#geoforum

[zinjanthropusboisei]

Hitting download pdf like

[dailyanarchistposts]

The Bottom Line

The effectiveness of our actions cannot be measured in the same terms we measure the decline of our ecosystems. Life, and especially living resistance, is so much more than actions taken to influence a scientists’ interpretation of climate meta data and feedback loops. Measuring our efforts by their effectiveness on the scales of dominant society is falling for the same ‘return on investment’ paradigm that has allowed the looting of our habitats.

As long as we do not see our struggles as the continuation of an age-old fight against domination and state coercion [R.F. – see 23 Theses Concerning Revolt], we will be setting forth on half measures leaving the old powers alive underneath the surface, which has only led to an intensification of authoritarianism, ecological degradation and now climate crisis.

Decentralized organizing, non-hierarchical networks and joyful resistance have been and will be the most effective tools to fight the builders of this ecocidal world and to live a life free of oppression. We don’t need political parties or professional leaders to pacify these struggles. We need to support them, help them grow and connect, and show how they already contain the solutions to the interrelated problems of ecological collapse, poverty, and exploitation.

Situations of desperation and perceived emergency create opportunities for authoritarians to increase their power [R.F. – see ‘The Difference Between “Just Coping” & “Not Coping at All”’], and mislead efforts of decentralized movements towards tech-fixes that accelerate neo-colonial extractivism. If people have a desire to attempt to appropriate the state to create more favorable policy conditions for land defenders and ecosystems or become lawyers, this is understandable. The battle against ecological and climate catastrophe already exists, the problem is there are few actually fighting it and taking this battle seriously.

If you are reading this, you are the resistance to ecological catastrophe and the authoritarianism that put the world in this desperate situation.

...“Just as we

refuse to be ruled,

we refuse to rule

over anyone else”...

(Peter Gelderloos)

Footnotes

[1] medium.com/@fulalas/from-dispersion-to-apathy-how-technology-makes-us-lonely-1d489ee6004f

[2] Hickel J. (2020) Less is more: How degrowth will save the world, London: Random House.

[3] versobooks.com/blogs/4450-it-is-time-to-try-out-an-ecological-leninism-interview-with-andreas-malm

[4] researchgate.net/publication/328887527_Contemporary_Questions_on_Eco-terrorism_with_Michael_Loadenthal

[5] Leslie Pickering (2003) Earth Liberation Front 1997–2002

[6] kersplebedeb.com/posts/ecological-leninism-friend-or-foe

[7] Anonymous. (2018) Against the World Builders. Black Seed #6 : 84–108.

[8] youtu.be/8LSQLBFQruo?t=1675

[9] portal.research.lu.se/ws/files/96341244/HM_DAC.pdf

[10] reuters.com/article/us-usa-energy-carbon-capture-idUSKCN2523K8

[11] ecostandard.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/CCS-false-solution-food-water-action-europe.pdf

[12] cleantechnica.com/2019/06/12/best-carbon-capture-facility-in-world-emits-25-times-more-co2-than-sequestered

[13] Andreas Malm, (2020) Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency – War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, p. 89

[14] ibid.

[15] Fairhead, James, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones. 2012. “Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of Nature?”

[16] Duffy, Rosaleen. 2016. “War, by Conservation.” Geoforum 69 (1): 238–248.

[17] Kelly, Alice. 2013. “Property and Negotiation in Waza National Park.” Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI), UK.

[18] Gelderloos P. (2017) Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, Oakland: AK Press. theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-worshipping-power

[19] Dunlap A. (2020) The Politics of Ecocide, Genocide and Megaprojects: Interrogating Natural Resource Extraction, Identity and the Normalization of Erasure.

[20] euobserver.com/nordic/150287

[21] offshore-energy.biz/saipem-lays-more-than-100km-of-baltic-pipe-pipeline

[22] energinet.dk/Anlaeg-og-projekter/Projektliste/Groen-gas-Lolland-Falster

[23] tv2east.dk/guldborgsund/sukkerfabrikker-udleder-naestmest-co2-i-danmark-er-gas-eller-el-loesningen

[24] canfor.com/sustainability-report/environment/canadian-boreal-forest-agreement

[25] totalenergies.com/media/news/press-releases/total-acquires-maersk-oil-for-7-45-billion-dollars-in-share-and-debt-transaction

[26] greenpeace.org/usa/maersk-stands-up-for-the-oceans

[27] Shiva V. (2002 [1989]) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Carolyn Merchants (1983) The Death of Nature, Sullivan S. (2010) ‘Ecosystem service commodities’ – a new imperial ecology? Implications for animist immanent ecologies, with Deleuze and Guattari.

[28] marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1939/ruhle01.htm

[29] marx.libcom.org/library/russian-revolution-communist-party-alexander-berkman

[30] P. Gelderloos (2010) Worshipping Power

[31] Scott JC. (2017) Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, New Haven: Yale University Press. Gelderloos P. (2017) Worshiping Power.

[32] A. Dunlap (2020) Compost the Colony: Exploring Anarchist Decolonization, see theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alexander-dunlap-compost-the-colony-exploring-anarchist-decolonization

[33] theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/16/climate-scientists-shocked-by-scale-of-floods-in-germany

[34] grist.org/protest/dakota-access-pipeline-activists-property-destruction grist.org/protest/dakota-access-pipeline-activists-property-destruction [R.F. It turns out that Ruby has turned snitch, and is cooperating with cops and investigators.]

[fatehbaz]

Fragrant Frontier: Global Spice Entanglements from the Sino-Vietnamese Uplands. Edited by Sarah Turner, Annuska Derks, and Jean-Fracois Rousseau. Published in 2022 by Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press. Part of the series NIAS Studies in Asian Topics.

Open access e-book available. (All blurbs, quotes, and reviews in this post are excerpted from: niaspress.dk/book/fragrant-frontier)

Publisher’s “about the book” blurb:

“Since its inception over two millennia ago, the spice trade has connected and transformed the environments, politics, cultures, and cuisines of vastly different societies around the world. The ‘magical’ qualities of spices mean they offer more than a mere food flavoring, often evoking memories of childhood events or specific festivals. Although spices are frequently found in our kitchen cupboards, how they get there has something of a mythical allure. In this ethnographically rich and insightful study, the authors embark on a journey of demystification that starts in the Sino-Vietnamese uplands with three spices – star anise, black cardamom, and cassia (cinnamon) – and ends on dining tables across the globe. This book foregrounds the experiences of ethnic minority farmers cultivating these spices, highlighting nuanced entanglements among livelihoods, environment, ethnic identity, and external pressures, as well as other factors at play. It then investigates the complex commodity chains that move and transform these spices from upland smallholdings and forests in this frontier to global markets, mapping the flows of spices, identifying the numerous actors involved, and teasing out critical power imbalances. Finally, it focuses on value-creation and the commoditization of these spices across a spectrum of people and places. This rich and carefully integrated volume offers new insights into upland frontier livelihoods and the ongoing implications of the contemporary agrarian transition. Moreover, it bridges the gap in our knowledge regarding how these specific spices, cultivated for centuries in the mountainous Sino-Vietnamese uplands, become everyday ingredients in Global North food, cosmetics, and medicines. Links to online resources, including story maps, provide further insights and visual highlights.”

---

NIAS Press also provides “about the author” blurbs:

“Sarah Turner is Professor of Geography at McGill University. She is a development geographer specializing in ethnic minority livelihoods, agrarian change, and everyday resistance in upland northern Vietnam and southwest China. She also works with street vendors and other members of the mobile informal economy [...] in urban Southeast Asia. [...] [S]he is also an editor of the journals Geoforum and Journal of Vietnamese Studies. Annuska Derks is an [...] is a social anthropologist interested in social transformation processes in Southeast Asia, in particular in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Also widely published, her research focuses on migration, labor, gender, as well as the social lives of things [...]. Jean-François Rousseau [...] is a development geographer with research focusing on the relationships between agrarian change, infrastructure development – especially hydropower dams and sand-mining – and ethnic minority livelihood [...].”

---

NIAS Press quotes a couple of book reviews. From Janet Sturgeon of Simon Fraser University:

“This compelling study – one of the best integrated volumes I have read – traces the precarious livelihoods of ethnic minority farmers producing spices under two related processes. The first is global commodity chains, which the chapters follow from node to node along long-standing relations of trust. The second is misguided state-driven interventions to limit farmers’ land and get them to produce monocrops. These combined processes threaten farmers in the borderlands between Vietnam and China, while international traders of these lucrative spices become rich.”

---

Available to read, for free, at NIAS Press.

[sharpened--edges]

Organized around a simple but elegant motto, “homeless people in peopleless homes,” the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign is often seen to be “a radical urban homesteader movement”. Inhabited by members of the movement and restored through collective labor, these homes are now indistinguishable from those around them. No longer boarded up, they house multiple residents, nodes in a secret geography of activism and occupation. […] I read these occupations – this strategic illegality – as a politics of emplacement. In my visits to liberated homes on the South Side, I was struck by the lived experience of domesticity: a meticulous care, a display of sentiment, a curation of beautiful objects. […] In the liberated homes, I had expected to find the desperate bricolage of survival and the careless urgency of occupation. Instead I found a careful curation: patiently polished wood, a piece of quartz reclaimed for a kitchen counter, the favorite painting hung just right, mismatched chairs hugging a salvaged dining table, fireplaces that glowed with warmth while outside the cold winds of April raged noisily. I use “emplacement” quite deliberately, drawing on at least two meanings associated [with] the term: “the process or state of setting something in place or being set in place,” and “a platform or defended position where a gun is placed for firing.” Home liberations are the frontline of […] the enforcement and defense of human rights. It is also the intimate practice of constructing domesticity. Such domesticity is not necessarily the aesthetics of possession.

Ananya Roy, “Dis/possessive Collectivism: Property and Personhood at City’s End," Geoforum 80 (2017), pp. A3–14.

[tsmom1219]

Holding space for climate justice? Urgency and ‘Regenerative Cultures’ in Extinction Rebellion Netherlands

Tom Rowe, Meghann Ormond (2023). “Holding space for climate justice? Urgency and ‘Regenerative Cultures’ in Extinction Rebellion Netherlands.” Geoforum 146, 103868. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103868 Abstract: This article explores tensions between urgency and climate justice in a climate activist movement context through the case study of Regenerative Cultures in Extinction…

[zyciestolicy]

Plany Lindleya na miejskim portalu mapowym

Plany Lindleya na miejskim portalu mapowym

Miejski serwis mapowy wzbogacił się o unikalne opracowanie – plan miasta z przełomu XIX i XX wieku w skali 1:2500, będący częścią kolekcji tzw. Planów Lindleya. Stanowi on uzupełnienie już wcześniej udostępnionego w serwisie planu w skali 1:250, z tego samego zbioru – przekazał stołeczny ratusz. Publikacja szczegółowych planów była możliwa dzięki uprzejmości Archiwum Państwowego w Warszawie.…

[dinmohd]

thanks to Oil and Gas Discover Centre for conducting a Geoforum. the only opportunities to seek advice from oil and gas experts here in Brunei. thanks to Seniorbstaff from BSP for such an inspiring panel for today. they are the reasons why Bruneians are developed these days #geoforum #ogdc #forBruneians #inspiration (at Oil & Gas Discovery Centre, Seria Brunei)

[eruminski15-blog]

Works Cited:

- Costos, Daryl, Ruthie Ackerman and Lisa Paradis. 2002. “Recollections of Menarche: Communication Between Mothers and Daughters Regarding Menstruation.” Sex Roles. 46(1-2): 49-59.

- Fetohy, Ebtisam M. 2007. “Impact of a Health Education Program for Secondary School Saudi Girls About Menstruation at Riyadh City.” The Journal of the Egyptian Public Health Association 82(1&2):105-125.

- Jewitt, Sarah and Harriet Ryley. 2014. “It’s a girl thing: Menstruation, school attendance, spatial mobility and wider gender inequalities in Kenya.” Geoforum. 56(137-147).

 - Kirk, Jackie, Marni Sommer. 2006. “Menstruation and body awareness: linking girls’ health with girls’ education.” Royal Tropical Institute, Special on Gender and Health 1-22.

 - Kissling, Elizabeth A. 1996. “Bleeding Out Loud: Communication about Menstruation.” SAGE Journals 6(4): 480-504. 

- Nemade, Dipali, Seema Anjenaya, Rupali Gujar. 2009. “IMPACT OF HEALTH EDUCATION ON KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICES ABOUT MENSTRUATION AMONG ADOLESCENT SCHOOL GIRLS OF KALAMBOLI, NAVI-MUMBAI.” Health and Population; Perspectives and Issues 32 (4): 167–175.

[somethingelselivesherenow]

When scarcity is “naturalised” –by making it something that is part of the human condition– what needs to be explained (scarcity) becomes the explanation (scarcity). Awkward questions are conveniently pushed aside. Growing demand, for example, is simply assumed to be, and understood as, a force that is inexorable, a function both of rising numbers of people and of their innately expanding desires, wants and needs. The many and varied ways in which demand for specific products –whether through advertising or through state-led imposition or through corporate monopolies– has been deliberately manufactured is simply swept under the carpet.

Nicholas Hildyard 

Scarcity, ‘polite society’ and activism

In Geoforum (2018) p. 1-2

[zwischenstadt]

In political economy, unfree labour and related coercive work relations (forced labour, servitude, bonded and indentured labour and labour trafficking) have typically been understood as residual, exceptional or non-capitalist, while notions of free contract have tended to be at the heart of assumptions (among orthodox economists and critical political economists alike) about how capitalist labour markets function (McGrath and Strauss, 2015).  These understandings reinforced the idea that unfree labour relations are artifacts of pre-capitalist social and economic relations, and were widely superseded by the development of capitalist labour markets, enduring only where capitalist has not sufficiently taken root... Labour geography, building on foundations in marxian political economy also tended to reflect (often implicitly) these assumptions (but see Mitchell, 1996).  Work on unfree and forced labour geography in the last decade has thus coincided with a broader expansion of research on unfree and forced labour, 'modern slavery', and especially trafficking... This expansion has involved a questioning of binary and dichotomous conceptualizations of the categories of free and unfree labour, which are increasingly subject to critiques that highlight the multi-dimensional character of unfreedom, or which apply a heuristic of a continuum or spectrum of exploitation.

Kendra Strauss and Siobhan McGrath, “Temporary migration, precarious  employment and unfree labour relations: Exploring the ‘continuum of exploitation’ in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program”. Published in Geoforum, Geoforum 78, 2017.

[zinjanthropusboisei]

I really enjoy Geoforum

[fatehbaz]

This article is available for free to read online; just search for it:

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

But if you were specifically interested in reading more about songspirals and Aboriginal conceptions of time, better to read the words of the Yolngu women themselves. The article here references their 2019/2020 book:

Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines.

The book was written by the Gay’wu Group of Women and discusses time/temporality and human relationships with other-than-human creatures from a Yolngu perspective.

If you cannot find the book, that’s OK, because Yolngu women and scholars put together a couple of articles describing the same subjects, which you can read online. I recommend:

“Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Authored by Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S. Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. Published in the journal Geoforum in January 2020.

-------

Down below, I’ve included an excerpt from their article.

But first, here’s a short re-post of an excerpt from the Rademaker article, for comparison/contrast or whatever:

-------

Aboriginal people, in many cases, have resisted and rejected the uniformity of times that are celebrated by the supposed ‘time revolutions’ and instead, pointed to their own dynamic and enduring temporalities. [...] By the nineteenth century, however, ‘secular time’ became for many ‘just time, period’: the ‘empty time’ of Walter Benjamin. […] The European discovery of ‘deep time’ hastened this shift. As Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, in the ‘modern historical consciousness’ ‘time is empty because it acts as a bottomless sack: any number of events can be put inside it’. […] Historicism views the past as developments, trends, eras and epochs. It assumes a homogenous, calendrical time through which a universal story of all peoples (no matter their cosmology or temporality) might be told. [...]

Many of the Traditional Owners of Willandra Lakes expressed frustration that their temporalities were overlooked by researchers. Datings of tens of thousands of years were not ‘revolutionary’ for those who know they had ‘always’ been here. McGrath describes how, to Traditional Owners, Mungo Lady is not ‘“gone” in any final sense; she is active in the landscape today’. ‘This lady who lived 40,000 years ago,’ she observes, ‘is treated like an aunty who died only yesterday’. For Traditional Owners, the scientists’ ‘obsession’ with dates is a source of frustration. These tensions are more than disputes over time’s scale, questions of 40,000 years versus ‘infinity’. Rather, they reflect a deeper mismatch between linear, homogenous, quantifiable time and many Aboriginal people’s often unacknowledged temporalities. For Indigenous peoples, time is not necessarily homogenous or universal container for events. It can be ‘plural’. […]

For many Australian Aboriginal people, time is neither exclusively linear nor cyclical, it can be always, everywhen. Australian Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, remembering and re-enacting the past in the present blur the distinctions of linear time, making all time ‘now’. [...] Riratjingu elder, Wandjuk Marika, for example, explained that while ‘scientists can give you a small story of our origins possibly 40,000 years ago’, Aboriginal people ‘can tell you many more’. As Nganyinytia Ilyatjari explains, ‘Tjukurpa iriti ngaringi munu kuwari wanka nyinyangi.’ That is, ‘Tjukurpa [often translated “Dreaming”] has existed from a long time ago and is alive today.’ The power and presence of the Creative Beings continue to work in the landscape and creatures they formed. The Burarrwana collective of Yolngu women writes that ‘songspirals’ (often called ‘songlines’ or ‘Dreamings’) ‘have been here a long time’. But they did not simply create the land, ‘they keep on creating it, and us’. They are ‘ancient but fresh’ and ‘always in emergence’. The women are emphatic that time is not simply linear ‘clock time’. Times are interwoven and interconnected. Time is co-existing. We are with them. They are in their time. You are in your time. We are in time together. […] Aboriginal temporalities might weave together what, from a white settler perspective, might be temporally distant events. In Yolngu cosmologies, the closeness of events is determined more by their location, power and significance than their temporal distance. […] Yet the dominating times of settler colonialism erase the possibility of these temporalities. That is, they deny Indigenous ‘temporal sovereignty’. Under settler-colonialism, settler time is set as ‘the baseline for the unfolding of time itself’; as if white settlers’ times were the only times. So Indigenous claims become inconceivable and unrecognizable, being grounded in different experiences of time.

-------

Now, an excerpt from the Yolngu collective’s “Gathering of the Clouds ...”:

-------

Ada Smailbegovic talks of starfish time (2015). Starfish may seem to be still, but longer attention, through time-lapse photography for example, shows them moving, changing. Smailbegovic also talks of larval time, the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch, a time that is a compound entity of other variables, longer in the cold, or sped up with increasing temperature. Larval time is the right time for eggs to hatch, a deeply relational and contingent time. As she points out, “many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time in the Anthropocene – such as minute and incrementally   accumulating processes of change, or the long duration of geological time, rock time, or the temporal rhythms of non-human organisms – are beyond the human sensorium” (2015: 97). For by attending to more-than-human agencies of time and weather, diverse multiplicities emerge even as they are beyond human   understanding. This is the seasonal time of clouds gathering. It is also the time of hydrological cycles, of water moving through aquifers for thousands of years, of transpiration and growth. And short spirals, of the flash of lightning, claps of thunder, of traveling sound and light. Then there are beings that experience hundreds, thousands of generations within a human lifetime. For such beings, the memories, learnings and modes of passing on experience are, it almost goes without saying (yet it must be said as it is so often not), radically different from any human’s in terms of the ways they experience change. The immensity of the alterity is, literally, incomprehensible to humans. We can’t know how and what these beings know. But we can be aware that they have knowledges and experiences beyond us. For many people, coming from  different cultural and ontological positions, not knowing does not mean  not connecting or not respecting. For it would seem that there are things that humans cannot and should not know. We don’t need to know what starfish know. But we should know they live and experience and think beyond us. We should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled, how we co-become. [...] These are  place-based, pluralist, more-than-Western/colonial/white, more-than-human co-becomings. Weather - the sun, the clouds, the clans that gather, the starfish as it moves and the eggs as they develop and   hatch - tell us that time does not exist separately from more-than-human relationships and more-than-human worlds. It does not order worlds in a  strict and linear, universalized sequence. It is not abstract, or  empty. It is not separate from humans. This is a “transcorporeal collaboration” […] that make and weather a season’s change, a collaboration within  which bodies are not discrete entities whose borders may stand or be breached, but are themselves always more than human.

[kalinago-the-warriors]

Ras dan Kolonialisme dalam Agrikultur Karibia

Artikel jurnal ini berangkat dari kondisi produksi agrikultur kawasan Karibia saat ini yang masih bergantung pada sistem neoliberal. Tesis dasar dari tulisan ini adalah bahwa sistem pangan di Karibia saat ini yang dipenuhi peningkatan rasio di bawah rata-rata, ketergantungan impor, kerawanan pangan, dan gizi buruk terjadi karena relasi sosial neo-kolonial yang berjalan saat ini. Uniknya, analisis dalam tulisan ini juga mengungkapkan bahwa norma patriarki dan esensialisme gender juga beran dalam buruknya kondisi pangan Karibia.

Terlepas dari dinamika gender yang menjadi konsiderasi, beberapa hal yang menarik untuk dicatat adalah sebagai berikut.

- Selama beberapa dekade, ekonom politik Karibia, Girvan (2012) menggarisbawahi dampak buruk dari kooptasi ideologi dan korupsi di kawasan.

- Penduduk miskin dan komunitas marjinal, seperti Afro-Karibia atau masyarakat adat, secara spesifik dilemahkan dan diopresi oleh perjanjian dagang neoliberal.

- Dominasi perusahaan multinasional dalam pengorganisasian dan regulasi produksi dan konsumsi pangan menghasilkan relasi eksploitatif dan manipulatif antara petani-petani dan organisasi transnasional. Kasus ini secara spesifik tampak di Republik Dominika.

Kesimpulan yang disampaikan pun tidak kalah menarik, bahwa sering kali literatur mengenai Amerika Latin dan Karibia hanya terdiri atas data-data mengenai negara-negara Amerika Latin sehingga menyebabkan miskonsepsi mengenai Karibia.

Barry, T., Gahman, L., Greenidge, A., & Mohamed, A. (2020). Wrestling with race and colonialism in Caribbean agriculture: Toward a (food) sovereign and (gender) just future. Geoforum 109, 106-110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.12.018

[studiobricolage-molenpoort]

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Urhahn. (2010). De Spontane Stad. BIS Publishers. http://www.urhahn.com/de-spontane-stad/    

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China Is Rolling Out an Enormous “Weather Modification” System

Cloud Cover

This week, the Chinese government announced that it plans to drastically increase its use of technology that artificially changes the weather.

Cloud seeding technology, or systems that can blasts silver molecules into the sky to prompt condensation and cloud formation, has been around for decades, and China makes frequent use of it. But now, CNN reports that China wants to increase the total size of its weather modification test area to 5.5 million square miles by 2025 — a huge increase, and an area larger than that of the entire country of India, which could affect the environment on an epic scale and even potentially spur conflict with nearby countries.

Fog Of War

Most notably, China and India share a hotly-disputed border that they’ve violently clashed over as recently as this year, CNN has previously reported. India’s agriculture relies on a monsoon season that’s already grown unpredictable due to climate change, prompting experts in the country to worry that China may use its ability to control rain and snowfall as a weapon.

“Lack of proper coordination of weather modification activity (could) lead to charges of ‘rain stealing’ between neighboring regions,” National Taiwan University researchers conclude in a 2017 paper published in Geoforum.

Global Tampering

In the past, China has used its weather modification tech to seed clouds well in advance of major events like the 2008 Olympics and political meetings so the events themselves happen under clear skies, CNN reports.

But this planned expansion of the system means that other countries may be subject to its meteorological whims — seeding international conflict in addition to clouds.

READ MORE: China to expand weather modification program to cover area larger than India [CNN]

More on weather modification: China’s New “Weather-Controlling Tech” Could Make it Rain on Demand

The post China Is Rolling Out an Enormous “Weather Modification” System appeared first on Futurism.

[ana-sola-deactivated081518]

Capitalism: Mutually Exclusive with Ethical Consumption (Part I)

Malnutrition | Water Scarcity & Forced Labor | Mainstream Movements are Oppressive | Environmental Degradation | Cecil v. BLM | Acceptability & Conclusion | Food Systems & Accountability | Capitalism & Co-Ops

Introduction

A commendable, yet mostly futile, practice under capitalist markets is "ethical," "green," or "alternative" consumption. Ethical consumption was popularized after Marxian ideologies prompted the importance of combatting the ensnaring tentacles of capitalist markets' exploitation waged, underpaid, or underemployed laborers. Ethical, green, or alternative products are ideally meant to exist outside of capitalist markets because capitalism inherently exploits workers as it utilizes government policymaking to protect its illusive--but still sinister--global spread and influence. Alternative markets are the antithesis of commodity fetishism specifically created by and for capitalist markets), which expunge or omit the process of making certain commodities.

Alternative markets allow consumers the knowledge of where their products are made, by who, and under what circumstances. Without these transparent practices, it is nigh impossible to have ethical consumption under capitalism. Misinterpretations often ensure this thinking; what we consume does not matter, because it will not have significant enough impact on policies, economics, or--the big, bad wolf--capitalism. I cannot eat a meal; I cannot use my phone; and I cannot take a shit without perpetuating an economic regime specifically intended to exploit marginalized groups. I believe a better interpretation of our existence in such a deplorable regime is in order: capitalism makes monsters of us all. Individual consumerism is ineffective political participation because it relies on neoliberal governing (or lack thereof) practices, and, thus, perpetuates disorganized and improper movement-making. Movements must be focused on how institutions, especially market capitalism, exploit and oppress people. If the people with the right mindset are disorganized, it allows mainstream (allowable forms of resistance) organizations that support white supremacist systems through omission of capitalist exploitation of people domestically and internationally.

Neoliberalism Aids Capitalist Expansion

A brief introspection of the relationship between neoliberal policies and capitalism is necessary; the consequences are inconspicuous, but incredibly detrimental for the working class. The American democratic political environment relies on neoliberalism--government only regulates what is necessary to keep a nation continuing, but the rest of society (re: corporate America) may determine and regulate policies and practices that are not necessarily essential for a nation's continuance. Julie Guthman, in her article "Neoliberalism and the Making of Food Politics in California" describes what the corporate fill-in looks like;

“...the privatization of public resources and spaces, minimizations of labor costs, [and] reduction of public expenditures.” (Geoforum, vol. 39, no. 3, 2008, pp. 1171-1183, doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.09.002)

"Public resources" such as water, air, and land and "public spaces" such as parks and recreational areas are subject to legislative debate whether they should allow or how to allow private businesses to run those resources and spaces. "Minimization of labor costs" may be laying off hundreds of employees, decreasing employee hours overall, and myriad outlandishly legal policies that allow corporations to cut costs and maximize profits. "Public expenditure" reductions run the gamut from decreasing welfare benefits for the poor and single-parent families or increasing the age of retirement. These examples succeed government retraction (neoliberalism) that allows businesses to control the economic environment, and, in turn, exploit the working class. These constrict the options available to the working class-without proper social safety nets, they become desperate to work longer hours for less pay.

Allowing corporations and businesses to run domestic markets encourages capitalist expansion and exploitation of populations abroad. Capitalism is an untreated cancer--spreading from nation to nation, hell bent on overworking the poor and destroying the environment. Individual consumerism, such as veg(etari)anism, is closely linked to capitalist expansionism, because it

“depend[s] on the creation of new commodities, faster turnover of existing commodities, [and] new forms of product differentiation.” (Guthman, Julie. “Neoliberalism and the Making of Food Politics in California.” Geoforum, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 1171 - 1183, doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.09.002)

Capitalism is solely about increasing profits rather than encouraging ethical consumption. Capitalist expansion necessarily perpetuates degradation of ecosystems, exacerbates food deserts and water scarcity, and relies on overworking and underpaying less-privileged peoples abroad. Expansion of capitalism fueled by reckless individual consumption leads to, but is not limited to

“accelerated rates of climate change, air pollution, deforestation, soil degradation, and species loss.” (Soron, Dennis. “Sustainability, Self-Identity, and the Sociology of Consumption.” Sustainable Development, vol. 18, 2010, pp.172-181, doi:10.002/sd.457)

Products marketed as ethical, cruelty-free, sustainable--or any other buzzword--is not entirely representative of the production cycle. The cruelty may not have been exacted upon livestock farm animals, but the implications of the above consequences of market expansion are more widespread than what mainstream animal rights activists would like to admit.