In this interview with freelance writer Christopher Ketcham, we unpack the techno-industrial extractivism that plagues modern societies and the media’s complicity in failing to challenge the growth model on which it is based. We discuss Chris’ book This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West in which he outlines the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, corruptly supported by the federal land management agencies, who are supposed to be regulating these industries. He tracks the Department of Interior’s failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry.

We also chat about the green growth ideology behind the lithium mining at Thacker Pass in Nevada which is driving the destruction of ecosystems and species as well as the displacement of local Indian tribes from what they consider to be their sacred lands. This same ideology, combined with the failure to acknowledge and reckon with the realities of ecological overshoot, has caused many leading environmental groups to abandon their commitment to nature conservation in order to prioritize industry interests. Chris’ vision of ecological restoration calls for freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.

Book lecture: https://www.c-span.org/video/?462742-1/this-land

this is the title of a podcast interview by "Non Toxic", listen to it here (or wherever):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHBRX00WoMs

It's an interview about a project titled "Broken Spectre" https://jackshainman.com/exhibitions/richard_mosse_broken_spectre with the author: Richard Mosse

Joining Non-toxic from his studio in New York, Richard discusses the best ways to get powerful men to let you film their crimes, why women bare the brunt of the Amazon's destruction, and whether there's anything an artist can do to try to avert catastrophe.

The reason I'm mentioning it is because it reveals a contentious conflict and it shows the participants as they are.

Anyone following the genocide and ecocide in the Amazon region can probably understand that it's about settler-colonialism. The contention is about the fact that the settler-colonial class, these frontier types, they are workers and small business owners (and also large business owners and corporations).

The interview mentions that the Brazilian miners and ranchers are following the "Wild West" of colonization so hard that they're actually going for country songs and clothing style - called "Texano" cowboy.

This isn't the first time I've seen such documentaries or reports and it's important to understand the mentality and ideology of these settler-colonialists and how that relates to class politics.

Think of this problem as part of the "jobs tho" argument. The "jobs tho" argument is basically that:

You can't change the system! It would take away jobs and livelihood!

In this sense, "jobs tho!" is actually #BusinessAsUsual (BAU), it is conservatism.

We do need a lot of jobs to go away entirely. Starting with the Amazon miners and loggers and ranchers and their helpers, but it goes on for a lot more. Otherwise, each of these jobs is just as "indirect assassin", because that's the result, and the indigenous people in the Amazon are being genocided, as is common under settler-colonial invasion. And the #pastoralism angle is not surprising either, there's no better way to take over land than to make claims over land with the extensive land use: herding.

What's the alternative? Well, do you ever wonder how bad it has to get? That's the thing. The "pressure" of how bad is used by capitalism to push frontiers, to accumulate new capital (and, later, to catabolize/cannibalize). The top-down force is pushing, and instead of the opposite force pushing back, the opposite force is pushing sideways.

But "I was just following economic orders", right?

Significance

It is often said that money can’t buy happiness, yet many surveys have shown that richer people tend to report being more satisfied with their lives. This tendency could be taken to indicate that high material wealth—as measured in monetary terms—is a necessary ingredient for happiness. Here, we show survey results from people living in small-scale societies outside the globalized mainstream, many of whom identify as Indigenous. Despite having little monetary income, the respondents frequently report being very satisfied with their lives, and some communities report satisfaction scores similar to the wealthiest countries. These results imply greater flexibility in the means to achieve happiness than are apparent from surveys that examine only industrialized societies.

Abstract

Global polls have shown that people in high-income countries generally report being more satisfied with their lives than people in low-income countries. The persistence of this correlation, and its similarity to correlations between income and life satisfaction within countries, could lead to the impression that high levels of life satisfaction can only be achieved in wealthy societies. However, global polls have typically overlooked small-scale, nonindustrialized societies, which can provide an alternative test of the consistency of this relationship. Here, we present results from a survey of 2,966 members of Indigenous Peoples and local communities among 19 globally distributed sites. We find that high average levels of life satisfaction, comparable to those of wealthy countries, are reported for numerous populations that have very low monetary incomes. Our results are consistent with the notion that human societies can support very satisfying lives for their members without necessarily requiring high degrees of monetary wealth.>

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11658449

Review of 2023 book: How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology Philip Ball. ISBN9781529095999

#🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔

Yet again we have to debunk carnist Western scientists who promoted the myth of "Hunter Man" centuries ago and tainted the research with their male power fantasy biases.

This interview talks about pronatalism. If you're not ready to think politically about natalism without knee-jerking to a tweet-long critique, this is for you.

This discussion with science journalist Angela Saini does something that I really like: cut through centuries or thousands of years of bullshit diagonally to get to some key sets of connected truths. Her book is "The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule". I haven't read it yet, but it's going to the top of my list.

lots of animal products

This is related to the:

Overkill Hypothesis

And the article here is related to this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221330542300036X

Highlights

• Modern humans (Homo sapiens) drive late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions, with no role for climate change.
• The strong body-size bias of the late-Quaternary extinctions is also linked to modern humans, not climatic change.
• The late-Quaternary extinctions represent the first planet-wide, human-driven transformation of the environment.

easy read

Podcast about wolves returning in Europe and the livestock industry (includes extensive pastoralism) getting anxious and feeding right-wing populist clownery.

Reminder to the clowns: there's no "livelihood" on a dead planet. Biodiversity, the health the biosphere, comes before business. Unfortunately, the podcast hosts don't understand that, so enjoy this dose of "conservation centrism".

The post-lecture discussion is more interesting.

🦞