Don’t care. I stopped being Canadian hours and hours ago. USA#whatever!
https://mobile.twitter.com/kellynotbrecht/status/1378080939239088131
Regenerative agriculture processes are an alternative to mono-crop agriculture.
This also ties into US imperialist aka capitalist policies that pushes over-exploited countries towards mono-crop practices that do two things: 1) maximizes profits for the wealthy, 2) decreases those countries’ ability to sustainably feed its own populace, which leads to over reliance on food imports which serves a dual purpose in that it sucks money out of those countries, and diminishes the ability of local populations to decouple themselves from the capitalist hegemony that is driving us towards ecocide.
8 Likes
It matters a lot more than who you vote for and people seem to care a lot about that around here.
3 Likes
It is ahistorical to claim capitalism is incompatible with ecological sustainability because there has not been a single human culture, going back to hunter-gatherers, who didn’t significantly alter and degrade their environment. All economic social orders are bad for the environment The only thing special about capitalism is it happens to dominate when there are 7 billion people instead of a few million.
There are countless examples of pre-capitalist societies doing this exact same thing. Google eastern island for a perfect analogy.
The correct declaration is human culture is incompatible with environmental sustainability.
Population is the issue, not capitalism. It may be fair to argue capitalism is responsible for population growth but I am not sure.
2 Likes
There’s evidence that there was so much slash and burn agriculture in the pre-Colombian Americas and that it caused so much global warning, that the massive deaths brought about by the Europeans getting there and the subsequent decline of agriculture led to reforestation and that was a cause of The Little Ice Age.
3 Likes
There are countless examples like this. My own research was about how this huge ecological zone in Canada called the Aspen Parkland is almost certainly a product of indigenous people changing from hunter-gatherers to reservations combined with bison extirpation. They use to set fires all the time that prevented this zone from existing.
It’s an area the size of Japan.
1 Like
He’s arguing that humans are the problem and that capitalism is just the latest version of the society running software. He’s also right.
Every species that has ever existed tries to do exactly what we’re doing.
That’s what humans have always done. It’s more fair to blame technology than capitalism honestly. Big picture though it’s people.
Just like how it’s wildly unreasonable to blame capitalism for exploiting people since it’s less exploitative than feudalism.
Don’t get me wrong this software update is getting long in the tooth and it’s problems are obvious, but it’s not responsible for people being people.
It think it’s fair to say that globalism has massively accelerated the process of environmental destruction. You wouldn’t have most of borneo being replaced by palm oil in the old days. Maybe they slash and burn one are until it dies, then move on while that area recovers.
The Soviets pretty much wiped out a bunch of whale populations in the southern ocean just to meet arbitrary bureaucratic quotas.
1 Like
The problem could be stated as there’s not enough socialism just as much as there’s too much capitalism and that would counter the argument that it’s just people and not capitalism.
And, as a group, anyone who burns a million acres so they can farm is acting like capitalists anyway. The issue is that natural resources like land and air and forests and oceans belong jointly to everyone (everything) on Earth, not just to one person, company, or tribe.
That’s my anarchism talking. These things are not ownable. That’s the problem/solution. You have no right to hog other people’s stuff. Pretty simple. But, an individualistic look at things. The less individualistic socialists back in Marx’s day called it “Scientific Socialsm” because they were progressive scientists who looked at the modern industrial world, saw that it was unsustainable, and wanted to engineer a solution.
(The Soviet example Suzzer brings up is because anarchists are right. Power corrupts. The Soviets or any other society with concentrations of power just become some effed up version of State Capitalism or feudalism.)
4 Likes
I’m sorry this just isn’t accurate. Nitrogen fertilizers were the 10,733rd (number estimated for humor value) time that humans told themselves that if they just figured out how to get more yield out of an acre their children would be able to be fully fed with tons of leisure time. Just like all the other times humanity used the increase in yield to increase population density by even more somehow.
Farmers are never profitable in the aggregate it’s like a law of nature or something.
Are you really trying to tell me that farming practices prior to recent times were sustainable? Dude no. Half the reason humans have historically had a bottomless need for more land is that our farming techniques have always been hyper unbalanced and always ruined the land over time. The thing that limited how much damage we could do in the past was our technological capacity and numbers. That is absolutely all it was. Sustainability was never a priority for any group of humans ever until extremely recent times… and even now it’s entirely motivated by a reasonable fear of running out.
We caused our first mass extinction event as a species the instant we discovered fire when we would intentionally start fires as a hunting method. We extincted all of the mega fauna before we got domesticated by wheat.
I’m sorry man this is how it’s always been. Most of the stuff you blame capitalism for is, at a macro level just human/animal nature.
None of this is me defending capitalism from its many legitimate criticisms, this is me pointing out that it’s fashionable on this board to draw a big circle around everything evil about our species and then label that circle capitalism.
I definitely do think there are work outs for us as a species where we get to a better place, but I very definitely do not think that the answers are contained in the minds of people born before the internet except in some cases as components. We need something genuinely new to replace capitalism.
2 Likes
Dude that story has the sequence backwards. We discovered how to fix nitrates for agriculture, and then figured out it also made pretty good bombs. Yes we scaled up production during WW2 and yes after the war there was obviously a lot of supply that nobody who owned it wanted to just dry up and blow away.
But there was never any doubt that they were going to come up with new hybrid strains of corn etc to take advantage of nitrate fertilizers… which had been in wide usage since their discovery in 1909. This was very much that development everyone knows is coming and is full of breathless speculation about too. There were god knows how many different people in the race to figure out how to do nitrogen fixation to create fertilizer.
The reason we have crazy strains of GMO’s today that are tolerant of shit like roundup is not because pesticides exist, it’s because we got the technology to create them and they’d been on people’s wishlist since the first farmer met the first weevil.
And I’m not straw manning you on the all point. You were trying to draw a magical line between this one article you read about the nitrate industry after WW2 and what came before it and label what came before as ‘more sustainable’ as if anyone ever gave a fuck about that (or that it was sustainable, ignoring the fact that the Dust Bowl which ended in 1936 was a man made disaster created by unsustainable ag practices, and that events like this happened pretty constantly through human history).
You’re not going to claim capitalism is worse for the environment than other human systems because that’s not actually in any way verifiable. We’re worse for the environment now than we were in the past because there are more of us and we have better technology that enables us to consume more. And we’re going to keep going with that trend forever. Hopefully we’ll figure out how to turn towards the next cliff before we fly off of this one.
Again capitalism has huge flaws and is very much not good enough, but blaming it for things like checks notes agricultural practices being unsustainable is just wildly unreasonable.
1 Like
Capitalism isn’t uniquely damaging. If anything it’s unique in that there’s actual uptake and funding for disrupting the status quo because of demand for more environmentally friendly products and services. No one cared about any of that ever prior to people living with enough abundance to being to care about the environment. There was never that much abundance anywhere prior to the 20th century in mid to late stage capitalist countries.
I’m sorry the difference here is that I’m well aware of economics and specifically agriculture from a longer historical view. The version of history you have been promoting here is propaganda. Friendly propaganda to be sure but propaganda. Just like the views you have about how personal consumption choices matter in the face of a textbook tragedy of the commons situation is pure propaganda (it’s a specialty meme aimed right at you designed to make it easy to otherize people exactly like to you with the normies who are not exactly fans of personal sacrifice beyond the purely cosmetic). The only solutions to these problems are systemic, and the only solution to that is to organize people around simple memes that normies can chant en masse
I guarantee that if you look into what happened in the USSR and its many satellites after WW2 with nitrate factories isn’t that they closed them. The USSR was a lot of things but as people have pointed out it wasn’t environmentally friendly lol.
1 Like
Let’s be really really clear… that ‘if anything’ at the start of my first paragraph of my last post is mega weak lol. Capitalism is worse for the environment than previous economic systems we’ve run primarily because it works to keep humans doing human stuff at larger scale than ever before. The fact that there is almost no demand, even now, for green products is one of the major failures of capitalism that now urgently requires large scale government patches to fix.
The thing I’m pushing back on is the urge to demonize capitalism for stuff that isn’t really its fault. There’s plenty wrong about capitalism without doing that. The way it treats poor people is more than enough to be a huge problem. The way it exploits every single oversight in the law is another. The way it erodes institutional guard rails and regulations is still another. There are tons of problems inherent to capitalism and sometimes they very directly cause major environmental harm… But much of that is just how human nature interacts with capitalism.
And the solution to those problems certainly doesn’t lie in anything anyone wrote before the internet existed. I cannot stress enough how few actual solutions Marx has for this situation. What we need is to do an honest appraisal of where we are now, what the problems are and why they exist, and build a custom solution we can actually execute as a global civilization. That’s going to look different in different places, but nearly everywhere it looks like humans using fewer raw materials, and nearly no raw materials without any biodegradability. Which is achievable without much if any loss of quality of life for the general population in our lifetimes if we get back to actually getting shit done.
The demand isnt there because the external costs are almost never included. There would be no nuclear energy if the external costs would be included or if the shit wasn’t subsidized to begin with. Energy from coal and gas? Carbon tax etc… The problem with capitalism is that there is no stop mechanism. If you produce more you will earn more. So maybe we need taxes that make you stop at some point.
Yeah the externalities problem is one of those major legitimate criticisms of capitalism. It really has no guard rails against it besides government regulation which it very definitely erodes over time.
Something to definitely solve in the next iteration.
“Tragedy of the commons” was mentioned recently and this post from last year bears repeating. An expression like that can be a shortcut to avoid thinking. Yes, it describes a real phenomenon and a person who owns something may well take care of it better than people who share something, but that’s nothing at all like a law of nature. A person/company that can make a big profit while destroying something quickly and then either cash out or just buy the next plot of land or w/e and destroy it too is something else that happens.
What’s different about Capitalism is the degree of alienation between owner and property. Investment becomes more abstract, more lacking in responsibility, and more short term. The owners end up irresponsible and often ignorant about their property, the decisions are made by management whose responsibility is only to provide short term profit because the abstract investments are extremely liquid.
A farmer owning their land is not really Capitalism. Not in the sense of Capitalism that people are talking about when they talk about history going back to things like the Dutch East India Company being an early example. It’s the separation of investor from property and it’s just a more extreme example of what people are supposedly objecting to when they refer to something as causing a “tragedy of the commons” problem.
1 Like
His pain was transfixing, a case study in a fundamental climate riddle: How do you confront the truth of climate change when the very act of letting it in risked toppling your sanity? There is too much grief, too much suffering to bear. So we intellectualize. We rationalize. And too often, without even allowing ourselves to know we’re doing it, we turn away. At virtually every level — personal, political, policy, corporate — we repeat this pattern. We fail, or don’t even try, to rise to the challenge. Yes, there are the behemoth forces of power and money reinforcing the status quo. But even those of us who firmly believe we care very often fail to translate that caring into much action. We make polite, perhaps even impassioned conversation. We say smart climate things in the boardroom or classroom or kitchen or on the campaign trail. And then … there’s a gap, a great nothingness and inertia.
He tried converting Columbia’s undergraduate green groups to his cause. Did they care about the environment? Yes. Did they care about the planetary catastrophe? Well, yes, of course they did, but they were going to stick with their project of getting plastic bags out of dining halls, OK? He tried lobbying the university administrators to switch to wind power. Couldn’t even get a meeting. Nothing made sense. Why was Al Gore spending a fortune to make a climate movie only to flinch at the end of “An Inconvenient Truth” and say, essentially, Just buy more efficient light bulbs? Almost nobody saw it — really saw it . WE ARE HAVING AN EMERGENCY.
One of capitalism’s big issues is that it basically requires a strong government that isn’t beholden to big corporate interests to function. This is because nearly all of the positives that come from capitalism stem from competition, and unfortunately the economic dogma that in a vacuum firms trend toward perfect competition is bullshit. In real life competition is strictly a negative from the perspective of the firm, and the rational thing to do is to merge with their competitors to form a monopoly that can control price and service level while influencing the government to pass regulations that make it harder to compete with them.
If I had to guess what the next iteration of the code we use to allocate resources in society will look like it’s superficially capitalism, but the way government interacts with it will have to be pretty different.
In particular what I call ‘the tobacco play’ has to go. So far we’ve seen it with tobacco, carbon, guns, opiates to an extreme degree but really all through healthcare, sugar, and quite a few others. Basically when your industry is causing a lot of harm instead of allowing the problems your industry is causing to be fixed the industry runs a full court press to prevent any kind of government intervention complete with a large well funded full spectrum propaganda campaign.
Fixing the first amendment to not protect deliberate misinformation campaigns probably gets done through changes to slander/defamation/libel/fraud laws and regulations on the advertising industry. The idea that we allow totally unrestricted advertising is probably going to seem pretty barbaric in a couple of hundred years.
1 Like