Weekly Digest – June 19, 2016

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Must Read/Watch

Should Read

Politics

Science

Environment

 

End note:  The section of Elani’s essay which made me think of Mann’s book:

If we overemphasise the role of industrialisation … in the history of human impact on the biosphere, we will fail to see how pre-industrial societies were quite capable of destroying and disrupting ecosystems. Moore is absolutely right that talking about humanity contra nature is unproductive and in fact, facilitates the exploitation and degradation of the biosphere. He is also right when he points out that humanity as a whole cannot be said to have any particular means of relating to the environment. We have to talk about specific communities and societies.

That stated, he notes that we need to keep things in context:

Talking about the environmental crisis in terms of ‘nature’ or ‘the earth’ is … insufficient and misleading. The earth is still going to be here and nature is still going to be here, what we are talking about losing is the health and vitality of specific ecosystems, millions of species of animals and plants, and perhaps the extinction of the human race. The planet will keep on turning and new species will develop and grow.

and also that current times do differ in a significant way from earlier ones (emphasis mine):

Donna Haraway’s recent engagement with this debate offers further nuance. She cites a paper by Anna Tsing entitled ‘Feral Biologies’, which suggests that we might think about the distinction between holocene and anthropocene in terms of refuge. During the previous epoch its clear that destructive human activity occurred, however, at that point there were still spaces of refuge. This is to say various ecosystems had the capacity to rebuild, species could take shelter and return, biodiversity was largely unthreatened despite attacks against particular species. Haraway writes that ‘The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before.’ These refuges have all but disappeared. Ecosystems and species, humans certainly among them, do not have the time or the space to replenish themselves. In these terms Haraway argues that our only hope is to do everything we can to make sure that this current period of extinguishing refuge is as short as possible, because it is very clearly here now.

For me, the big takeaway from his essay precedes the passages above:

If people just hear that humans are destroying the environment, they aren’t given much incentive to act or even think much. We have to remind people that humanity, as a monolith, doesn’t do anything in particular. You have a choice, you are not condemned to exploit the earth simply by being born human…. When we break out of the old binary of human vs nature we can see that it’s not humanity that’s the problem but a specific way of life or specific practices. This recognition also allows us to address particular problems without falling into the trap that somehow and for some reason, usually a religious one, humanity is just destined to have an exploitative relationship to its environment. Again, the majority of human beings historical have lived in a radically non-exploitative way. Which humans are we talking about when we say that ‘humans are destroying nature’? And furthermore, lets be specific about what is being destroyed and how.

I need to do some homework before I buy in to “the majority of human beings historical have lived in a radically non-exploitative way” – I just don’t know enough of human history to say one way or the other – but the rest I’m on-board with.