, “when we look at any of the major impacts of climate change, they one way or another come through water…. So it will be no exaggeration to claim that climate change is really in fact about hydrological change.”21

At the same time, freshwater resources are being degraded by pollution and over-tapped by unsustainable agricultural practices, which, in conjunction with climate change and inadequate infrastructure serving poorer areas, is reducing the availability of freshwater to life-threatening levels. A 2016 study published in Science Advances indicated that already, “about 66% [of the global population] (4.0 billion people) lives under severe water scarcity…at least 1 month of the year…. The number of people facing severe water scarcity for at least 4 to 6 months per year is 1.8 to 2.9 billion…. Half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.”22

Scientists working at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and NOAA predict that in arid regions such as the U.S. Southwest, “the levels of aridity seen in the 1950s multiyear drought, or the 1930s Dust Bowl, [will] become the new climatology by mid-century: a perpetual drought.” The possibility of “perpetual drought” raises again the terrible specter of the Dust Bowl, but this time with no obvious way back, given the “locked-in” nature of climate change.23

Such warnings by scientists indicate the severity of both current and expected crises, given that the Dust Bowl is considered by many as one of the more extreme humanmade ecological and social disasters in history. However, we now confront the reality, given the trends explained above, that dust-bowlification is an increasingly likely and ordinary threat in the face of climate change.24 That what is happening today is a direct continuation of the colonial past is illustrated in part by the great social distance between those making decisions and those most affected—and by the fact that one group of people may forcibly impose such destruction on others. As a recent report by Tamra Gilbertson for the Indigenous Environmental Network and Climate Justice Alliance stated:

Communities especially impacted include the frontline communities of peoples living directly alongside fossil-fuel pollution and extraction overwhelmingly: Indigenous Peoples (IPs), Black, Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander communities, working class, poor and peasant communities in the United States, Canada and around the world. These peoples are forced to sacrifice their lives, livelihoods and health for the sake of projects to extract and burn fossil fuels and dump the resulting toxic waste and…have been facing the reality of the climate crisis for decades. In climate disruption and extreme weather events, these communities and indigenous tribal nations are hit first and [worst].25

However, there is no serious New Deal on the horizon for the poor and non-white world most impacted by socioecological crises in the new Dust Bowl era.26 Rather, international environmental politics, as represented by the most recent climate negotiations, have hung much of the world out to dry—or drown. Moreover, the very people suffering most under current conditions and forced to seek safety away from home are also scapegoated viciously by political and economic elites oozing racist anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment across Europe, Britain, North America, and beyond.

No Empires, No Dust Bowls
A key lesson from all of this is that when we talk about ecological crises like climate change, biodiversity loss, water pollution and scarcity, and soil degradation, we are necessarily talking about systemic social problems with long and brutal histories under capitalist development. When scientists describe the increase of Dust Bowl-like conditions under climate change, they signal a particular kind of violent ecological and social change. The projected crises have violent consequences. But equally violent are the social forces, historical developments, policies, and practices that produce such massive socioecological crises in the first place.

Mainstream environmentalism, which first developed in the colonial context, has often instead ignored the historical origins of current crises. Failure to address this history allows too many environmentalists and policy-makers “to safely put aside present responsibility for continued harm done by that past and questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society.”27

Rather than adjusting to injustice, a tendency toward accommodation in the face of oppression that Martin Luther King Jr. and others warned against, we must meet the imperial system of capital head on, in all its manifestations. Collective resistance against police brutality, immigrant-bashing, toxic forms of masculinity and heteronormativity, prisons, attacks on indigenous sovereignty, military aggression and bombing of defenseless communities, and the segregation of the global environmental movement are essential if environmentalism is to have any relevance in the struggle to build a better world and avoid the catastrophic deepening of the global ecological rift. At the heart of the matter is that allowing the accumulation of injustice to continue makes inevitable what Foster calls the “accumulation of catastrophe.”28 Environmental justice demands solidarity with those on the frontlines rather than those defending the bottom line of capital. We do not need a “greener” version of such barbarism. Peace with the system means no peace for the planet.

Notes
↩ Maria Cristina Rulli, Antonio Saviori, and Paolo D’Odorico, “Global Land and Water Grabbing,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 3 (2013): 892–97; Jampel Dell’Angelo, Maria Cristina Rulli, and Paolo D’Odorico, “The Global Water Grabbing Syndrome,” Ecological Economics 143 (2018): 276–85; Cyril Mychalejko, “Land Grabs Soar, Worsen Land Conflicts and Climate Change: Report,” Telesur, June 14, 2016; May Bulman, “Human Trafficking and Slavery Affecting ‘Every Large Town and City in UK,’” Independent, August 10, 2017; Gwyneth Rees, “Human Trafficking: Modern-Day Slaves ‘Within Plain Sight,’” BBC Wales News, February 25, 2018; Jonathan Watts and John Vidal, “Environmental Defenders Being Killed in Record Numbers Globally, New Research Reveals,” Guardian, July 13, 2017.
↩ Zach Schonfeld, “Understanding Donald Trump’s Weird Obsession With Andrew Jackson,” Newsweek, January 5, 2017.
↩ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014), 144.
↩ R. J. Thompson and B. M. Nicholls, “The Glen Grey Act: Forgotten Dimensions in an Old Theme,” South African Journal of Economic History 8, no. 2 (1993): 58–70.
↩ Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 35.
↩ Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 163.
↩ W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” [1920], Monthly Review 55, no. 6 (2003): 44–58, 45–46.
↩ Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 55.
↩ David Anderson, “Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography, and Drought: The Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa during the 1930’s,” African Affairs 83, no. 332 (July 1984): 321–43, 327; Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte, The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 249.
↩ Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Ecology in the 21st Century,” World Review of Political Economy 1, no. 1 (2010): 142–56, 152; John Bellamy Foster referred earlier to the “division of nature” as the “the disconnection of natural processes from each other and their extreme simplification…an inherent tendency of capitalist development” (The Vulnerable Planet [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999], 121).
↩ Theodore Roosevelt, “Opening Address by the President,” Proceedings of a Conference of Governors (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 9. Conference of Governors on the Conservation of Natural Resources held in Washington, D.C., May 13–15, 1908.
↩ Jacks and White, The Rape of the Earth, 1939.
↩ “Dust and Drought,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, http://americanexperience.si.edu.
↩ Russell Lord, “Progress of Soil Conservation in the United States,” Geographical Journal 105, nos. 5–6 (1945): 159–66, 162.
↩ Jacks and Whyte, The Rape of the Earth, 38.
↩ Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green Capitalism” (Yale University Press, forthcoming).
↩ Jonathan Watts, “Third of Earth’s Soil Is Acutely Degraded due to Agriculture,” Guardian, September 12, 2017.
↩ Oliver Milman, “Earth Has Lost a Third of Arable Land in Past 40 Years, Scientists Say,” Guardian, December 2, 2015.
↩ John Crawford, “What If the World’s Soil Runs Out?” interview by World Economic Forum, Time, December 14, 2012.
↩ Steve Graham, Claire Parkinson, and Mous Chahine, “The Water Cycle and Climate Change,” NASA Earth Observatory, October 1, 2010, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov.
↩ Chris Mooney, “World Bank: The Way Climate Change Is Really Going to Hurt Us Is through Water,” Washington Post, May 3, 2016.
↩ Mesfin M. Mekonnen and Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “Four Billion People Facing Severe Water Scarcity,” Science Advances 2, no. 2 (2016).
↩ Richard Seager, “An Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America,” Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Earth Institute, Columbia University, http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu; Richard Seager et al., “Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America,” Science 316, no. 5828 (2007): 1181–84.
↩ Joseph Romm, “Desertification: The Next Dust Bowl,” Nature 478 (2011): 450–51, 450; Joe Romm, “My Nature Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security,” ThinkProgress, May 24, 2012, https://thinkprogress.org.
↩ Tamra Gilbertson, Carbon Pricing: A Critical Perspective for Community Resistance, vol. 1 (Bemidji, MN: Indigenous Environmental Network/Climate Justice Alliance, 2017), 12.
↩ Chris Mooney, “World Bank: The Way Climate Change Is Really Going to Hurt Us Is through Water”; Somina Sengupta, “Hotter, Drier, Hungrier: How Global Warming Punishes the World’s Poorest,” New York Times, March 12, 2018; Pamela Worth, “Where Climate Change Hits First and Worst,” Catalyst 14 (2015): 8–11, 22.
↩ Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 5.
↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” Monthly Review 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1–17.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 05, 2018 12:00 pm

Dems damp down hopes for climate change agenda
BY TIMOTHY CAMA AND MIKE LILLIS - 10/17/18 06:00 AM EDT 3,237
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Dems damp down hopes for climate change agenda
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Democrats are unlikely to pursue major climate change legislation if they win the House majority, despite a growing body of evidence suggesting time is running out to address the issue.

This represents a shift in strategy from when House Democrats last controlled the chamber. In 2009, they passed cap-and-trade legislation, which subsequently died in the Democratic-controlled Senate. The game plan for next year, House Democrats say, is more incremental steps and hearings.

With President Trump in the White House and Republicans favored to keep the Senate next year, climate legislation would face stiff headwinds, and pushing it could spark backlash from the right — both now and after the Nov. 6 midterm elections.

Considering those “constraints,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), Democrats should “focus on the practical and the opportunistic” to make short-term progress while fighting for bolder measures — “the aspirational goals” — over the longer term.

“It’s going to be, I think, more of an opportunistic strategy, where, in various pieces of legislation, across the board, we’re going to insert measures that address climate change,” said Connolly, a leader in the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition.

The office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a fierce environmentalist who ushered the cap-and-trade bill through the lower chamber almost a decade ago, declined to comment about the Democrats’ future climate plans. Pelosi has been touring the country stumping for Democratic candidates, with a focus on economic and health-care issues.

Others anticipate a piecemeal approach to climate policy if the Democrats win the chamber.

“I could imagine that we can do ancillary pieces that are very much reinforcing this issue and concern for climate change,” said Rep. Paul Tonko (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s environment subcommittee.

Not all Democrats share that view. Faced with more data on a warming planet — and the role of human activity in exacerbating the trend — some lawmakers want the party to use its would-be majority to push a bold, sweeping package to hike the cost of carbon emissions.

Their urgency has been fueled by a new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which forecasts impacts like massive coral reef die-offs, increased drought and sea-level rise by 2040 if emissions are not significantly cut by 2030. The report’s authors said current climate policies and the 2015 Paris agreement — which Trump promised to exit — are not nearly enough to avoid disaster.

“I do think we need to go big,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). “I’m all for incrementalism in policy. We do lots and lots of it, and it’s a good way to move forward. But this situation is so serious that we can’t do it in little steps.”

Beyer acknowledged the political hurdles facing such a plan, not least Trump’s rejection of consensus climate science. But he sees a path for working with moderate Republican senators and getting a climate change bill to the president’s desk. If it gets that far, he thinks Trump — enticed by the opportunity to claim a victory — might change his tune.

“Politically, it wouldn’t be smart for Democrats to give him a win, but we’re not talking about politics, we’re talking about the fate of the planet and the fate of humanity,” Beyer said.

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), a co-chairman of the bipartisan, 90-member Climate Solutions Caucus, rejected the notion that pricing-up carbon is beyond reach, even in the current political environment. He’s pushing for a bipartisan carbon-fee bill that, if passed by the House, would then put pressure on Trump and Senate Republicans to act.

“I’m not expecting the president to lead on this,” he said, “but I think Congress has an opportunity, the House has an opportunity, to move something forward — hopefully with bipartisan support — that the president would then have to respond to.”

Rep. Earl Blumenauer is also on board for bold action. The Oregon Democrat said fighting carbon pollution will be “a top priority” if Democrats win the House.

“My preferred method has been a putting a price on carbon — cap-and-trade is complex and less efficient,” he said.

Progressive groups, a vocal part of Democrats’ base, are certain to push for such an aggressive approach — as will many Democrats who launch 2020 presidential bids. Still, those lawmakers anticipating sweeping climate legislation appear to be in the minority, as more Democrats see a political environment that’s simply too hostile to move a major climate bill.

In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on Sunday, Trump addressed the changing climate: “I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again. I don’t think it’s a hoax, I think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s man-made.”

Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said the notion that cap-and-trade or carbon tax legislation could pass the Senate and win Trump’s signature “is extremely unlikely.” He suggested Democrats adopt a two-tier approach: Pass piecemeal bills on issues where there’s bipartisan buy-in — like energy efficiency and grid modernization — while simultaneously holding hearings on the larger climate problem to build support among industry leaders and other stakeholders.

“We can’t be blind to the reality of Donald Trump’s climate change denial,” Welch said. “We can’t put all our eggs in that basket.”

Instead, Democrats are eyeing relatively small-ball measures that push energy efficiency, modernize the electric grid to handle more renewable energy, increase incentives for power sources like wind and solar and provide more infrastructure for electric vehicles.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the minority whip, said Democrats across the board deem the warming trend a threat to both national security and public health, urging Republicans to tackle it in bipartisan fashion “instead of denying climate change is real and taking steps to exacerbate it.” He singled out energy efficiency and clean energy technology as two areas “of potential bipartisan agreement.”

The failure in 2010 of the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill is still fresh in House Democrats’ minds. Republicans won 63 seats and the House majority in 2010, campaigning against Democrats on climate change and ObamaCare.

Polling continually shows that voters rank climate far down on their list of priorities. And although energy prices are lower than they were a decade or so ago, few lawmakers want to be responsible for significant increases in consumers’ costs or job losses that could accompany new policies.

Democrats, who are now favored to seize the House, have crafted their campaign message around issues like increasing working-class wages and lowering the cost of prescription drugs. They think the kitchen-table agenda will resonate more effectively, particularly in conservative-leaning districts where voters tend to be wary of the economic impact of climate legislation.

As Speaker of the House in 2007, Pelosi struck deals with then-President George W. Bush on a variety of bills but didn’t push climate change until former President Obama was in the White House. Addressing the issue before the 2008 election, Pelosi said, “I’m trying to save the planet.”

Environmentalists agree with the Democrats’ strategy.

“A long time ago, we came to the realization that there was no real possibility that truly progressive climate legislation was going to be signed by President Trump,” said Lukas Ross, senior policy analyst at Friends of the Earth.

Instead, Ross wants Democrats to focus on investigating the Trump administration and holding officials’ feet to the fire for its environmental rollbacks.

Ana Unruh Cohen, managing director of government affairs at NRDC Action Fund, said next year wouldn’t be the right time for big efforts on climate. The group is the campaign affiliate of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“You have to hit some singles and doubles to load the bases to hit a grand slam. I think Democratic leadership will be trying to get those bases loaded, even as some others in the caucus will be trying to point to the fences and lay out a big vision,” said Cohen.

“You have to hit some singles and doubles to load the bases to hit a grand slam. I think Democratic leadership will be trying to get those bases loaded, even as some others in the caucus will be trying to point to the fences and lay out a big vision,” said Cohen.

For the Trump administration’s supporters, the fear of a major climate bill shows that Democrats are afraid of backing up their words about climate with action.

“They will please their base, they will gin up the rhetoric on this,” said Tom Pyle, president of the industry-backed American Energy Alliance.

“As far as how bold they will be, it remains to be seen,” he said. “I see a lot of message bills and a whole lot of discussion about it.”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), one of the lead sponsors of the ill-fated cap-and-trade bill when he was in the House, said the priority for House Democrats should be to restart the legislative conversation on climate.

“I think once Democrats start to have hearings on the severity of the problem, and how many jobs get created if you put in place a plan to deal with the crisis, that we would have a real chance at making some progress,” he said.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-envir ... nge-agenda

'Keeping their powder dry', as usual. Said it many times and will say it again, 'The Democratic Party is the piss that sets the Republican dye in the national fabric. There can be no progress until the Dems are utterly discredited.'
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 09, 2018 12:12 pm

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Geoengineering and environmental capitalism

Extractive Industries in the Era of Climate Change
Posted Nov 02, 2018 by Eds.
Topics: Ecology , Political EconomyPlaces: Global
Originally published: Science for the People by Linda Schneider (Summer 2018) |

If, as history shows, fantasies of weather and climate control have chiefly served commercial and military interests, why should we expect the future to be different?
—James Fleming, Fixing the Sky(1)

After decades of lurking in the shadows of secretive military research, geoengineering has recently resurfaced in conversations about climate change and crept into the mainstream of international climate policy.(2) A small group of climate scientists, elite policy advisers and industry representatives from high-polluting countries in the Global North are increasingly vocal about their support for geoengineering—large-scale technological interventions in the climate system—as a means to weaken or suppress some of the symptoms of climate change.

There are two basic categories of geoengineering technologies. The first is a suite of technologies that aim to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight to artificially cool the climate, Solar Radiation Management (SRM). Proposed SRM projects include shooting aerosols into the stratosphere andbrightening clouds or ocean surfaces to reflect sunlight back into space.

SRM has thus far only been simulated in computer models, but it could leave the lab as early as 2018. Backed by a multimillion geoengineering fund provided by Bill Gates, Harvard University scientist David Keith, and colleagues working on the high profile Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) project known as “SCoPEx” plan to run first field experiments in Tucson, Arizona, this year. Hardware-testing of the Marine Cloud Brightening Project, a research project with financial and professional connections to SCoPEx, is slated to take place in Monterey Bay, California, on Indigenous territory. Ice911, a self-proclaimed “Silicon Valley moonshot,” is already testing their geoengineering solution to lower global temperatures by restoring ice in the Arctic.

The second category of geoengineering interventions in the Earth system fall under the umbrella of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). CDR aims to suck CO2 from the atmosphere at a global scale and bury it underground or in the oceans.(3) While pilot-scale facilities on land filter CO2 from ambient air, they are so far unable to permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere. David Keith’s Carbon Engineering company, for example, produces synthetic fuel from captured CO2.Climeworks in Switzerland lists food and beverage, agriculture, and automotive manufacturing as (potential) industries for their product. In all cases, the captured CO2 sooner or later returns to the atmosphere when the products made from it are combusted, consumed, or otherwise disposed of.

Carbon Dioxide Removal schemes are not limited to land. As one of the most prominent marine geoengineering technologies, Ocean Fertilization applies iron or other nutrients in large oceanic areas to stimulate phytoplankton growth that sequesters atmospheric CO2. The phytoplankton eventually sink to the ocean bed when they die, supposedly taking the sequestered CO2 along. Thisidea has been tested a dozen times—with meager results for the technology’s efficacy (much of the sequestered CO2 was released again via the marine food chain), but with detrimental impacts on the marine environment.

Across the two basic categories of SRM and CDR, geoengineering aims to intervene in the world’s oceans, soils, ecosystems and atmosphere. Most geoengineering technologies are largely hypothetical, and major uncertainties remain as to whether they could ever work at all.

A Climate “Technofix”
Geoengineering is an attempt to solve the problem of climate change—a social, political, and ecological crisis—through large-scale technological projects. This “technofix“ mentality lends itself to a systematic disregard of risk, adverse impacts, and unintended side-effects associated with unproven technologies. Side effects are particularly threatening to strained natural ecosystems and economically or ecologically vulnerable populations.

Some consequences are fairly straightforward: the technological system known as BECCS is meant to couple bioenergy production with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies that bury CO2 underground. If rolled out at a climate-relevant scale, BECCS would lead to fierce competition over land and resources, widespread land grabs and forced displacement, and sharp increases in global food prices.

Computer simulations have predicted other possible impacts of geoengineering schemes on the natural world. Injecting aerosols in the stratosphere could suppress rainfall and potentially interfere with monsoon patterns. Carbon farm monocultures threaten to destroy natural ecosystems at a massive scale. Given that natural processes and systems are complex, non-linear, and in some measure chaotic and unpredictable, the overwhelming majority of effects that will ripple through our global ecosystems might only become apparent after geoengineering technologies are actually deployed.

The systematic dominance of physical science and engineering perspectives in geoengineering research encourages a neglect of social and environmental impacts. This negligence is characteristic of an approach that addresses symptoms but leaves the underlying conditions that spawned the problem in place. Yet the sociopolitical and socioeconomic implications of large-scale technological schemes to “fix” the climate are profound: under existing global power relations, geoengineering is bound to be exploited for corporate and strategic interest.

The perfect excuse for continuing business-as-usual
Finding a technological shortcut to climate change is in the interest of those responsible for the bulk of the problem. Were the international community to address the root causes of environmental destruction, major pollutants would bear the political and economic costs. It is therefore no surprise that fossil fuel companies and their representatives often draw on geoengineering as part of the “solution” to climate change.(4) If pollution can be cleaned up after the fact and global warming and other symptoms of climate change can be technologically suppressed, then the industries responsible for environmental crisis can continue business as usual.

Oil industry moguls and their representatives, such as Haroon Kheshgi at ExxonMobil, have been at the forefront of developing geoengineering technologies, particularly to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.(5) Kheshgi is also an author of the upcoming IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C, which for a broad range of over one hundred international civil society organizations constitutes a flagrant conflict of interest.(6)

In many cases, there is direct overlap between oil industry interests and geoengineering projects branded as environmental solutions. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), an important enabling technology for Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), was originally developed by the oil industry as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), a technique to flush out the final drops of oil from nearly-depleted wells and reservoirs. Both fossil CCS and CCS coupled with bioenergy (BECCS) or CO2 from the atmosphere (Direct Air Capture and CCS, or DACCS) are now touted as contributions to climate change mitigation.

For a long time, geoengineering was too controversial for big corporations to publicly endorse. Yet as Steve Horn revealed in his DeSmog Blog article, “How the Biochar Industry Pushed for Offsets, Tar Sands, and Fracking Reclamation Using Unsettled Science,” powerful industries have lobbied extensively for geoengineering initiatives like biochar.

Much remains to be uncovered about the entanglements of the fossil fuel industry and geoengineering initiatives, but as geoengineering becomes less taboo, corporate interests are increasingly apparent. Business magnates such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, have openly donated large sums of money toward geoengineering research and technology.(7) Private and corporate investments contribute to the highly undemocratic and unaccountable nature of the field of geoengineering research and development.

Fossil fuel industries have much to lose from the socioecological transformation and restructuring that our economies and societies urgently need. An entire mode of production—highly polluting, highly exploitative of humans and nature—is utterly indefensible in the face of climate change and the global social injustice environmental degradation perpetuates. In treating some of the symptoms of climate change but not tackling the root causes, geoengineering can be understood as a desperate attempt to maintain a failed economic status quo.

New industries for engineering the planet
Geoengineering schemes aim to intervene in natural ecosystems at a global scale. Current climate mitigation scenarios include the possibility of several hundred to more than one thousand gigatons (Gt) of CO2 being removed from the atmosphere over the course of the twenty-first century and stored underground or in the oceans.(8) In 2017, global CO2 emissions stood at around 40 Gt. This amounts to a staggering amount of ten to twenty-five times of the current global emissions per year that would need to be sucked from the atmosphere.

Given the magnitude and scale at which the proposed geoengineering initiatives would need to be rolled out to be “climate-significant,” their implementation would consume enormous amounts of energy, land, water, minerals, and other natural resources. They would depend on the establishment of new transnational, large-scale extractive industries.

BECCS, for example, requires cultivating, harvesting, and transporting fast-growing, usually water-and fertilizer-intensive biomass, burning biomass in bioenergy plants, sequestering the carbon dioxide that arises in the combustion process, and transporting CO2 to sites of final disposal. In other words, implementing BECCS means developing cross-border and industrial-scale infrastructure, processing plants, pipes and tubes, roads and railways, and storage facilities. And who is better equipped to erect and maintain such industrial infrastructures than existing transnational industries currently engaged in mining, transportation, fossil fuel production, and conventional agriculture?

Other CDR technologies come with similar costs. Global-scale Enhanced Weathering (EW) involves distributing finely ground rock material (olivine or basalt) several millimeters thick on agricultural fields—and not just some agricultural fields, but the largest part of the tropics. A 2010 study estimated that Enhanced Weathering could require olivine mining at the scale of present-day global coal mining.(9)

The additional emissions that arise throughout the entire life cycle—from industrial-scale mining to processing, transportation, and distribution—cast doubt on the ability of proposed CDR technologies to ever effectively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Moreover, extractive industries have a recognized, long-standing track record of human rights abuses and environmental destruction. The political economy behind geoengineering schemes threatens to further entrench industry power and marginalize the rights of local communities and the integrity of their ecosystems.

Engineering the climate for profit
Geoengineering schemes are not only in the interest of fossil fuel producers and extractive industries. They also promise market expansion, commercial gains and greater power for new and emerging economic actors and corporations. The recent increase in registered geoengineering patents and burgeoning commercial interest in geoengineering technologies make clear that tech entrepreneurs expect to profit from “fixing” the climate crisis.(10)

In the current absence of a significant carbon price or government regulation, it is incumbent upon “carbon geoengineers” to come up with commercially viable products made from the CO2 they capture. Strategies to make CDR commercially viable include attempts to use captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) or, in the case of David Keith’s direct air capture company, for synthetic fuels for the transport sector.(11) These commercial goods might eventually be profitable,but certainly have no climatic benefit.

Convergence of new and emerging technologies
Virtually any geoengineering scheme, for technical or political and governance reasons, would require a globe-spanning grid of measuring sites to monitor and control climatic and weather parameters. This is especially true for SRM technologies such as Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) and Marine Cloud Brightening that maintain artificial cooling by constantly recharging the climate with substances such as sulfur dioxide. Once such an intervention was implemented, halting it would trigger a “termination shock,” unleashing a sudden uptick in temperature, with rates of climatic change well beyond to what many species, including humans, could adapt.(12)

Similarly, permanent monitoring, reporting, and verification of carbon sequestration and storage in soils, biomass, the oceans, and underground would demand the extraction of massive amounts of data. Deploying such technologies and maintaining them over centuries is infeasible without constant universal surveillance of the climate and other Earth systems. Big Data has much to gain from reshaping and controlling the climate system. Beyond Big Data, we can trace tenuous connections to other new and emerging technologies, such as synthetic biology and genetic engineering. Trans-industrial proposals include genetically redesigning crop leaves to make them more reflective, engineering fast-growing tree species for afforestation and bioenergy plantations, and reconfiguring carbon-sequestering microorganisms for algal geoengineering schemes.

Finally, even the emerging Artificial Intelligence market has a potential stake in geoengineering. A late 2017 paper found that the deployment of a specialized algorithm and machine learning led to better results in fine-tuning injection sites and optimal dosages of sulfur dioxide in solar geoengineering deployment than depending on human intelligence.

These large-scale, transindustrial geoengineering proposals not only share technologies, but are also motivated by common underlying economic interests and corporate power. Public accountability and democratic governance of research and development recedes into the distance in the face of such powerful, globe-spanning, and planet-altering projects.

The Cool War: Hacking the planet for strategic interest
Besides commercial and industrial appetite, there are also serious military and security implications around the deployment and potential weaponization of geoengineering.

Even under the ideal deployment conditions that SRM computer simulations assume, impacts and side effects—an overall suppression of rainfall, regional droughts, hurricanes, and floods—will be unevenly distributed, resulting in regional winners and losers. This has significant ramifications for international peace and security. Industrial CDR infrastructure would place excessive demand on water, energy, minerals, and other resources. These are bound to give rise to a new wave of conflict over precisely these resources.

Geoengineering will produce adverse impacts and side-effects for some regions and populations, rendering it difficult to imagine establishing consensus around deployment. Who would voluntarily accept the potentially devastating consequences of such technologies? As geoengineering expands outside the realm of labs and computer models into the real world, political conflict risks being exacerbated by a systematic bias toward powerful nations more readily positioned to develop and deploy geoengineering in their favor.

This situation is exacerbated by global leaders’ sustained inability to agree on meaningful and mandatory climate action. Under conditions of unreliable multilateralism and fragile accountability, the international community lacks reliable mechanisms for holding potential geoengineering interventions responsible for liabilities. Geoengineering is essentially impossible to govern democratically on the international level.

David Keith, one of the most prominent supporters of climate engineering, and his co-authors in a recent article are surprisingly frank about the weaponization potential of certain geoengineering technologies. The global security threats posed by unilateral or mini-lateral SRM deployment, they argue, necessitate counter-measures or “counter-geoengineering” as a tactical device to deter other states from unilaterally deploying the technologies to their advantage.

According to Keith and co-authors, “counter-geoengineering” could be effected through “counterveiling with a warming agent, i.e. injecting even more GHG into the atmosphere, and neutralising impacts with a physical disruption.”(13)

Counter-geoengineering represents the final step towards climate militarization and borrows directly from Cold War deterrence thinking. The authors are unfazed by this explicitly militaristic dimension: “Military action to stop SRM deployment by a powerful state would likely only be launched by another powerful state or states, potentially triggering a systemic war.”(14)

It is no coincidence that in the United States, geoengineering is supported by individuals and think tanks with ties to the military.(15) At the end of 2017, a bill was introduced into Congress, which, if approved, would develop a strategic research agenda for Solar Radiation Management.(16)

The upshot of the U.S. officially pursuing a geoengineering research agenda while simultaneously withdrawing from the Paris Agreement might be a strategic intensification of existing geoengineering research elsewhere, such as the government-led research programs in China and Russia.(17) It is not only the deployment of geoengineering that has high-stakes geopolitical and security implications, but also the current pursuit of strategic technology development.

Power, profits, and authoritarian control: Petrifying the status quo
High-risk and global-impact technologies are inherently difficult to govern democratically. Under real-world political conditions, they are likely to privilege powerful states, granting marginalized populations little say in the newly engineered climate regime.

The infrastructure required by geoengineering also limits the autonomy of less powerful countries and independent actors. Although small states and rogue climate hackers could theoretically develop and carry out a one-time SRM intervention, as David Keith and his co-authors concede, “contrary to the common assumption that the ability to engage in solar geoengineering would be widely distributed among states, practical requirements related to delivery infrastructure, technical capacity, and ability to withstand external pressure would likely mean that SRM capabilities would be limited to major powers or coalitions.”(18)

Authoritarian regimes could readily exploit geoengineering technologies. Imaginary global climate control is itself an authoritarian fantasy on the part of a small technocratic elite. Measures to artificially cool down the planet as envisioned by Solar Radiation Management only suppress certain symptoms of climate change. The looming threat of consequences such as “termination shock” would demand constant control and surveillance over the global thermostat over the course of decades, centuries, or possibly millennia.

A deeper crisis
Despite attempts to present a neutral facade, geoengineering schemes are far from apolitical, “last resort” stopgaps for the environment. Not only is geoengineering not a remedy to the looming climate crisis, it is likely to worsen environmental issues in the long term.

Geoengineering is clearly opposed to the interest of the general public, from the risks posed to human communities and natural ecosystems to the ease with which it could be appropriated to serve extractive industry and military interests. Geoengineering is about more than just the climate: it is an attempt to uphold the failed status quo of fossil fuel and extractive industry power. It is a project amenable to authoritarianism, militarization, and weaponization. Increased private sector and military investment in climate engineering technologies and research represent an attempt to thwart the deep socio-ecological transformation our societies and economies urgently need.

The world does not need more technological quick fixes. We need a rapid phaseout of global coal, oil, and gas production and a rapid deconstruction of fossil fuel infrastructure. We need a shift to one hundred percent decentralised renewable energy production and supply from solar and wind. We have exciting, sustainable alternatives to the current status quo: a global transition towards peasant agroecology would produce significantly lower emissions than conventional industrial agriculture and simultaneously pave the way for food sovereignty.(19)

We can reduce the absolute energy and resources consumed by the global economy by adopting an agroeconomic model that does not depend on endless growth. We must redistribute global wealth and income, both between and within countries, to reduce socioeconomic inequality and increase climate resilience. Our solutions to the climate crisis, in reality a socioecological crisis, must be climate-just. The problem ahead is not an engineering problem—it is a problem of power and the vested interests of global industry in preventing real environmental justice.

References
↩ James R. Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Columbia University Press.
↩ See Earth‘s Future 2016 issue “Crutzen +10: Reflecting upon 10 years of geoengineering research.” Link: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com ... .GEOENGIN1
↩ For more information on geoengineering technologies and their impacts, key actors and supporters, political developments and international civil society opposition to geoengineering see GeoengineeringMonitor, a civil society-run information hub.
↩ Shell, “Sky. Meeting the Goals of the Paris Agreement,” Shell Scenarios, 2018, https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads ... io-sky.pdf; ETC Group, Biofuelwatch, Heinrich Böll Foundation, “The Big Bad Fix. The Case Against Climate Engineering,“ 2017, pp. 40ff. Link: https://www.boell.de/sites/default/file ... vision_iup
↩ Haroon S. Khesghi, „Sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxideby increasing ocean alkalinity,“ Energy, Vol. 20, No. 9, 1995, pp. 915-922. Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 429500035F
↩ GeoengineeringMonitor, Civil Society: „Oil Companies Should Not Author IPCC Report“, May15, 2017. Link: http://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/20 ... cc-report/
↩ ETC Group, Biofuelwatch, Heinrich Böll Foundation, “The Big Bad Fix,“ p. 40.
↩ Jan Minx et al., “Negative emissions – Part 1: Research landscape and synthesis,“ Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 13, No. 6, 2018. Link: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.10 ... 326/aabf9b
↩ Peter Köhler et al., “The geoengineering potential of artificially enhanced silicate weathering of olivine,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 107, 2010, pp. 20228-20233. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/47/20228
↩ ETC Group, Biofuelwatch, Heinrich Böll Foundation, “The Big Bad Fix,“ p. 41.
↩ Ibid.
↩ Trisos, C. H. et al., „Potentially dangerous consequences for biodiversity of solar geoengineering implementation and termination,“ Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, pp. 475-482, 2018. Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0431-0
↩ Parker, Horton, Keith, „Stopping Solar Geoengineering Through Technical Means“, 2018. Highly recommendable is a video produced to go along with the research paper, in which David Keith, Peter Irvine and Joshua Horton discuss the notion of counter-geoengineering and reflect on their new research: https://player.vimeo.com/video/269265108
↩ Ibid.
↩ ETC Group, Biofuelwatch, Heinrich Böll Foundation, ”The Big Bad Fix,“ p. 43.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-con ... format=txt
↩ ETC Group, Biofuelwatch, Heinrich Böll Foundation, “The Big Bad Fix,“ p. 38ff
↩ Andy Parker, Joshua Horton, and David Keith, “Stopping Solar Geoengineering Through Technical Means: A Preliminary Assessment of Counter-Geoengineering.” Earth’s Future, 2018.
↩ ETC Group, “Who Will Feed Us?“, 2017. Link: http://www.etcgroup.org/whowillfeedus

https://mronline.org/2018/11/02/geoengi ... italism-2/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 17, 2018 5:23 pm

Scores arrested as thousands block London bridges in climate rebellion
Protesters close five main bridges across Thames over extinction crisis in huge act of peaceful civil disobedience

Matthew Taylor and Damien Gayle

Sat 17 Nov 2018 10.31 EST First published on Sat 17 Nov 2018 06.11 EST

(Video at link)
Thousands block five London bridges to protest over climate crisis – video

Forty-five people have been arrested as thousands of demonstrators occupied five bridges in central London to voice their concern over the looming climate crisis.

Protesters including families and pensioners began massing on five of London’s main bridges from 10am on Saturday. An hour later all the crossings had been blocked in one of the biggest acts of peaceful civil disobedience in the UK in decades. Some people locked themselves together, while others linked arms and sang songs.

By 2pm the blockade of Southwark Bridge had been abandoned and protesters moved from there to Blackfriars Bridge, where organisers said they were soon to move west towards Westminster Bridge.


Climate protesters glue hands to UK government building
Read more
Demonstrators occupied Southwark, Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster and Lambeth bridges.

The Metropolitan police said all the bridges had since reopened.

A spokesman said: “There have been over 70 arrests for obstruction of the Highway Act and Bail Act offences.

Demonstrators have now gathered in Parliament Square to hear speeches. Roger Hallam, one of the strategists behind the rebellion day actions, told the Guardian that he felt the protest had been fantastic.

“This is total prediction stuff, mass participation civil disobedience,” he said. “They can’t do anything about it unless they start shooting people, and presumably they won’t do that.”

The demonstration will move from eastern bridges to congregate at the end of the day at Westminster, where there will be speeches and opportunities for members of the public to speak about environmental destruction.

The day will end with an interfaith ceremony outside Westminster Abbey.

The move is part of a campaign of mass civil disobedience organised by a new group, Extinction Rebellion, which wants to force governments to treat the threats of climate breakdown and extinction as a crisis.

“The ‘social contract’ has been broken … [and] it is therefore not only our right but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty and to rebel to defend life itself,” said Gail Bradbrook, one of the organisers.

Alice, 19, from Bristol was one of those blocking Westminster Bridge.

“I took the coach at 3am to make sure I didn’t miss it,” she said, “and I’m so glad that I did. It’s a tiny personal inconvenience and, having made it, I get to be part of a rebellion.

“This moment will be remembered in the history books, when we finally stopped allowing our leaders to take us over the cliff.”

Jenny Jones, the Green party peer, joined the protest on Westminster Bridge. She backed the non-violent direct action taken by demonstrators.

“We are at the point where if we don’t start acting and acting fast we are just going to wipe out our life support system,” she said.

“It’s fine to think we are a rich country, the sixth biggest economy in the world, but actually we won’t do any better than anywhere else because climate change will massively affect us too.

“Basically conventional politics has failed us - it’s even failed me and I’m part of the system - so people have no other choice.”

(Video at link)
Jenny Jones: "If we don't act fast, we're going to wipe out our life support system" - video

Father Martin Newell on Blackfriars Bridge said: “What brought me here is the climate emergency, the extinction emergency and my faith in God who created all this and whose creation we’re destroying and crucifying … I’m called as a Christian to protect our neighbour who’s being abused.”

In the past two weeks more than 60 people have been arrested for taking part in acts of civil disobedience organised by Extinction Rebellion ranging from gluing themselves to government buildings to blocking major roads in the capital.

However, those disruptions were eclipsed on Saturday, when organisers say 6,000 people took part in protests.

“It is not a step we take lightly,” said Tiana Jacout, one of those involved. “If things continue as is, we face an extinction greater than the one that killed the dinosaurs. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be a worthy ancestor.”

Extinction Rebellion, which cites the civil rights movement, suffragettes and Mahatma Gandhi as inspirations, said smaller events took place in other UK cities as well as overseas on Saturday.

Organisers say they are planning to escalate the campaigns from Wednesday, when small teams of activists will “swarm” around central London blocking roads and bridges, bringing widespread disruption to the capital.

“Given the scale of the ecological crisis we are facing this is the appropriate scale of expansion,” said Bradbrook. “Occupying the streets to bring about change as our ancestors have done before us. Only this kind of large-scale economic disruption can rapidly bring the government to the table to discuss our demands. We are prepared to risk it all for our futures.”


Image
Rebellion Day environmental protest
Demonstrators on Westminster Bridge in London for a protest called by Extinction Rebellion to raise awareness of the dangers posed by climate change. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday November 17, 2018. Photo credit should read: John Stillwell/PA Wire Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

The group is calling on the government to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025 and establish a “citizens assembly” to devise an emergency plan of action similar to that seen during the second world war.

On top of the specific demands, organisers say they hope the campaign of “respectful disruption” will change the debate around climate breakdown and signal to those in power that the present course of action will lead to disaster.

The group, which was established only a couple of months ago, has raised around £50k in small-scale donations in the past weeks.

It now has offices in central London and over the past few months has been holding meetings across the country, outlining the scale of the climate crisis and urging people to get involved in direct action this weekend.

“Local groups are setting up across the country and even new groups are seeing around 100 people come to meetings, and we have coaches coming, from Newcastle to Plymouth,” said Rupert Read, a philosophy academic at the University of East Anglia.

The campaign hit the headlines a couple of weeks ago when the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was one of almost 100 academics to come out in favour of it.

In a letter published in the Guardian they said: “While our academic perspectives and expertise may differ, we are united on this one point: we will not tolerate the failure of this or any other government to take robust and emergency action in respect of the worsening ecological crisis. The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible, and it is unconscionable to us that our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of an unprecedented disaster of our own making.”

The civil disobedience comes amid growing evidence of looming climate breakdown and follows warnings from the UN that there are only 12 years left to prevent global ecological disaster.

The group is also making international contacts, with 11 events planned in seven countries so far, including the US, Canada, Germany, Australia and France.

“To properly challenge the system that is sending us to an early grave we have to be bold and ambitious,” said Read. “Forging new connections across the world and learning from each other.”

Supt Waheed Khan, of the Metropolitan police, said: “The demonstration is having a direct impact on others across London who wish to go about their daily business – and the emergency services from using the bridges to travel around London. Given that the organisers failed to engage with police prior to the event, we were unable to work with them around their plan and to make considerations for other Londoners.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... are_btn_tw

How many of these would come out against capitalism, for socialism?
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 24, 2018 12:53 pm

Here's the Summary Findings of the Fourth National Climate Assessment which the Administration tried to bury by a Friday evening release:
Summary Findings
These Summary Findings represent a high-level synthesis of the material in the underlying report. The findings consolidate Key Messages and supporting evidence from 16 national-level topic chapters, 10 regional chapters, and 2 chapters that focus on societal response strategies (mitigation and adaptation). Unless otherwise noted, qualitative statements regarding future conditions in these Summary Findings are broadly applicable across the range of different levels of future climate change and associated impacts considered in this report.

1. Communities
Climate change creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities across the United States, presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth.
The impacts of climate change are already being felt in communities across the country. More frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities. Future climate change is expected to further disrupt many areas of life, exacerbating existing challenges to prosperity posed by aging and deteriorating infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and economic inequality. Impacts within and across regions will not be distributed equally. People who are already vulnerable, including lower-income and other marginalized communities, have lower capacity to prepare for and cope with extreme weather and climate-related events and are expected to experience greater impacts. Prioritizing adaptation actions for the most vulnerable populations would contribute to a more equitable future within and across communities. Global action to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions can substantially reduce climate-related risks and increase opportunities for these populations in the longer term.

2. Economy
Without substantial and sustained global mitigation and regional adaptation efforts, climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.
In the absence of significant global mitigation action and regional adaptation efforts, rising temperatures, sea level rise, and changes in extreme events are expected to increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property, labor productivity, and the vitality of our communities. Regional economies and industries that depend on natural resources and favorable climate conditions, such as agriculture, tourism, and fisheries, are vulnerable to the growing impacts of climate change. Rising temperatures are projected to reduce the efficiency of power generation while increasing energy demands, resulting in higher electricity costs. The impacts of climate change beyond our borders are expected to increasingly affect our trade and economy, including import and export prices and U.S. businesses with overseas operations and supply chains. Some aspects of our economy may see slight near-term improvements in a modestly warmer world. However, the continued warming that is projected to occur without substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions is expected to cause substantial net damage to the U.S. economy throughout this century, especially in the absence of increased adaptation efforts. With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.

3. Interconnected Impacts
Climate change affects the natural, built, and social systems we rely on individually and through their connections to one another. These interconnected systems are increasingly vulnerable to cascading impacts that are often difficult to predict, threatening essential services within and beyond the Nation’s borders.
Climate change presents added risks to interconnected systems that are already exposed to a range of stressors such as aging and deteriorating infrastructure, land-use changes, and population growth. Extreme weather and climate-related impacts on one system can result in increased risks or failures in other critical systems, including water resources, food production and distribution, energy and transportation, public health, international trade, and national security. The full extent of climate change risks to interconnected systems, many of which span regional and national boundaries, is often greater than the sum of risks to individual sectors. Failure to anticipate interconnected impacts can lead to missed opportunities for effectively managing the risks of climate change and can also lead to management responses that increase risks to other sectors and regions. Joint planning with stakeholders across sectors, regions, and jurisdictions can help identify critical risks arising from interaction among systems ahead of time.

4. Actions to Reduce Risks
Communities, governments, and businesses are working to reduce risks from and costs associated with climate change by taking action to lower greenhouse gas emissions and implement adaptation strategies. While mitigation and adaptation efforts have expanded substantially in the last four years, they do not yet approach the scale considered necessary to avoid substantial damages to the economy, environment, and human health over the coming decades.
Future risks from climate change depend primarily on decisions made today. The integration of climate risk into decision-making and the implementation of adaptation activities have significantly increased since the Third National Climate Assessment in 2014, including in areas of financial risk reporting, capital investment planning, development of engineering standards, military planning, and disaster risk management. Transformations in the energy sector—including the displacement of coal by natural gas and increased deployment of renewable energy—along with policy actions at the national, regional, state, and local levels are reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. While these adaptation and mitigation measures can help reduce damages in a number of sectors, this assessment shows that more immediate and substantial global greenhouse gas emissions reductions, as well as regional adaptation efforts, would be needed to avoid the most severe consequences in the long term. Mitigation and adaptation actions also present opportunities for additional benefits that are often more immediate and localized, such as improving local air quality and economies through investments in infrastructure. Some benefits, such as restoring ecosystems and increasing community vitality, may be harder to quantify.

5. Water
The quality and quantity of water available for use by people and ecosystems across the country are being affected by climate change, increasing risks and costs to agriculture, energy production, industry, recreation, and the environment.
Rising air and water temperatures and changes in precipitation are intensifying droughts, increasing heavy downpours, reducing snowpack, and causing declines in surface water quality, with varying impacts across regions. Future warming will add to the stress on water supplies and adversely impact the availability of water in parts of the United States. Changes in the relative amounts and timing of snow and rainfall are leading to mismatches between water availability and needs in some regions, posing threats to, for example, the future reliability of hydropower production in the Southwest and the Northwest. Groundwater depletion is exacerbating drought risk in many parts of the United States, particularly in the Southwest and Southern Great Plains. Dependable and safe water supplies for U.S. Caribbean, Hawai‘i, and U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Island communities are threatened by drought, flooding, and saltwater contamination due to sea level rise. Most U.S. power plants rely on a steady supply of water for cooling, and operations are expected to be affected by changes in water availability and temperature increases. Aging and deteriorating water infrastructure, typically designed for past environmental conditions, compounds the climate risk faced by society. Water management strategies that account for changing climate conditions can help reduce present and future risks to water security, but implementation of such practices remains limited.

6. Health
Impacts from climate change on extreme weather and climate-related events, air quality, and the transmission of disease through insects and pests, food, and water increasingly threaten the health and well-being of the American people, particularly populations that are already vulnerable.
Changes in temperature and precipitation are increasing air quality and health risks from wildfire and ground-level ozone pollution. Rising air and water temperatures and more intense extreme events are expected to increase exposure to waterborne and foodborne diseases, affecting food and water safety. With continued warming, cold-related deaths are projected to decrease and heat-related deaths are projected to increase; in most regions, increases in heat-related deaths are expected to outpace reductions in cold-related deaths. The frequency and severity of allergic illnesses, including asthma and hay fever, are expected to increase as a result of a changing climate. Climate change is also projected to alter the geographic range and distribution of disease-carrying insects and pests, exposing more people to ticks that carry Lyme disease and mosquitoes that transmit viruses such as Zika, West Nile, and dengue, with varying impacts across regions. Communities in the Southeast, for example, are particularly vulnerable to the combined health impacts from vector-borne disease, heat, and flooding. Extreme weather and climate-related events can have lasting mental health consequences in affected communities, particularly if they result in degradation of livelihoods or community relocation. Populations including older adults, children, low-income communities, and some communities of color are often disproportionately affected by, and less resilient to, the health impacts of climate change. Adaptation and mitigation policies and programs that help individuals, communities, and states prepare for the risks of a changing climate reduce the number of injuries, illnesses, and deaths from climate-related health outcomes.

7. Indigenous Peoples
Climate change increasingly threatens Indigenous communities’ livelihoods, economies, health, and cultural identities by disrupting interconnected social, physical, and ecological systems.
Many Indigenous peoples are reliant on natural resources for their economic, cultural, and physical well-being and are often uniquely affected by climate change. The impacts of climate change on water, land, coastal areas, and other natural resources, as well as infrastructure and related services, are expected to increasingly disrupt Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods and economies, including agriculture and agroforestry, fishing, recreation, and tourism. Adverse impacts on subsistence activities have already been observed. As climate changes continue, adverse impacts on culturally significant species and resources are expected to result in negative physical and mental health effects. Throughout the United States, climate-related impacts are causing some Indigenous peoples to consider or actively pursue community relocation as an adaptation strategy, presenting challenges associated with maintaining cultural and community continuity. While economic, political, and infrastructure limitations may affect these communities’ ability to adapt, tightly knit social and cultural networks present opportunities to build community capacity and increase resilience. Many Indigenous peoples are taking steps to adapt to climate change impacts structured around self-determination and traditional knowledge, and some tribes are pursuing mitigation actions through development of renewable energy on tribal lands.

8. Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services
Ecosystems and the benefits they provide to society are being altered by climate change, and these impacts are projected to continue. Without substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, transformative impacts on some ecosystems will occur; some coral reef and sea ice ecosystems are already experiencing such transformational changes.
Many benefits provided by ecosystems and the environment, such as clean air and water, protection from coastal flooding, wood and fiber, crop pollination, hunting and fishing, tourism, cultural identities, and more will continue to be degraded by the impacts of climate change. Increasing wildfire frequency, changes in insect and disease outbreaks, and other stressors are expected to decrease the ability of U.S. forests to support economic activity, recreation, and subsistence activities. Climate change has already had observable impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems, and the benefits they provide to society. These impacts include the migration of native species to new areas and the spread of invasive species. Such changes are projected to continue, and without substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, extinctions and transformative impacts on some ecosystems cannot be avoided in the long term. Valued aspects of regional heritage and quality of life tied to ecosystems, wildlife, and outdoor recreation will change with the climate, and as a result, future generations can expect to experience and interact with the natural environment in ways that are different from today. Adaptation strategies, including prescribed burning to reduce fuel for wildfire, creation of safe havens for important species, and control of invasive species, are being implemented to address emerging impacts of climate change. While some targeted response actions are underway, many impacts, including losses of unique coral reef and sea ice ecosystems, can only be avoided by significantly reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

9. Agriculture
Rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on rangelands, and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly disrupt agricultural productivity in the United States. Expected increases in challenges to livestock health, declines in crop yields and quality, and changes in extreme events in the United States and abroad threaten rural livelihoods, sustainable food security, and price stability.
Climate change presents numerous challenges to sustaining and enhancing crop productivity, livestock health, and the economic vitality of rural communities. While some regions (such as the Northern Great Plains) may see conditions conducive to expanded or alternative crop productivity over the next few decades, overall, yields from major U.S. crops are expected to decline as a consequence of increases in temperatures and possibly changes in water availability, soil erosion, and disease and pest outbreaks. Increases in temperatures during the growing season in the Midwest are projected to be the largest contributing factor to declines in the productivity of U.S. agriculture. Projected increases in extreme heat conditions are expected to lead to further heat stress for livestock, which can result in large economic losses for producers. Climate change is also expected to lead to large-scale shifts in the availability and prices of many agricultural products across the world, with corresponding impacts on U.S. agricultural producers and the U.S. economy. These changes threaten future gains in commodity crop production and put rural livelihoods at risk. Numerous adaptation strategies are available to cope with adverse impacts of climate variability and change on agricultural production. These include altering what is produced, modifying the inputs used for production, adopting new technologies, and adjusting management strategies. However, these strategies have limits under severe climate change impacts and would require sufficient long- and short-term investment in changing practices.

10. Infrastructure
Our Nation’s aging and deteriorating infrastructure is further stressed by increases in heavy precipitation events, coastal flooding, heat, wildfires, and other extreme events, as well as changes to average precipitation and temperature. Without adaptation, climate change will continue to degrade infrastructure performance over the rest of the century, with the potential for cascading impacts that threaten our economy, national security, essential services, and health and well-being.
Climate change and extreme weather events are expected to increasingly disrupt our Nation’s energy and transportation systems, threatening more frequent and longer-lasting power outages, fuel shortages, and service disruptions, with cascading impacts on other critical sectors. Infrastructure currently designed for historical climate conditions is more vulnerable to future weather extremes and climate change. The continued increase in the frequency and extent of high-tide flooding due to sea level rise threatens America’s trillion-dollar coastal property market and public infrastructure, with cascading impacts to the larger economy. In Alaska, rising temperatures and erosion are causing damage to buildings and coastal infrastructure that will be costly to repair or replace, particularly in rural areas; these impacts are expected to grow without adaptation. Expected increases in the severity and frequency of heavy precipitation events will affect inland infrastructure in every region, including access to roads, the viability of bridges, and the safety of pipelines. Flooding from heavy rainfall, storm surge, and rising high tides is expected to compound existing issues with aging infrastructure in the Northeast. Increased drought risk will threaten oil and gas drilling and refining, as well as electricity generation from power plants that rely on surface water for cooling. Forward-looking infrastructure design, planning, and operational measures and standards can reduce exposure and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and reduce energy use while providing additional near-term benefits, including reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

11. Oceans & Coasts
Coastal communities and the ecosystems that support them are increasingly threatened by the impacts of climate change. Without significant reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions and regional adaptation measures, many coastal regions will be transformed by the latter part of this century, with impacts affecting other regions and sectors. Even in a future with lower greenhouse gas emissions, many communities are expected to suffer financial impacts as chronic high-tide flooding leads to higher costs and lower property values.
Rising water temperatures, ocean acidification, retreating arctic sea ice, sea level rise, high-tide flooding, coastal erosion, higher storm surge, and heavier precipitation events threaten our oceans and coasts. These effects are projected to continue, putting ocean and marine species at risk, decreasing the productivity of certain fisheries, and threatening communities that rely on marine ecosystems for livelihoods and recreation, with particular impacts on fishing communities in Hawai‘i and the U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands, the U.S. Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. Lasting damage to coastal property and infrastructure driven by sea level rise and storm surge is expected to lead to financial losses for individuals, businesses, and communities, with the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts facing above-average risks. Impacts on coastal energy and transportation infrastructure driven by sea level rise and storm surge have the potential for cascading costs and disruptions across the country. Even if significant emissions reductions occur, many of the effects from sea level rise over this centuryand particularly through mid-centuryare already locked in due to historical emissions, and many communities are already dealing with the consequences. Actions to plan for and adapt to more frequent, widespread, and severe coastal flooding, such as shoreline protection and conservation of coastal ecosystems, would decrease direct losses and cascading impacts on other sectors and parts of the country. More than half of the damages to coastal property are estimated to be avoidable through well-timed adaptation measures. Substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions would also significantly reduce projected risks to fisheries and communities that rely on them.

12. Tourism and Recreation
Outdoor recreation, tourist economies, and quality of life are reliant on benefits provided by our natural environment that will be degraded by the impacts of climate change in many ways.
Climate change poses risks to seasonal and outdoor economies in communities across the United States, including impacts on economies centered around coral reef-based recreation, winter recreation, and inland water-based recreation. In turn, this affects the well-being of the people who make their living supporting these economies, including rural, coastal, and Indigenous communities. Projected increases in wildfire smoke events are expected to impair outdoor recreational activities and visibility in wilderness areas. Declines in snow and ice cover caused by warmer winter temperatures are expected to negatively impact the winter recreation industry in the Northwest, Northern Great Plains, and the Northeast. Some fish, birds, and mammals are expected to shift where they live as a result of climate change, with implications for hunting, fishing, and other wildlife-related activities. These and other climate-related impacts are expected to result in decreased tourism revenue in some places and, for some communities, loss of identity. While some new opportunities may emerge from these ecosystem changes, cultural identities and economic and recreational opportunities based around historical use of and interaction with species or natural resources in many areas are at risk. Proactive management strategies, such as the use of projected stream temperatures to set priorities for fish conservation, can help reduce disruptions to tourist economies and recreation.

https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 02, 2018 12:38 pm

Capitalism is killing the world’s wildlife populations, not ‘humanity’
November 1, 2018 11.20am EDT

Author
Anna Pigott
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities, Swansea University

The latest Living Planet report from the WWF makes for grim reading: a 60% decline in wild animal populations since 1970, collapsing ecosystems, and a distinct possibility that the human species will not be far behind. The report repeatedly stresses that humanity’s consumption is to blame for this mass extinction, and journalists have been quick to amplify the message. The Guardian headline reads “Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations”, while the BBC runs with “Mass wildlife loss caused by human consumption”. No wonder: in the 148-page report, the word “humanity” appears 14 times, and “consumption” an impressive 54 times.

There is one word, however, that fails to make a single appearance: capitalism. It might seem, when 83% of the world’s freshwater ecosystems are collapsing (another horrifying statistic from the report), that this is no time to quibble over semantics. And yet, as the ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer has written, “finding the words is another step in learning to see”.

Although the WWF report comes close to finding the words by identifying culture, economics, and unsustainable production models as the key problems, it fails to name capitalism as the crucial (and often causal) link between these things. It therefore prevents us from seeing the true nature of the problem. If we don’t name it, we can’t tackle it: it’s like aiming at an invisible target.

Why capitalism?
The WWF report is right to highlight “exploding human consumption”, not population growth, as the main cause of mass extinction, and it goes to great lengths to illustrate the link between levels of consumption and biodiversity loss. But it stops short of pointing out that capitalism is what compels such reckless consumption. Capitalism – particularly in its neoliberal form – is an ideology founded on a principle of endless economic growth driven by consumption, a proposition that is simply impossible.

Image
No extinction risk for ‘commodity species’. Baronb / shutterstock

Industrial agriculture, an activity that the report identifies as the biggest single contributor to species loss, is profoundly shaped by capitalism, not least because only a handful of “commodity” species are deemed to have any value, and because, in the sole pursuit of profit and growth, “externalities” such as pollution and biodiversity loss are ignored. And yet instead of calling the irrationality of capitalism out for the ways in which it renders most of life worthless, the WWF report actually extends a capitalist logic by using terms such as “natural assets” and “ecosystem services” to refer to the living world.

By obscuring capitalism with a term that is merely one of its symptoms – “consumption” – there is also a risk that blame and responsibility for species loss is disproportionately shifted onto individual lifestyle choices, while the larger and more powerful systems and institutions that are compelling individuals to consume are, worryingly, let off the hook.

Who is ‘humanity’, anyway?
The WWF report chooses “humanity” as its unit of analysis, and this totalising language is eagerly picked up by the press. The Guardian, for example, reports that “the global population is destroying the web of life”. This is grossly misleading. The WWF report itself illustrates that it is far from all of humanity doing the consuming, but it does not go as far as revealing that only a small minority of the human population are causing the vast majority of the damage.


Global map of Ecological Footprint of consumption, 2014. Although the WWF report highlights disparity in consumption, it says nothing about the capitalism which produces this pattern. WWF Living Planet
From carbon emissions to ecological footprints, the richest 10% of people are having the greatest impact. Furthermore, there is no recognition that the effects of climate and biodiversity collapse are overwhelming felt by the poorest people first – the very people who are contributing least to the problem. Identifying these inequalities matters because it is this – not “humanity” per se – that is the problem, and because inequality is endemic to, you guessed it, capitalist systems (and particularly their racist and colonial legacies).

The catch-all word “humanity” papers over all of these cracks, preventing us from seeing the situation as it is. It also perpetuates a sense that humans are inherently “bad”, and that it is somehow “in our nature” to consume until there is nothing left. One tweet, posted in response to the WWF publication, retorted that “we are a virus with shoes”, an attitude that hints at growing public apathy.


Paul Crockford
@CrockfordPaul
Seems like Bill Hicks was spot on when he called us a virus with shoes...

Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report findshttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oc ... dApp_Tweet

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Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds
The huge loss is a tragedy in itself but also threatens the survival of civilisation, say the world’s leading scientists

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But what would it mean to redirect such self-loathing towards capitalism? Not only would this be a more accurate target, but it might also empower us to see our humanity as a force for good.

Breaking the story
Words do so much more than simply assign blame to different causes. Words are makers and breakers of the deep stories that we construct about the world, and these stories are especially important for helping us to navigate environmental crises. Using generalised references to “humanity” and “consumption” as drivers of ecological loss is not only inaccurate, it also perpetuates a distorted view of who we are and what we are capable of becoming.

By naming capitalism as a root cause, on the other hand, we identify a particular set of practices and ideas that are by no means permanent nor inherent to the condition of being human. In doing so, we learn to see that things could be otherwise. There is a power to naming something in order to expose it. As the writer and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit puts it:

Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.

The WWF report urges that a “collective voice is crucial if we are to reverse the trend of biodiversity loss”, but a collective voice is useless if it cannot find the right words. As long as we – and influential organisations such as the WWF, in particular – fail to name capitalism as a key cause of mass extinction, we will remain powerless to break its tragic story.

https://theconversation.com/capitalism- ... ity-106125
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 03, 2018 6:41 pm

Marx and Alienated Speciesism
by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark
(Dec 01, 2018)
Topics: Agriculture , Ecology , Marxist Ecology
Places: Global

Image
A child ploughing the land with a water buffalo in Don Det, Si Pan Don, Laos. Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate editor of Monthly Review and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Utah. The authors would like to thank Joseph Fracchia for helpful discussions on the concept of species being (Gattungswesen) in Marx’s philosophy.

Few contemporary scholarly controversies on the left are more charged than those surrounding Karl Marx’s view of the status of animals in human society. Numerous left animal-rights scholars, including some ecosocialists, allege that Marx was speciesist in his early writings. Moreover, it is contended that, despite their later adherence to Darwinian views, Marx and Frederick Engels never fully transcended this deeply embedded speciesist outlook, which therefore infected historical materialism as a whole. These critics concentrate their objections primarily on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, claiming that Marx presented an anthropocentric and dualist perspective of a chasm, rather than a continuity, between nonhuman and human animals, thereby ontologically justifying an exploitative and instrumentalist approach to human-animal relations that ignored or denied animal suffering and was blind to the basic conditions of animal existence.

Pioneering ecosocialist Ted Benton offers the classic criticism of Marx in this respect. Benton argues that Marx’s dominant approach to the human-animal relation, particularly in his early writings, was not only “speciesist,” but, by virtue of its anthropocentric humanism, was also an example of “a quite fantastic species-narcissism.” Marx’s views, he adds, were rooted in Cartesian dualism, which radically separated the human being (mind) from the animal (machine). Benton maintains that Marx saw animals as permanently “fixed” in their capacities. Further, in describing how the alienation of labor reduced human beings to an animal-like condition, Marx is said to have downgraded animal life.1

Other animal-rights critics of Marx have followed suit. Renzo Llorente claims that a “certain speciesism [was] constitutive of Marx’s…thinking,” and that his whole theory of alienated labor was “predicated on a division between human and nonhuman animals.”2 John Sanbonmatsu alleges that Marx advanced the “extermination in the realm of thought of the sensuous existence, and experiences, of billions of other suffering beings-in-the-world on earth.”3 Katherine Perlo insists that Marx committed “ideological violence” against animals, while David Sztybel contends that he considered animals “merely instrumentally valuable,” like any machine.4

The term speciesism was coined by Richard Ryder in 1970, and is defined in the 1985 Oxford English Dictionary as “discrimination against or exploitation of certain animal species, based on an assumption of mankind’s superiority.”5 But while speciesism is formally defined as differentiation between humans and animals leading to discrimination against and exploitation of other species, there has been a tendency for animal-rights scholars to expand the concept to apply to any differentiation between the human species and other animal species, whether or not this is actually used to justify discrimination or abuse.6

Thus, Benton declares that Marx draws a sharp “contrast between the human and the animal [that] cuts away the ontological basis for…a critical analysis of forms of suffering shared by both animals and humans.”7 Here the charge is not that Marx ever directly sought to justify the suffering of animals, for which there is no evidence, but simply that his humanist ontology undermines the whole ontological basis for the recognition of animal suffering. Hence, Benton declares that “humanism equals speciesism,” in direct opposition to Marx’s notion that a “fully developed humanism equals naturalism.”8

What is most remarkable about these criticisms of Marx as a speciesist thinker is that they typically rely on taking a handful of sentences from one or two texts out of context, while ignoring Marx’s wider arguments and his intellectual corpus as a whole. Coupled with this is the neglect of the larger historical conditions, intellectual influences, and debates out of which Marx’s treatment of the human-animal dialectic arose—even though this is crucial to any meaningful understanding of his thought in this area. This includes: (1) his studies of Epicurus and Lucretius; (2) his knowledge of the German debate on animal drives and animal psychology, most notably the work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus; (3) his critique of René Descartes on animals and mechanism; (4) his use of Ludwig Feuerbach’s notion of species being; (5) his incorporation of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory; and (6) his development of the concept of socioecological metabolism based on Justus von Liebig and others. Claims that classical historical materialism was speciesist also necessarily downplay Engels’s explorations of animal-human ecology.

It is important to recognize that Marx’s discussions of animals were primarily historical, materialist, and natural-scientific in orientation. Marx and Engels’s examinations of the position of animals in society were therefore not directed at issues of moral philosophy, as is the case for most of their critics. By the same token, the value of classical historical materialism in this area is what it teaches us concretely with regard to the changing relations between human beings and other animals, particularly with respect to evolving ecological conditions, including what Marx called the “degradation” of animal life under capitalism.9

Although it was obviously not the major focus of his work, which was devoted to developing a critique of the capitalist mode of production, concern for and affinity with animals is not absent from Marx’s analysis.10 Overall, his consideration of the human-animal dialectic was affected by a conception of the historical specificity of human-animal relations, associated with different productive modes. This gave rise to Marx’s critique of what political scientist Bradley J. Macdonald has called the “alienated speciesism” arising from the capitalist alienation of nature.11

Epicurus and the Human-Animal Dialectic
Marx’s historical-materialist thinking was deeply affected by his explorations of Epicurean materialism—the subject of his doctoral thesis.12 Central to Epicureanism is a protoevolutionary perspective and an emphasis on the close material relationship of humans and other animals, as all life emerges from the earth. Animals, like humans, are viewed as sentient beings that experience pain and pleasure.13 Epicureanism addresses environmental destruction, including the death of species.14 As Marx put it, for Epicurus, “the world is my friend.”15

Ironically, given the emphasis of Epicurean materialism on a strong human-animal connection and the influence of this on Marx, both Benton and Sztybel in their criticisms chose to quote, out of context, a statement from Marx’s Epicurean notebooks, in which he declares: “If a philosopher does not find it outrageous to consider man as an animal, he cannot be made to understand anything.”16 For Benton, this is clear and compelling evidence of an “extreme and unequivocal human/animal dualism” on Marx’s part.17 Similarly, for Sztybel, it is an indication that Marx at this early stage lacks a naturalist perspective and takes an overall instrumentalist approach to animals.18 Neither critic, however, examines the actual context in which this sentence appeared—that is, Marx’s critique of Plutarch’s attack on Epicurean materialism for rejecting a religion based on fear. Thus, in the immediately preceding sentence, which neither Benton nor Sztybel quote, Marx conveys what he takes to be Plutarch’s view: “For in fear, and indeed an inner, inextinguishable fear, man is determined as animal [that is devoid of reason and freedom], and it is absolutely indifferent to the animal how it is kept in check.”19 In this passage, Marx is objecting to Plutarch’s anti-Epicurean polemics in That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible and Against Colotes.20 In these works, and particularly the former, Plutarch, following Plato, claimed that the religion of the masses should be based on fear, including the fear of the afterlife (“The Hell of the Populace”).21

Marx’s fierce conflict with Plutarch, in the context of the latter’s attack on the Epicurean critique of religion and immortality, is the basis of an appendix to his dissertation (entitled “Critique of Plutarch’s Polemic Against the Theology of Epicurus”—only a fragment of which survives), where the same critical observations on Plutarch are put forth. Marx’s argument is that reason allows human beings to transcend what Plutarch sees as animals’ “inner fear that cannot be extinguished.”22 Here, Marx, following Epicurus, acknowledges the kinship between animal suffering and human suffering. He also highlights, in opposition to Plutarch, the “corporeal” basis of human beings, linking them to other animals—since humans have immortal souls no more than animals do—while stressing the potential of humanity to raise itself by practical reason, i.e., self-conscious material existence.23

Lack of knowledge of Epicurean materialism by animal-rights critics affects the criticisms of Marx in other ways as well. In an attempt to demonstrate that Marx sees animals purely instrumentally, Sztybel quotes Marx’s statement in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that “nature too, taken abstractly, for itself, and rigidly separated from man, is nothing for man.” Unaware that this is an allusion to one of Epicurus’s principal doctrines, Sztybel concludes that Marx means that nature, including animal life, is “at best of instrumental value.”24 Yet, no classically educated individual in Marx’s own day could have failed to recognize in Marx’s statement Epicurus’s famous declaration (which Marx quoted throughout his life): “Death is nothing to us. For what has been dissolved has no sense-experience, and what has no sense-experience is nothing to us.”25

Hence, in writing that nature separated from humanity, i.e., outside sensuous, material interaction, was nothing to humanity, Marx was highlighting the fact that human beings were objective, corporeal, sensual beings—the very point of his critique of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in this part of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Removed from sensual connections to the earth, which define human beings—just as they define all corporeal beings—as living, suffering beings, it was obvious that nature in Marx’s (as in Epicurus’s) terms was “nothing for man.” Divorced from nature, human beings, like nonhuman animals, have no existence at all. Far from promoting an instrumentalist approach to animals, what Marx is emphasizing here is the material relation that governs the existence of humans and all species. Rather than representing a separation of humans from other animals or a moral justification for the utilitarian use of the latter, this statement was an expression of their shared existence as physical beings. As Joseph Fracchia argues, for Marx, it was “human corporeal organization” that both identified human beings as animals and served to distinguish them from all other animals.26

Indeed, rather than denying the connection between human beings and other animals, Marx wrote in On the Jewish Question in 1843, prior to his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, that, “[t]he view of nature which has grown up under the regime of private property and of money is an actual contempt for and practical degradation of nature.… In this sense Thomas Müntzer declares it intolerable that ‘all creatures have been made into property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth—all living things must also become free.'”27

The Critique of Cartesian Animal Machines
Seeking a broad philosophical foundation for what he sees as Marx’s dualistic view of humans and animals, Benton repeatedly suggests that Marx’s so-called speciesist approach to the human-animal relation is trapped in the “paradigm[atic] dualist philosophy of Descartes.”28 In his 1637 Discourse on Method, Descartes associated human beings with the mind, while animals were relegated to the status of machines or natural automota—a view that was to have an enormous impact on the development of Enlightenment thought.29 However, missing from Benton’s description of Marx’s alleged Cartesian dualism is any recognition of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century critique of the Cartesian animal-machine notion within German philosophy and psychology, of which Marx was the heir. German Romantic, idealist, and materialist thinkers alike challenged the Cartesian animal-machine hypothesis and, in the process, generated a new revolutionary understanding of animal (and human) psychology.30 Marx was to base his own criticisms of Descartes’s animal-machine notion on this long-standing anti-Cartesian tradition within German philosophy.

The central figure in the German philosophical revolt against the Cartesian notion of the animal machine was the deist (and virulently anti-Epicurean) philosopher Reimarus, whose discoveries in animal psychology (and animal ethology) in the mid–eighteenth century influenced thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel, and Feuerbach.31 Reimarus adamantly rejected the Cartesian reduction of animals to machines. He also objected to the French philosopher and psychologist Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s notion that nonhuman animals had a consciousness and an ability to learn from the environment, essentially identical to human beings. In response to such conceptions, Reimarus in his Drives of Animals (1760) introduced the concept of Trieb or drive (generally translated until the twentieth century as impulse or instinct since there was no clear English equivalent). In what was gradually to emerge as the basic explanatory category in psychology, Reimarus argued that there were innate drives in animals (including human beings) that interacted with sensations.32 Drive (Trieb) for Reimarus thus stood for the capacity of the animal to pursue a beneficial end “without any individual reflection, experience, and practice, without any training, example, or model, from birth onward, with an artfulness ready from birth that was masterful in achieving its end.”33

Reimarus developed a taxonomy of ten classes and fifty-seven subclasses of drives, of which the most important were skillful drives (Kunsttriebe)—more specifically, artifice or skillful activity in the form of innate rule-governed capacities for certain actions—which he used to describe the surprising productive proficiency of bees, spiders, and other animals. His notion of skillful drive was that of an innate drive that was also agential, that is, an “elective drive,” incorporating an element of choice.34 It was this analysis that strongly influenced Marx, who was fascinated with Reimarus’s notion of skillful drives.35

For Reimarus, nonhuman animals lacked access to the more abstract, generic (related to genus) conceptions of things, and therefore to the higher levels of reasoning, such as conceptual relation (metacognition), inference, reflection, and language.36 Nevertheless, animals had, to a degree, consciousness and imagination responding to sense stimuli, which interacted with their basic drives. In his philosophy of history, Kant argued on this basis that the human species was defined by its freedom to transcend innate drives and to develop conscious ends based on the perception of general human psychological and ethical needs.37 Herder added that the broader, more generic concepts that characterized human consciousness, in comparison to nonhuman animals, were a product of a much wider, more universal set of experiences reflecting relatively undetermined human interactions with the environment, allowing them to rise above some of their stronger animal drives.38

In An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking, Robert Ausch indicates that following the publication of Reimarus’s Drives of Animals, the concept of drive (Trieb) was incorporated into the analysis of animal psychology and “students of animal behavior were forced to work within Reimarus’s frame.”39 Animals of various kinds were seen as exhibiting complex, innate drives that were unlearned, uniform, and too intelligent to be reduced to Cartesian mechanical terms. If the human species was distinct, in Reimarus’s theory, it was due to its capacity to work with generic concepts, while the Cartesian relegation of animals to the status of machines was considered philosophically and psychologically bankrupt.

Marx’s attempt to develop a social ontology of labor arose on this basis, relying on the most advanced animal (and human) psychology of his day. He was very impressed by Reimarus’s conception of animals’ skillful drives and evoked it throughout his work, for example, when comparing the production of nests and dwellings on the part of “the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc.” to the more conscious production exercised by human labor. “A spider,” Marx wrote in Capital, in accordance with Reimarus’s notion of skillful drives, “conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.”40 Like other animals, Marx stated in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the human being “is on the one hand,”

equipped with natural powers, with vital powers, he is an active natural being; these powers exist in him as dispositions and capacities, as drives [Triebe]. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited being, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his drives exist outside him as objects independent of him; but these objects are objects of his need, essential objects, indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living real, sensuous, objective being with natural powers means that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being.41

What stands out here is the strong materialism and naturalism of Marx’s analysis, which unites human beings with nonhuman animals through the concept of drive related to various dispositions and faculties.42 If the human species has more developed social drives, needs, and capacities compared to other animals, as reflected in human production and social labor, these arise through a corporeal organization that unites humanity with the rest of life. It follows that even though nonhuman animal species lack the self-conscious social drives characteristic of human beings as homo faber, they nonetheless remain objective, sensuous beings, with their own distinct forms of species life, which reflect their own corporeal organization, drives, needs, and capacities.

Benton and others have strongly criticized Marx’s concept of “species being,” which he took from Hegel and Feuerbach, for setting humanity an order above nonhuman animals, thus exhibiting speciesism. Here too, however, misunderstandings abound. Species being (Gattungswesen), sometimes translated as generic being, stood, in Marx’s analysis, for distinctively human-species drives and capacities leading to a higher level of consciousness or self-consciousness, connected to generic consciousness (objectification) and the “universal” character of human production.43

Feuerbach, building on Reimarus, Kant, Herder, and Fichte, had argued that it was the self-consciousness of human beings that allowed them to see themselves as part of a generic or species being, i.e., as social beings, and that constituted the “essential difference” between them and other animals. “Strictly speaking,” he wrote, “consciousness is given only in the case of a being to whom his species, his mode of being, is an object of thought. Although the animal experiences itself as an individual—this is what is meant by saying that it has a feeling of itself—it does not do so as a species.… The inner life of man is constituted by the fact that man relates himself to his species [generically], to his mode of being.”44

Marx took over some aspects of Feuerbach’s conception of species being, particularly the notion that distinctively human consciousness was a generic consciousness or developed species consciousness.45 Marx, however, connected this both to the postulate of animal drives underlying nonhuman and human psychology, and to the notion of human beings as laboring beings (homo faber).46 In Marx’s materialist conception, human beings actively and self-consciously transform their relation to nature and thus their own needs and potentials through their production. Hence, if, in his theory of alienation, Marx saw this capacity for self-conscious development as characterizing human rather than nonhuman animals, this was not conceived as an invidious distinction aimed at justifying the domination of the latter, but merely a recognition of human needs, powers, and capacities for active self-development in history, exercised through the labor and production process.

Benton, Llorente, and Sanbonmatsu all censure Marx for contending that human beings, when alienated from their labor, are reduced to those dispositions they have in common with nonhuman animals—eating, drinking, procreating, and, at most, fashioning their dwellings and dressing up—while being estranged from their specifically human species being as creative, laboring producers.47 In this, Marx is supposed to have advanced a speciesist ontology. However, Marx’s classical historical-materialist analysis does not deny that human beings share a close kinship with other animals biologically and psychologically, including numerous common drives. Rather, he suggests that the human species is distinctive in its capacity to produce more “universally” and self-consciously, and thus is less one-sidedly limited by specific drives than other animals. Humanity is therefore able to transform nature in a seemingly endless number of ways, constantly creating new human needs, capacities, and powers.48

This character of human beings as self-conscious species beings also generates the capacity of self-alienation through the development of the division of labor, private property, class, commodity production, etc. Alienation is seen by Marx as a uniquely self-imposed human problem, not to be confused with animal suffering (in which human beings also partake), which is not the product of such self-alienation. This self-alienation of humans, the product of human history, is also an estrangement from nature and other natural beings, resulting in an alienated speciesism in capitalist society, as in the Cartesian designation of animals as machines.49

Marx was acutely aware of the ecological conditions of animals and of the destruction and pollution wrought on them by capitalism. Hence, in the German Ideology, Marx and Engels famously commented: “The ‘essence’ of the fish is its ‘being,’ water.… The ‘essence’ of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the ‘essence’ of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as the water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence.”50

Marx was himself a strong critic of Cartesian metaphysics, for its removal of the mind/soul from the realm of the animal and the reduction of the latter to mere mechanical motions.51 In Marx’s words, “Descartes in defining animals as mere machines, saw with the eyes of the period of manufacture. The medieval view, on the other hand, was that animals were assistants to man.”52

Marx, Darwin, and Evolution
Benton compares the early Marx unfavorably to the early Darwin, who indicated in 1839 in his notebooks that humans had similar facial expressions to that of the orangutan in the zoo, thereby indicating the relatedness of humans and animals.53 However, Marx, nine years Darwin’s junior (and who may not have seen an orangutan), argued only a few years later, in 1843, that the commodification of animals was an example of the “degradation” of nature by human society—a point that Darwin himself hardly grasped at this or any other stage.54 A year later, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx explicitly noted the close relationship between human beings and other animals as objective natural beings.55

Such an emphasis on strong human-nonhuman animal connections were hardly the dominant view of the time. Charles Lyell, in his pathbreaking Principles of Geology (1830–33), with which Marx, as well as Darwin, was familiar, devoted four chapters to the extinction of species, much of which justified the killing off of animal species by humans. “If we wield the sword of extermination” against animals, “as we advance,” Lyell wrote,

we have not reason to repine at the havoc committed, nor to fancy, with the Scotch poet [Robert Burns], that “we violate the social union of nature”; or complain, with the melancholy Jacques [Shakespeare, As You Like It], that we

Are mere usurpers, tyrants, and, what’s worse,

To fright the animals, and to kill them up

In their assign’d and native dwelling-place.

We have only to reflect, that in thus obtaining possession of the earth by conquest, and defending our acquisitions by force, we exercise no exclusive prerogative. Every species which has spread itself from a small point over a wide area, must, in like manner, have marked its progress by the diminution, or the entire extirpation, of some other.56

Marx and especially Engels took careful note of the human destruction of local ecologies and species through the worldwide expansion of capitalism. Yet, in contrast to Lyell, there is no moral justification of these actions and consequences to be found in their analysis. Instead, there is a critique of how the system of capital generated an alienated speciesism. For example, Engels made references to the effects wrought by invasive species (goats) introduced by European colonists onto the island of Saint Helena. Here, one sees a concern over the resulting destruction of indigenous ecology.57

Evolutionary ideas in a general sense had long preceded the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 and its theory of natural selection.58 Therefore, it should not surprise us that, as a consistent materialist, Marx incorporated evolutionary ideas into his perspective from the beginning, insisting, against the religious view, as early as 1844, on the spontaneous generation of species sometime in the distant geological past. He saw nonhuman and human animal species as sharing an evolutionary and morphological kinship.59 If Marx metaphorically said in 1857 that “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape,” the metaphor was nonetheless rooted in a genuine morphological kinship between humans and the higher primates.60

Marx would have been well aware of Linnaeus’s classification of Homo sapiens as among the primates in close proximity to the ape.61 He had studied in the gymnasium in Trier under the famous German geologist Johann Steininger. Later, at the University of Berlin, Marx attended lectures in anthropology given by Heinrich Steffens, a natural philosopher as well as an important geologist and mineralogist. Marx was familiar with George Curvier’s Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe.62 His interest in geology was to continue for the remainder of his life. As late as 1878, he was copying into his notebooks excerpts from the prominent English geologist Joseph Beete Jukes’s the Student’s Manual of Geology, paying careful attention to geological extinction of species resulting from shifting isotherms (climate zones) due to paleoclimatic change.63

In July 1858, just two weeks after the famous presentation of papers by Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, establishing them as codiscoverers of natural selection as a basis for evolution, Engels wrote to Marx that “comparative physiology gives one a withering contempt for the idealistic exaltation of man over the other animals. At every step one bumps up against the most complete uniformity of structure with the rest of the mammals, and in its main features this uniformity extends to all vertebrates and even—less clearly—to insects, crustaceans, earthworms, etc.”64 Marx and Engels both strongly admired Darwin’s Origin of Species, referring to it as “the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views.”65 And no wonder, because, as Fracchia indicates, “Marx’s positing [in The German Ideology] of human corporeal organization as the first fact of human history amounts to a Copernican upheaval—precisely because…it is the human complement to Darwin’s approach to animal organisms in general.”66

In response to the new knowledge that was developing in the natural sciences, Marx and Engels went even further in their critique of the Cartesian notion of animal machines. Thus, Engels provided in “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” what Stephen Jay Gould called “the best nineteenth-century case for gene-culture coevolution” (the form that all theories of human evolution, accounting for the development of the human brain and language, must take).67 In that same work, Engels dealt with the complex evolution of animals in relation to their environments, not simply by adapting to their environments but as dialectical subjects-objects of evolution.68 “It goes without saying,” he wrote, “that it would not occur to us to dispute the ability of animals to act in a planned, premeditated fashion.”69 In notes to the Dialectics of Nature that he obviously intended to develop further, he wrote:

We have in common with animals all activity of the understanding: induction, deduction, and hence also abstraction (Dido’s [Engels’s dog’s] generic concepts: quadrupeds and biped), analysis of unknown objects (even the cracking of a nut is the beginning of analysis), synthesis (in animal tricks), and, as the union of both, experiment (in the case of new obstacles and unfamiliar situations). In their nature all these modes of procedure—hence all means of scientific investigation that ordinary logic recognises—are absolutely the same in men and the higher animals. They differ only in degree (of development of the method in each case).… On the other hand, dialectical thought—precisely because it presupposes investigation of the nature of concepts themselves—is only possible for man, and for him at a comparatively high stage of development.70

Likewise, Marx suggested in his Notes on Adolph Wagner that animals were capable of distinguishing “theoretically” everything that pertained to their needs. In the paragraph immediately following, he noted grimly that “it would scarcely appear to a sheep as one of its ‘useful’ properties that it is edible by man,” drawing broad parallels between the expropriation (and suffering) of animals and the exploitation of workers. Marx believed his three small dogs displayed an intelligence akin to humans.71 Marx and Engels thus adopted a view identical with Darwin in the Descent of Man—that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind.” Indeed, like Darwin, they can be said to have subscribed, in general, to the view that the “immense superiority” of human beings when compared to even the higher animals can be attributed to human “intellectual faculties,” “social habits,” and “corporeal structure.”72

Alienated Speciesism and the Metabolic Rift
Given his historical-materialist approach, which actively incorporated evolutionary and scientific insights, Marx was able to assess how the development of capitalism transformed animal relationships, created an alienated speciesism, and fostered widespread animal suffering. Along these lines, John Berger, in his essay “Why Look at Animals?,” warns that viewing nonhuman animals as simply the source of meat, leather, or milk is ahistorical and involves imposing a nineteenth-century conception “backwards across the millennia.”73 He indicates that there is both corporeal continuity and distinction between humans and other animals, as they are “both like and unlike.” Stressing that the specific relationships between them have historically been altered due to changes in socioeconomic and cultural conditions, he points out that

the 19th century, in western Europe and North America, saw the beginning of a process, today being completed by 20th century corporate capitalism, by which every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature was broken. Before this rupture, animals constituted the first circle of what surrounded man. Perhaps that already suggests too great a distance. They were with man at the centre of his world. Such centrality was of course economic and productive. Whatever the changes in productive means and social organisation, men depended upon animals for food, work, transport, and clothing.74

Marx’s analysis of the historical development of capitalism highlighted this transition in animal relations. For him, Descartes’s depiction of animals as machines represented the status that animals were accorded in capitalist commodity production. Marx took note of the ongoing changes, such as the reduction of nonhuman animals to a source of power and the altering of their corporeal organization and very existence, imposed in order to further the accumulation of capital.

In Capital, Marx presented the dynamic relationship between humans and farm animals, illuminating their close proximity and interdependence. “In the earliest period of human history,” he indicated, “domesticated animals, i.e. animals that have undergone modification by means of labour, that have been bred specially, play the chief part as instruments of labour along with stones, wood, bones and shells, which have also had work done to them.”75 At the same time, he specifically focused on how the historical development of capitalism, including the division of town and country that accompanied it, shaped these conditions, reducing animals simply to instruments and raw materials, as reflected in the general logic of the system. “Animals and plants which we are accustomed to consider as products of nature,” Marx explained,

may be, in their present form, not only products of, say, last year’s labour, but the result of a gradual transformation continued through many generations under human control, and through the agency of human labour. As regards the instrument of labour in particular, they show traces of the labour of past ages, even to the most superficial observer, in the great majority of cases.… A particular product may be used as both instrument of labour and raw material in the same process. Take, for instance, the fattening of cattle, where the animal is the raw material, and at the same time an instrument for the production of manure [used to fertilize agricultural fields].76

Within this system of generalized commodity production, nonhuman animals often have varying relationships to capital. In the second volume of Capital, Marx described how capitalists assessed the lives of cows in relation to production: “Cattle as draught animals are fixed capital; when being fattened for slaughter they are raw material that eventually passes into circulation as a product, and so not fixed but circulating capital.”77 The corporeality of nonhuman animals raised, for capital, the issue of the costs (including those associated with turnover time) determined by the ecoregulatory aspects of natural reproduction. “In the case of living means of labour,” explained Marx, “such as horses…the reproduction time is prescribed by nature itself. Their average life as means of labour is determined by natural laws. Once this period has elapsed, the wornout items must be replaced by new ones. A horse cannot be replaced bit by bit, but only by another horse.”78 While distinct in form, horses, for capital, were simply interchangeable Cartesian machines.

The mid–nineteenth century, when Marx was writing, was a time of major transformation in human-nonhuman animal relations. Although animal power had long been in use, such as in plowing fields and transporting goods, the mechanization associated with capitalist development was radically altering animal relations. Capitalists carefully calculated whether human, nonhuman animal, or machine power could best enhance profits. In some cases in England, the costs associated with raising and caring for horses to pull barges along rivers and canals exceeded that of hiring women to carry out the same task, due to their extraordinarily low wages (and the fact that the costs of social reproduction in the household were not included in their wages), resulting in women often replacing horses as barge pullers.79

Capital invariably seeks to employ science and technology to speed up production in order to shorten the time associated with natural, ecoregulatory processes, such as the growth of animals, with the object of reducing turnover time and speeding up the realization of profits.80 As Marx explained, in the context of sheep husbandry,

it is impossible, of course, to deliver a five-year-old animal before the end of five years. But what is possible within certain limits is to prepare animals for their fate more quickly by new modes of treatment. This was precisely what [Robert] Bakewell managed to do. Previously, British sheep, just like French sheep as late as 1855, were not ready for slaughter before the fourth or fifth year. In Bakewell’s system, one-year-old sheep can already be fattened, and in any case they are fully grown before the second year has elapsed. By selective breeding, Bakewell…reduced the bone structure of his sheep to the minimum necessary for their existence. These sheep are called the New Leicesters.81

Here, Marx quoted French agriculturalist Léonce de Lavergne, author of The Rural Economy of England, Scotland, and Ireland, who advocated further expanding meat and dairy production: “The breeder can now send three to market in the same space of time that it formerly took him to prepare one; and if they are not taller, they are broader, rounder, and have a greater development in those parts which give most flesh. Of bone, they have absolutely no greater amount than is necessary to support them, and almost all their weight is pure meat.”82

In his critical notes on Lavergne, Marx objected to these new methods of animal production for meat and dairy, as the pursuit of endless profits led to a broad range of animal suffering and corporeal abuse—inherent in a mode of alienated speciesism in which animals were not viewed as living beings but as machines to be manipulated as such. Sheep that were bred so as to decrease bone structure—in Marx’s words, “aborting bones in order to transform them to mere meat and a bulk of fat”—had a hard time supporting their own weight and standing due to their much larger, heavier bodies and weaker skeletal frames. To increase milk production for the market, calves were weaned earlier. Cattle were increasingly confined to stalls and were fed oil cakes and other high-energy-input concoctions designed to accelerate the rate of growth.83

Under previous agricultural practices, Marx observed, “animals remained active by staying under free air.” Confined to stalls with the attendant box feeding meant that “in these prisons animals are born and remain there until they are killed off.” This resulted “in serious deterioration of life force” and growth deformities in their bodies, which were regarded as mere parts, grist for the mill of capital. For Marx, all of this was “Disgusting!” It amounted to a “system of prison cells for the animals.”84

Today, such capitalist methods for speeding up and commodifying natural reproduction also include the use of growth hormones, massive concentrated animal-feeding operations, and extensive use of antibiotics to treat ailments that arise from the conditions under which animals are raised. These approaches have only become more intensive and widespread throughout animal production for meat and dairy, as in the case of chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, and fish.85 As environmental sociologist Ryan Gunderson stresses, the vast expansion of animals confined to industrialized production is directly linked to the ceaseless pursuit of capital accumulation.86

Through this analysis, Marx detailed how capitalist development created an alienated mediation between human beings and nature, in this case, nonhuman animal species. This alienated speciesism reduces animals to machines within factory farms, and animals throughout the world confront extermination due to destruction of habitat, climate change, and ocean acidification—all associated with the general workings of capitalism in the contemporary period. This rupture takes on an ironic character, Macdonald points out, as “the more their dismembered bodies intersect with ours” via commodity circulation as meat, leather, glue, etc., “the more they ultimately disappear from human life.”87 This finding, associated with alienated speciesism under capitalism, is similar to the dynamics that accompany the alienation of nature in general. As Raymond Williams indicated, the deeper the alienation from nature, the more intensive “the real interaction” with the biophysical world in regard to the resources used in commodity production and the generation of waste that pollutes ecosystems.88

These broad concerns regarding the operations of the capitalist system, ecological conditions, and alienated speciesism are intertwined in Marx’s consideration of the metabolism of nature and society. In the 1850s and ’60s, Liebig, the leading German chemist, explained that British high-farming techniques were violating the “law of compensation” due to the shipment of crops to distant locations, resulting in failure to return to the soil the nutrients that had been removed. This robbery system led to the despoliation of agricultural lands. Marx took up Liebig’s analysis, including the conception of metabolic relations. He developed an even richer socioecological metabolic approach focusing on the metabolic rift, whereby an alienated social metabolism, in contradiction to the universal metabolism of nature, disrupts or ruptures natural cycles, systems, and flows.89

With the repeal of the Corn laws in 1846, which ushered in free trade, Marx identified several trends within what he called the “new regime” of capitalist food production. This included a further deepening of the metabolic rift in the soil nutrient cycle, increasing the scale of the mechanized expropriation of animals, themselves treated as mere machines (or machine parts).90 There was a drive to shift Britain toward greater meat and dairy production as part of the Norfolk rotation system (and other similar rotations), which primarily served the wealthier population. As a result, more land was converted to pasturage and for growing forage crops, such as legumes, rather than cereal and grains, while expanding the impacts of animal grazing. With more farm animals on the land, less workers were needed. Under this new food regime, wheat production in Britain plummeted, leading to massive imports of grain in order to feed the general population.91 Irish lands were converted to pastures to raise pigs, cattle, and sheep, displacing much of the rural population.92 New Leicesters were imported to Ireland to breed with native sheep to develop a variety that provided greater profits for capital, without any regard for the health of the animals.93 Intensive agricultural practices expropriated the nutrients from the soil in Britain and abroad, giving rise to the increasing reliance on importing both agricultural inputs and grains. Here, the metabolic rift was expanded, robbing the nutrients of distant lands, whether it was in the form of cereal and grains for human consumption, guano to repair the degraded land, or rapeseed in the production of oil cake to feed farm animals to enrich their manure.94

While Lavergne celebrated the imposition of industrialized agricultural operations, intensifying animal production for meat and dairy, Marx suggested that a grain-based system of agriculture was a more efficient system for providing food for the population as a whole and ensuring the long-term vitality of the land.95

Marx’s critique of alienated speciesism, associated with the degradation of humans and nonhuman animals, can be considered part of his wider ecological critique, linked to the metabolic rift.96 The metabolic rift is not limited to external nature, but also encompasses the expropriation of corporeal beings, where nonhuman animals are reduced to machines in a system predicated on constant expansion, which ignores and increases their suffering. Indeed, when the question of animals arose, his analysis transcended the merely ecological framework, displaying an affinity with nonhuman animals, which, for Marx, are limited, objective, “suffering beings” like humans themselves.97

Marx never lost his close connection to Epicurean materialism. The Epicureans taught that animal suffering and human suffering are alike for they both pertain to natural beings. In books I and II of De rerum natura, the great Roman poet Lucretius presented five attacks on sacrificial practices, beginning with his description of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to the altar of the gods, and ending, as if to emphasize human affinity with animals, with a bereaved cow:

For oft in front of noble shrines of gods

A calf falls slain beside the incensed altars,

A stream of hot blood gushing from its breast.

The mother wandering through the leafy glens

Bereaved seeks on the ground the cloven footprints.

With questing eyes she seeks if anywhere

Her lost child may be seen; she stands, and fills with moaning

The woodland glades; she comes back to the byre

Time and again in yearning for her calf.98

No one could fail to recognize from such a passage that human suffering and animal suffering, as Marx himself noted, are akin. Revolutionary struggle is necessary to transcend the alienation of nature associated with capitalism. Marx clearly recognized that the uprooting of alienated speciesism is part of this fight. If “fully developed humanism” is to become “naturalism,” it is necessary to forge a new human-animal dialectic, one grounded in the Epicurean principle that “the world is my friend.” Echoing Müntzer, Marx declared, “all living things must also become free.”99

https://monthlyreview.org/2018/12/01/ma ... peciesism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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