Re: <nettime> Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism - (...always) look on the bright (regenerative) side...?

[jan hendrik brueggemeier <jan@neture.org>]

hi everyone

interesting conversation indeed, apologies for being late to the party.
thanks, martin, for sharing these references.

On the note of bright regenerative side I just thought share David
Holmgren's latest post, who is one of Australia's leading perma culture
guru or "permis".

It is a rather long essay (11 pages or so) but I found it highly
fascinating as it on one hand recaps core principles but still ends up
in his personal conclusion to be anti vaccine (which from a sub-cultural
perspective may not be surprising)...

If there would be an archetype for the "free thinker" David would be
meet that to a t, but it does make me wonder about necessary framing of
such "free critical enquiry" due social obligations or not ...

https://holmgren.com.au/writing/pandemic-brooding/ ;

It would be great to hear other people's thoughts on this.

I also intrigued by martin's point of projecting depression, but I
suppose that's maybe better reserved for another thread ...

cheers,
jan

On 6/9/21 7:40 pm, martin wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Interesting conversation...
>
> On 05/09/2021 18:31, John Hopkins wrote:
>
> I am very sorry to hear about your ailments and wish you all the best.
>
> Then,
> -- though I admittedly can sometimes also be caught in a moment of
> weakness and despair where I forget myself and utter statements with a
> dim, negative view of humanity
>
>  -- this, to my mind:
>
>> Humans have always had an oversized impact on local energy flows around
>> them (i.e., Pleistocene megafauna destruction)
>
> .... is a dangerous fallacy of thought.
>
> It expresses a sad, self-defeating view (see footnote 1 and 2; and with
> regards to the speculative hypothesis of megafauna extinction see
> footnote 3).
>
> Importantly there are historical examples as well as contemporary
> movements, praxis and data testifying to quite the opposite: Complex
> human societies have had / can have a positive impact on the
> environment, enrich their habitat and increase biodiversity (see
> footnote 4).
>
> Whether in the form of Amazonian Dark Earths, regenerative agriculture,
> permaculture or other expressions of the human imagination from 'the
> other side of the anthropocene', human beings have the capacity to leave
> the world in 'a nicer state' tomorrow than it was yesterday. Not through
> quick technofixes nor dirty hacks, but through building cultural
> alliances with all the other beings in the complex web of life that
> sustains us - from soil ecologies and their microbes, insects and other
> beasts, through plants, trees and rivers to other mammals and everything
> in between.
>
> Indeed, transformative agroecology (see footnote 5) combined with
> regenerative agriculture possibly constitute the only reasonable,
> significant set of carbon sequestration (carbon negative) techniques
> available (see footnote 6) and has the useful side-effect of feeding
> humanity, regenerating immune systems and, all in all, delivering a
> healthy planet.
>
> It has been done, it can be done. It will be done if we all work towards
> it. War is over if you want it, extractive/dominator culture can end.
>
> It is, imho, worse than a waste of time to go on about all the examples
> of destructive human behaviour, rather than focusing on the hope- and
> joy-providing opposite.
>
> Shifting the discourse to the endless possibilities of
> more-than-sustainable social organisation will feed grassroots power
> structures and undermine totalitarian attitudes.
>
> The future is ours, because this land is ours in common.
>
> sincerely/martin
>
> ---------------------------
>
> Footnote 1: Sad because it sounds like depression projected, and sad
> because it feeds the power and agency of those who are into population
> control and the concomitant necessity of global rule from above; and of
> course it also helps push the corporate, hi-tech progress myth-based
> geoengineering fantasies that perpetuate the causes of the effects they
> purport to solve (/as Kolbert notes in 'Under a White Sky' on that
> issue, this is “..a book about people trying to solve problems created
> by people trying to solve problems”-
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/06/it-is-the-question-of-the-century-will-tech-solve-the-climate-crisis-or-make-it-worse
> ).
>
> Extractor/dominator culture probably needs this "bad humans" assumption
> to remain in place as a baseline of reality to justify their elitist
> model of society.
>
> ------
>
> Footnote 2: On the population number "argument": the total fertility
> rate has peaked and the next challenge is likely how to manage
> increasingly smaller and older populations suffering from auto-immune
> conditions and cancer, resulting from poor diet, lack of movement, and
> the ubiquity of toxic air and drinking water. Please don't feed the
> Malthusian trolls.
> ------
>
> Footnote 3: Invoking the speculative megafauna human-driven extinction
> hypothesis rests on just that: speculation, and it also has potential
> overtones of human self-aggrandisement and belittling of the large
> beasts; see for instance Brook and Bowman (2002) and Hocknull et al. (2020):
>
> Brook and Bowman (2002): "...Understanding of the Pleistocene megafaunal
> extinctions has been advanced recently by the application of simulation
> models and new developments in geochronological dating. Together these
> have been used to posit a rapid demise of megafauna due to over-hunting
> by invading humans. However, we demonstrate that the results of these
> extinction models are highly sensitive to implicit assumptions
> concerning the degree of prey naivety to human hunters. In addition, we
> show that in Greater Australia, where the extinctions occurred well
> before the end of the last Ice Age (unlike the North American
> situation), estimates of the duration of coexistence between humans and
> megafauna remain imprecise. Contrary to recent claims, the existing data
> do not prove the “blitzkrieg” model of overkill..." - from:
>
> https://www.pnas.org/content/99/23/14624
>
> Hocknull et al. (2020): "...Explanations for the Upper Pleistocene
> extinction of megafauna from Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) remain
> unresolved. Extinction hypotheses have advanced climate or human-driven
> scenarios, in spite of over three quarters of Sahul lacking reliable
> biogeographic or chronologic data. Here we present new megafauna from
> north-eastern Australia that suffered extinction sometime after 40,100
> (±1700) years ago. Megafauna fossils preserved alongside leaves, seeds,
> pollen and insects, indicate a sclerophyllous forest with heathy
> understorey that was home to aquatic and terrestrial carnivorous
> reptiles and megaherbivores, including the world’s largest kangaroo.
> Megafauna species diversity is greater compared to southern sites of
> similar age, which is contrary to expectations if extinctions followed
> proposed migration routes for people across Sahul. Our results do not
> support rapid or synchronous human-mediated continental-wide extinction,
> or the proposed timing of peak extinction events. Instead, megafauna
> extinctions coincide with regionally staggered spatio-temporal
> deterioration in hydroclimate coupled with sustained environmental
> change..." - from:
>
> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15785-w.pdf?origin=ppub
>
> --------------------
>
> Footnote 4: Maezumi et al.: 'The legacy of 4,500 years of polyculture
> agroforestry in the eastern Amazon' /
> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-018-0205-y . See also the work of
> Michael Heckenberger, for instance, introduced lightly here:
> https://news.mongabay.com/2008/08/pre-colombian-amazonians-lived-in-sustainable-urban-society/
>
>
> These lines of argument are slowly taking hold, see also:
>
> Buscardo, E., Forkuor, G., Rubino, A. et al.: 'Land and people'. Commun
> Earth Environ 2, 178 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00240-5
> - who write:
>
> "...Amazonian Dark Earths (terra preta) and European Dark Earths
> (plaggen soils) are fairly well known, but many less well-known types of
> anthropogenic soils are now being documented in the tropics and
> subtropics3,4. Conversely, ancient mining and smelting activities
> produced concentrations of heavy metals toxic to plant and animal life,
> in some cases even more severe than modern soil contamination5,6.
> Ancient human societies have had a wide range of impacts on the
> environment that can persist through to the present day...
>
> ..Looking forward, more work is needed to share and standardize
> geochemical and other proxy data that may be fundamental for answering
> questions of where, when and how people in the past influenced their
> environment. Understanding the global distribution of anthropogenic
> soils and paleo-pollution will not only help place the rate of soil
> degradation seen in the Anthropocene within a deeper historical context,
> but perhaps, optimistically, reveal the fundamental role that human
> societies have played in building healthier soils throughout much of the
> Holocene. By sharing data and developing global research agendas, the
> paleoenvironmental community at large has the exciting opportunity to
> reveal the widespread legacy of premodern human–environmental
> interactions and increase the general awareness of the long-lasting
> ecological legacy of ancient societies.
>
> -------------------
>
> Footnote 5: Entry in ‘Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology’ on
> ‘Agroecology’
>
> https://oxfordre.com/anthropology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.001.0001/acrefore-9780190854584-e-298
>
> https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.298
>
> ---------------
>
> ---- Footnote 6: Easy intro to the work of David Montgmery:
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/02/desertification-barren-solution-famine-agriculture
>

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