[Xmca-l] Re: Burning...

Greg Thompson greg.a.thompson@gmail.com
Sat Aug 24 19:38:18 PDT 2019 

Martin,
Yes, that was my point in sharing the book. What happens when you destroy
the rainforests that are sustaining themselves.
The parallel story that Melville tells is from 16th century Mexico and the
way that bringing in large numbers of grazing animals changed the ecology
of the area for the worse.
Am I wrong to guess that this same thing is likely to happen when massive
parts of the Amazon rainforest are destroyed by fire?
Or was it some other difference you were pointing to?
Greg


On Sat, Aug 24, 2019 at 7:02 PM Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:

> Hi Greg,
>
> I think Wagner’s point was the rain forest sustains itself just fine
> without creating the kind of soil that would be useful to farmers. I found
> this online:
>
> The paradox of rainforest soilsTropical soils are notoriously thin and
> poor in nutrients. In some parts of the Amazon River Basin
> <http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/about_the_amazon/ecosystems_amazon/rainforests/22301#amazon_basin>,
> white, sandy soils are found, which have evolved through erosion over
> hundreds of millions of years. And yet, although these soils have lost
> their mineral content and fertility, rich rainforests grow on them.
>
> In rainforests, some of the highest trees on the planet shoot to the sky.
> Dead plants and animals quickly decompose and their organic matter is
> utilized by other organisms.
>
> Martin
>
>
>
> On Aug 24, 2019, at 7:39 PM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Not that it will make much difference but perhaps now would be a good time
> to revisit Elinor Melville's study of early ecological imperialism in
> Mexico in her book *A Plague of Sheep*?
> Here is a review:
> https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54
>
> and a short blurb from the review:
> "Above all else, the reader is struck by the extent to which Spaniards
> ignored the obvious changes recorded in their own *relaciones* between
> 1548 and 1581. In the 1540's, Spanish observers recorded that this valley,
> which is to the north of Mexico City and includes Tula, was fit to grow
> wheat, with stands of oak and pine forest. Yet, by 1581, the *relaciones* record
> an arid region, home of mesquite, prickly pear cacti, and the maguey. In
> the interim, the overstocking and overgrazing of sheep, complemented by
> other factors such as deforestation to acquire mining beams and charcoal,
> had transformed irrigated Otomi' farmland into land fit only for wide-range
> grazing."
>
> Hard not to think that this is where things are headed, esp. considering
> Wagner's last post about the nature of the soil in the Amazon.
>
> -greg
>
> On Sat, Aug 24, 2019 at 5:59 PM Wagner Luiz Schmit <
> wagner.schmit@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Just to make some things clear:
>>
>> " In Brazil, for example, it appears that the really big agrobusiness
>> companies are far more aware of how dangerous the fires are for
>> international trade, while the much smaller, i.e. less capitalized,
>> enterprises are more tightly aligned with Bolsinaro and more inclined to
>> pyromania."
>>
>> It is the opposite, 75% of the food consumed by Brazilians are produced
>> by small farmers, most try to avoid chemicals as much as possible on their
>> crops. A considerable part of those consists of people that literally
>> fought and died for land, many with a left or even marxist background - The
>> government treats some of them as "pro-lula terrorists". Many produce
>> organic food and permaculture is growing. They are against the fires and
>> the bad use of the land, because if the land dies, they die with it. On the
>> other hand those that are in full support of Bolsonaro are the big farmers,
>> some need airplanes to go from a place to another of just one farm. Why the
>> burn of the forest? The soil at the Amazon region is very poor by itself,
>> what sustains the forest is the forest itself. So after some years of soil
>> and beef production the land is of not much use, so they move on and
>> destroy more forest to grow stuff. Problem is: if the deforestation
>> continues, the cycle of water will be broken and most of Amazon forest will
>> be doomed and some parts of Brazil and nearby countries will turn into a
>> desert. Most of land on Amazon is obtained by forging documents to claim
>> land that is of the state, and since most politicians on the region are big
>> farmers, they can get out with it. Also just this year Bolsonaro government
>> told the farmers that they do not need to pay almost half a million dollars
>> on fines on deforestation (and some reports point out that only 10% of the
>> illegally deforested land is fined), i.e., basically they can do whatever
>> they want. And as I said it is not only the land, native people is being
>> killed by farmers and gold miners.
>>
>> So no, the Big capitalists do not care, and only started to "care" when
>> Europe came out with the possibility of a ban. The small producers are not
>> much affected by this, for most of them sell for the internal market in
>> their vicinity (and really far from Amazon), for most of Brazilian
>> population is located near the cost and the south, not the in the north.
>>
>> Wagner
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 24, 2019 at 6:23 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> My dear Martin--
>>>
>>> Something there is about the way you read--or maybe it's the way I
>>> write--it's very likely the way I write, with all its multiple embeddings
>>> and whatnot--one of us always manage to get things, as Vygotsky say,
>>> ass-backwards. So, on the one hand, I was not denying that capitalism
>>> turns nature into raw materials for prouction. That's not at all peculiar
>>> to capitalism; it exists in all societies without exception, and it's not
>>> even as pronounced in advanced capitalist societies as it was in some
>>> pre-modern societies (American slavery devastated the soil as well as the
>>> population that worked it). As a result we can expect (and you prove this
>>> when you rummage around, even rhetorically, for Bill Gates's e-mail
>>> address) to find many capitalists ostensibly and even actually on the side
>>> of nature: renewable resources are just good business. In Brazil, for
>>> example, it appears that the really big agrobusiness companies are far more
>>> aware of how dangerous the fires are for international trade, while the
>>> much smaller, i.e. less capitalized, enterprises are more tightly aligned
>>> with Bolsinaro and more inclined to pyromania. I think that dividing one's
>>> enemies is always just the other side of uniting fellow travelers, friends,
>>> and, as Andy says, comrades in arms.
>>>
>>> But on the other hand, I do not think that the solution is more
>>> capitalism, or a gentle transition to some gentler form of capitalism, or
>>> that capitalism is and always will be the only game "we" know how to
>>> play. I  was trying to say that it works better when we raise transitional
>>> demands, demands which force capitalism itself to expose the links between
>>> basic, fundamental, democratic, not-obviously-anti-capitalist stuff like
>>> the right to breathe air with oxygen in it and teh struggle against
>>> capitalism itself. That is how whole classes can acquire a perezhivanie of
>>> the existential threat they really exist in, how they can seize conscious
>>> awareness of the existential threat of capitalism. Anything else is going
>>> to lead to what Vygotsky calls empty verbalism. I don't think that class
>>> perezhivanie or the graspture of conscious awareness is ever gentle,
>>> though: the reason I was using sexual transitioning as a metaphor was that
>>> it's not crisis-free at all, even if you take hormones "gradually" (one
>>> transgender woman described it as having to do adolescence twice). Finally,
>>> I think that the current crisis tells us is that capitalism is a game
>>> nobody really knows how to play: it's a game that is playing us as a
>>> species and even as a whole social situation of development. (And, on a
>>> personal level, I am supposed to teach a class called "Specialism and
>>> Start-ups" this semester, and I really don't have a clue how to start!)
>>>
>>> Leave it to Andy, with his  heritage in Trotskyism and his preternatural
>>> erudition iin Marxism, to know exactly what I was getting at. It ws this:
>>>
>>> https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm#mt
>>>
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Sangmyung University
>>>
>>> New Article:
>>> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
>>> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
>>> understanding narratives by
>>> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI:
>>> 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>
>>> Some e-prints available at:
>>>
>>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Aug 24, 2019 at 10:19 AM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think that once we have grasped the simple fact hat we live in a
>>>> capitalist world, and that there is a hellovalot that has to happen between
>>>> now and a situation where we don't live in a capitalist world, we need to
>>>> think about how to understand and change our situation ...
>>>>
>>>> Rather than the truism that the object of all government and economic
>>>> activity in the world is capitalist accumulation, I think we should
>>>> recognise the truth put forward by the Regulation Theorists, which agrees
>>>> with Activity Theory -- government and economic activity can be conceived
>>>> of as a number of independent, interconnected *activities* (projects)
>>>> like business management, trade, wage determination, distribution, price
>>>> determination, a finance system, as well as environmental protection,
>>>> taxation, legislative, judicial, political and policing systems - every one
>>>> of which is culturally variable and is within the grasp of governments and
>>>> an organisation people to challenge and change.
>>>>
>>>> The destruction of the amazon forests and their crucial role in
>>>> maintenance of everyone's atmosphere and the world's biological and
>>>> cultural resources is a real problem. I don't know the answer. But we can't
>>>> solve by starting with the largest possible generalisation.
>>>>
>>>> Units of analysis comrades.
>>>>
>>>> Andy
>>>> ------------------------------
>>>> *Andy Blunden*
>>>> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>>> On 24/08/2019 8:46 am, Martin Packer wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi David,
>>>>
>>>> I don’t think what you’re saying negates the assertion that capitalism,
>>>> with its pernicious tendency to turn every aspect of nature into “raw”
>>>> materials and “natural" resources, is the source of the problems in the
>>>> Amazon and many other parts of the world. You’re probably correct, though,
>>>> in suggesting that the solution might turn out to be more capitalism. It
>>>> is, after all, the game that we play so well, and in fact the only game
>>>> that we know how to play.
>>>>
>>>> So transition rather than revolution? Okay, I’m game. Who takes the
>>>> first turn?
>>>>
>>>> Martin
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Aug 23, 2019, at 4:14 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Wagner:
>>>>
>>>> You were, I remember, interested in gaming culture. But if I remember
>>>> correctly, you weren't just interested in gaming culture "in the
>>>> wild"--when you look at gaming culture on line  in the wild, you see that
>>>> it's often associated with misogyny, violence, and Alt-right motifs (e.g.
>>>> the "Lost Cause" of southern slavery in the USA--my brother, for example,
>>>> has been doing a regular blog for Matrix games on the anniversaries of the
>>>> civil war, and his work is very often commentated by pro-slavery gamers).
>>>> You were interested in gaming culture as a vehicle for
>>>> teaching-and-learning in schools--both as a vehicle of conveying content,
>>>> and as a way of mediating the role of the learner from passive recipient to
>>>> active participant.
>>>>
>>>> Well, consider THIS video, which was made by a transexual woman who
>>>> started out (male) in the on-line gaming culture making videos to try to
>>>> talk to Alt-right people about their support for Donald Trump. I apologize
>>>> for the coarse language, and some of the rather risque jokes, but you will
>>>> see it is part of the message. (I also do not endorse the call to vote
>>>> Democratic: Al Gore ended "An Inconvenient Truth" with a stirring call to
>>>> elect democrats, and in 2008 Americans dutifully did, with no discernible
>>>> effect whatsoever on any of the issues raised in this film.)
>>>>
>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6GodWn4XMM
>>>>
>>>> Now, in some ways, it is srikingly similar to your video--the
>>>> spokesperson is carefully chosen and made up, there is a direct appeal  to
>>>> the (male) viewer which doesn't eschew sex appeal. But here's what I think
>>>> is different.
>>>>
>>>> a) ContraPoints manages to use many of the Alt Right's own
>>>> arguments--their aesthetic, their humor, and even, at one point, their own
>>>> racism (when she argues that unless climate change is tackled, we will have
>>>> to deal with hundreds of millions of dark-skinned refugees). She even ends
>>>> with the idea that all successful political struggles are essentially aimed
>>>> at mythical enemies.
>>>>
>>>> b) ContraPoints, nevertheless, does not have to disguise her own
>>>> Marxist agenda or her own actual persona--she simply presents it as part of
>>>> a panoply of gamer identities.
>>>>
>>>> c) ContraPoints is neither minimalist ("don't take an airplane to
>>>> ISCAR") nor maximalist ("no es fuego, es capitalismo!")--she doesn't want
>>>> to simply "meliorate" capitalism, nor is she happy to simply blame
>>>> capitalism for everything (in fact, elsewhere she points out that
>>>> capitalists themselves are not to blame--since they are helpless and
>>>> largely harmless patsies for Capital itself, hence Martin's appeal to Bill
>>>> Gates!)
>>>>
>>>> d) Instead, ContraPoints is a transitionalist (no pun intended). That
>>>> is, she begins with simple demands which are in no way anti-capitalist--but
>>>> which neveretheless compel attention even in children (that's the point of
>>>> the eroticism, the watermelon, the knife, etc, but she could also do the
>>>> same with the demand for a living minimum wage, or protection for
>>>> indigenous peoples, or simply putting out the fires). Because these demands
>>>> are not inherently anti-capitalist, the inability of capitalism to satisfy
>>>> them needs to be explained. In real political struggles, this is often done
>>>> by the capitalists themselves: we cannot make a profit if we increase
>>>> wages, protect indigenous people, or--in the case of Bolsinaro--try to put
>>>> out the fires (Bolsinaro says Brazil doesn't have the resources, which is
>>>> probably true). A transitional programme then demands proof--open the
>>>> account books to prove that there is no money for minimal wages, no land
>>>> for indigenous peoples, no resources for fighting firest. It is then
>>>> capitalism itself which has to demonstrate its own bankruptcy--and create
>>>> its own, united, educated, and purposeful gravediggers.
>>>>
>>>> Of course, the most obvious objection to this kind of transitional
>>>> programme is that her humor is misplaced and that this struggle is not a
>>>> game. Sometimes the humor is beside the point--the suicide rate among
>>>> transgender women is somewhere around forty percent, and some of
>>>> ContraPoint's work has a strong flavor of the person in the bath
>>>> self-medicating and self-treating. But I know that you, of all people, will
>>>> never object that struggle is not a game!
>>>>
>>>> (By the way, I'm not going to ISCAR either--same reason!)
>>>>
>>>> David Kellogg
>>>> Sangmyung University
>>>>
>>>> New Article:
>>>> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
>>>> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
>>>> understanding narratives by
>>>> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI:
>>>> 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>>
>>>> Some e-prints available at:
>>>>
>>>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 7:35 PM Wagner Luiz Schmit <
>>>> wagner.schmit@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> A short video about this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfiutlJ7uWc
>>>>>
>>>>> So yes, it is capitalism
>>>>>
>>>>> Wagner
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:08 PM Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> This is a satellite image not of fire per se but of the carbon
>>>>>> dioxide the fire is releasing (redder = more CO2) from the weather
>>>>>> site Windy.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Perhaps worth sharing? Who has Bill Gates' email address?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Martin
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>
>
> --
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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