3067. More Than 77 Percent of Earth's Land Has Been Modified By Human Industry

By Livia Albeck-Ripka, The New York Times, October 31, 2018

         Sunset on the Tapajós River, deep in the Amazon rain forest. 

         Credit: Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

MELBOURNE, Australia — Scientists are warning that if human beings continue to mine the world’s wildernesses for resources and convert them into cities and farms at the pace of the previous century, the planet’s few remaining wild places could disappear in decades.

Today, more than 77 percent of land on earth, excluding Antarctica, has been modified by human industry, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, up from just 15 percent a century ago.

The study, led by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, paints the first global picture of the threat to the world’s remaining wildernesses — and the image is bleak.

“We’re on a threshold where whole systems could collapse and the consequences of that would be catastrophic,” said James R. Allan, one of the study’s authors.

In the study, Mr. Allan and his colleagues urged the participants of a United Nations conference on biological diversity, scheduled for next month in Egypt, to protect all of the world’s remaining wilderness areas.

“We cannot afford to lose more,” he said. “We must save it in its entirety.”

The parts of the world most in need of protecting are in some of the largest and most powerful nations, the study found. More than 70 percent of wilderness areas can be found in Russia, Canada, Australia, the United States and Brazil.

Wilderness, the study’s authors said, is defined as an area not subject to direct human use.

These areas are the only places on earth that have natural levels of biodiversity, and can continue to sustain plant and animal species on an evolutionary time scale.

Moreover, these spots often act as the world’s lungs, storing carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.

“Wild areas provide a lot of life support systems for the planet. We’d lose those benefits and those ecosystems services, and the cost of having to replace that would be immense,” Mr. Allan said.

In 2016, the scientists mapped the world’s terrestrial wildernesses. This year, they did the same for the world’s oceans.

More of the oceans have been affected by human industry — including oil exploration, shipping and commercial fishing — than have the world’s land mass, the study found.

According to the study, “87 percent of the ocean has been modified by the direct effects of human activities.”

“This astonishing expansion of the aggressive human footprint is happening everywhere,” said William Laurance, a professor of environmental science at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, who was not involved in the study.

Dr. Laurance said that while he “wholeheartedly” agreed with the researchers’ message to policy experts, even more aggressive action was needed to stop global resource extraction and industrial expansion.

He warned that developing countries like Brazil and China are eager to catch up with more industrialized nations. Each step those countries take has a compounding effect on the environment: Developing mines also means building roads and refineries.

Healthy ecosystems are crucial in their own right for biodiversity and mitigating climate change, but more importantly, said the researchers, they are home for hundreds of millions of indigenous people, who rely on the wilderness to survive and thrive.

2748. Pebble Mine: “One More Indicator That We Are Undoubtedly the Dumbest Species on the Planet”

By Thomas Linzey, In These Times, November 8, 2017

Residents in southwestern Alaska have been fighting the Pebble Mine for decades. In October, on behalf of the extractive industry, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resurrected the ecologically insane proposal.   (Image: Jim Klug / savebristolbay.org)

Funny how projects that would be holocausts for Earth never seem to stay dead.

Look no further than the proposed Pebble Mine in southwestern Alaska's Bristol Bay. In 2002, after deposits of copper, gold, and molybdenum were confirmed to the tune of $300 billion, the dream of a huge open pit mine was born—with a proposal to remove 10 billion tons of rock, create two artificial lakes over four miles long, and construct a mine as deep as the Grand Canyon and as big as Manhattan.

During the Obama Administration, Alaskans and other groups successfully fought to get the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to declare the area off-limits to mining under a rarely-used provision of the Clean Water Act. The agency eventually declared that the mine would result in the “complete loss of fish habitat” due to the destruction of 22 miles of streams and more than six square miles of wetlands.

But it only took an hour after a meeting between President Trump’s EPA-head Scott Pruitt and the CEO of the Pebble Limited Partnership for Pruitt to reverse that determination. His decision now allows the permit application process to move forward.

Problem is, that part of Alaska is the last place in the world that a mine should be built. Fifty-six million sockeye salmon call Bristol Bay home—making it one of the last, great salmon fisheries on Earth. Nearly half of the world’s sockeye catch comes from this one region, supporting some 14,000 jobs, generating about $480 million annually, and feeding 4,000 year-old Alaska native communities.

Sockeye salmon swimming in Alaska's Bristol Bay. Note: their bodies only turn red when they reach their spawning grounds. When in the ocean, sockeye are a blue or silver color. (Image: Ben Knight / earthjustice.org)

Of course, it’s not just the Pebble Mine protections that are here today and gone tomorrow. Whether it’s uranium mining in central Virginia, coal shipping terminals in Washington, or federal land protections in the West, ecosystems and nature are just political footballs; always one election away from being trampled to death.

Enough Already

We treat the natural environment with less legal protections than we treat our own right to carry firearms. And that is just one more indicator that we are undoubtedly the dumbest species on the planet. While our very lives depend on clean air, clean water, and the sustenance provided by this planet, we continue to treat Earth as something that can be sold off to the highest bidder without consequence.

Enough already. The kind of change we need won’t come about because we “raise consciousness,” recycle more, take shorter showers or write more letters to Congress. We need a plain old revolution that elevates nature and ecosystems to the highest form of protection available under our law—that of rights. And we need to give up hope that the foxes in charge of the current henhouse will do anything to move in that direction.

Three dozen communities in the United States, including the City of Pittsburgh, have been leading the way—adopting local laws that recognize that ecosystems have rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and to be restored when damaged. Courts in India, Colombia, and Ecuador have held that rivers, glaciers and other ecosystems possess independently enforceable rights of their own. At least two countries have placed constitutional protections for nature directly into their national constitutions.

In the United States, with the help of those who care about the river, the Colorado River ecosystem recently sued the State of Colorado for the gross malfeasance of governance that has almost killed off the River.

Bring It On

Rivers with a right to flow? Yes. Forests with the right to exist? Absolutely. Wetlands with a right to do what wetlands do? Without a doubt. The climate with a right to exist without fossil fuel emissions? Bring it on.

Let’s dance. And let the naysayers explain why it’s okay somehow to continue to treat places like Bristol Bay as just another dumping ground. They’re the same idiots that defended slavery, denied women the right to vote and stopped African-Americans from voting. They’re the same venal morons who brought us “corporate rights,” “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” and “nuclear power: too cheap to meter.” They’ll say anything to anyone to continue to clutch at their avenues of wealth, control and power.

If now isn’t the time to have that fundamental battle to remove their cold dead hands from our sustainable future, then I think we’ve forgotten completely what battles are for.

Time to put our big boy pants on, and giddyup. Let’s go.

2050. Not Colonialists, and Not Nice Either: A Response to Eduardo Gudynas

By By Estefanía Martínez, Verónica Morales, Carla Simbaña, Japhy Wilson, Nora Fernández, Thomas Purcell y Jeremy Rayner (CENEDET), Pensamiento Crítico, October 14, 2015

David Harvey

In an article recently published on various critical political websites, Eduardo Gudynas accuses David Harvey of “a nice colonialism”. According to Gudynas, the presence of Harvey in Latin America, and the “trendiness” of his Marxist theoretical framework is providing ideological support for certain governments in the region. As an example, Gudynas refers to CENEDET, the research team led by Harvey in Ecuador. In this article, we respond by emphasizing the utility of Harvey’s work for critical thinking and anti-capitalist struggles in Latin America, in contrast to Gudynas’s superficial analyses of “extractivism.”

One of the most important aspects of Harvey’s thought is the concept of accumulation by dispossession, which has been extremely useful for social movements that condemn and resist the dispossession and displacement that have been forced on peoples throughout Latin America. We, therefore, find it disturbing that this concept should provide the focus for Gudynas’s critique of Harvey’s work.

Perhaps Gudynas senses that he is no longer as ‘trendy’ as he once was, and has chosen to respond by attacking a theory that better serves resistance movements opposed to so-called “extractivism”? In his article he argues that some Latin American governments critique “global capitalism” as a convenient means of concealing the reproduction of capitalist social relations within their national territories. But his own critique of Harvey as a supposedly “kind colonialist” reproduces the same tendency in the field of academic thought, blaming external forces for avoiding internal changes, and rejecting a powerful theory because of its origin in the “North”, in order to hide the weaknesses of his own theoretical framework.

Rather than speculating further upon his motives, it is necessary to clarify some basic errors in Gudynas’s presentation of the theory of accumulation by dispossession. Gudynas refers to this theory as a simple reproduction of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation – of the separation of the peasantry from the land that forms the basis of capitalist social relations. Harvey certainly takes inspiration from Marx in this regard, but his argument is that these processes of dispossession are much more widespread than Marx indicated, and that they cannot be relegated to the past but continue to be active in contemporary capitalism.

According to Harvey, there is a dialectical relation (a concept that Gudynas is apparently unable to grasp) between the expanded reproduction of capital through the production and accumulation of surplus value in the exploitation of labor power – and accumulation by dispossession based on the outright theft of use values and their transformation into exchange values through the process of commodification.

In the context of capitalist crises (dynamics that Gudynas is equally incapable of comprehending), in which expanded reproduction slows and economic growth becomes negative, accumulation by dispossession assumes increasing importance for capital. According to Harvey, the intensification of accumulation by dispossession in the era of neoliberalism is an expression of the crisis of expanded reproduction at a global level, underway since the 1970s.

For Gudynas this focus on the global level is a profound weakness that makes Harvey irrelevant to the analysis of the concrete realities of Latin America. It seems that Gudynas does not understand the importance of examining the relation between geographical scales, which is fundamental to the critique of a capitalist system that operates simultaneously on the local and global levels. It is precisely here that the utility of the concept of accumulation by dispossession lies – it allows us, for example, to connect the violent dispossession of an indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon with the over-accumulation of capital in China, instead of merely denouncing the event in abstract terms as a consequence of “extractivism”.

It turns out that descriptive and one-dimensional concepts such as “extractivism” and “neo-extractivism” are less useful than Marxian dialectics for critical thought and political action. It is for this reason, and not because of an alleged “mental colonialism”, that Latin American intellectuals and social movements are using Harvey’s concepts in place of Gudynas’s ideas.

In this respect, it is important to note that Gudynas’s own concept of extractivism is based on theories of “the Dutch disease” and “the resource curse”. These theories not only come from “the North” but are also derived from neoclassical economics; that is to say, from bourgeois thought. This is a far greater problem than a particular geographical origin when referring to a concept that has pretensions to being a useful tool in subaltern struggles.

Gudynas presents accumulation by dispossession as if it were the only thing that has crossed Harvey’s mind in his entire life. On the contrary, the concept is built on an immense theoretical base that offers a complex and coherent structure for thinking through the relationship between the accumulation of capital and the production and destruction of social space. Other examples of the application of his theoretical framework in Latin America include: rentier capitalism; infrastructural megaprojects; spatial utopias; entrepreneurial urbanism; the ecosystem of capital; and the demand for forms of property that prioritize use value over exchange value. (Gudynas claims that the concept of use value does not apply in Latin America, but indigenous communities dispossessed of their land and the possibility of reproducing their lives could offer him a very different perspective).

In this regard we invite readers to review the working papers that we have produced in our research center, which are based on heterodox readings of Marxism and combine the ideas of thinkers from Latin American and other latitudes in spaces not restricted to academia – such as our recent Summer Conference.

Our work demonstrates that Harvey’s framework provides a far more powerful critical approach than Gudynas’s ideas when it comes to thinking about actually-existing capitalism. In this regard, it is important to emphasize Gudynas’s complicity in trendy fantasies of a nice capitalism based on eco-tourism and “other knowledges,” by means of which he tries to defend “the rights of nature” without confronting the social relations of capital.

In the face of this impoverishment of critical thought, we propose a heterodox Marxism that is hostile to simplistic visions that propose false alternatives to the reality of capital. Against the nice capitalism and bourgeois colonialism of Eduardo Gudynas, we begin from Marx’s call for a “ruthless critique of everything that exists”.

2049. Friendly Colonialism and the ‘Harvey Fashion’

By Eduardo Gudynas, Entitle Blog, September 30, 2015

The Uruguayan political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas. Source: youtube.com

One of the most striking issues in the critiques of capitalism coming from Latin America are the continuous invocations of the English geographer David Harvey. References to the idea of “accumulation by dispossession” are repeated in hundreds of academic texts published by Latin Americans, and the author himself has been invited by the progressive governments of Ecuador and Bolivia.

Let us recall that Harvey proposed the idea of ” to replace Karl Marx’s concept of “original (or primitive) accumulation”. It refers to processes such as the commodification of land, expulsion of peasants, the transformation of labour into a commodity, colonialism or other aspects of the financialisation of economies.

They are attractive ideas which, without elaborating, many would share, and which in part explains the avalanche in citations of the term. Beyond that, however, I would like to explore other aspects of this “Harvey fashion” especially in South America, and the fact that the progressive governments of invite him and use his concepts to enhance their image as radicals. I am concerned about two issues.

The first is that this “fashion” ignores the rich history of Latin American reflections and takes us back into the hands of Northern thought. The second is that, while critiques such as Harvey’s can be shared, they are in any case insufficient for the Latin American reality. And it is precisely because of their incompleteness that progressive governments cite him and invite him.

A fashion

Let me explain, starting with the first point. The problem of accumulation by dispossession popularized by Harvey, as capitalist appropriation of natural resources or labour, in its basic ideas is not new. In Latin America we have a long and sad history of massive appropriation of our resources and of dispossession of indigenous people and peasants to enrich corporations and governments in other continents.

We also have many thinkers, activists and academics who, in their own way, in the last century at least have essentially supported these ideas. To give a few examples that come to mind, the reflections proposed decades ago by Mario Arrubla in Colombia, René Zavaleta Mercado in Bolivia, Ruy Mauro Marini from Brazil and Fernando Velasco Abad from Ecuador. Regardless of the positions one may have today regarding these and other authors, my point is that there is a very rich library of Latin Americans which is neglected time and again.

All this leads me to point out that, irrespective of whether one agrees or not with specific aspects of the theory of accumulation by dispossession, it would seem at times that this fashion is a new symptom of intellectual colonialism, whereby many prefer to quote an English author, leaving aside the recovery of our Latin American intellectual references. This may have to do with the academic obsession embraced in Latin America to cite texts in English or publications in Northern journals, as a demonstration of scientific expertise.

We are not facing a problem with Harvey, but rather a limitation in us Latin Americans. It is a friendly colonialism. It is friendly because the idea of a critique of global capitalism is attractive, but what goes unnoticed for this reason is that this is a form of colonialism, since we all draw upon, copy, repeat or seek the legitimation which irradiates from the “North”.

Four shortcomings

My second point does have to do with the emphasis of Harvey’s analysis. I insist that many of his theses can be shared, as they offer a valuable tool for understanding global capitalism. But the key issue to consider is whether these contributions are sufficient to understand what happens in Latin America, in our continent, and at this exact moment, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here I find four important limitations.

The first one is that the approaches of the British geographer are primarily at a high level of abstraction, very focused on the dynamics of planetary capitalism. There are local and national examples, but there is no in-depth analysis of the forms of capitalist organisation typical of Latin America. His studies are so abstract that they allow a radical critique of capitalism as a global phenomenon but do not require analysing the details of national or Latin American contexts. This is not a minor limitation, since Latin America is inserted into globalization primarily through its extractive exports, and that kind of specificity does not appear clearly in Harvey. The geographer’s emphasis is on much larger scales. Couldn’t this be one of the reasons why he is cited and invited by progressive governments?

Because many progressives do just that, they challenge international capitalism but without taking on the contradictions internal to capitalism itself, or they attack imperialism but are almost silent on the internal colonialism they impose on peasants and indigenous peoples. Harvey’s texts fit perfectly with this duality, allowing global critiques (with the symbolic advantages of his Marxist language), without requiring much on national predicaments. This is a duality that has not gone unnoticed at conferences by the geographer in Quito or La Paz.

A second problem is the limited attention that Harvey pays to the ecological dimension. There is a no local Nature, rooted in territories, but rather an abstract consideration of the environment. This is not surprising because this author has had many problems in considering the environmental dimension (for instance, he distrusts ecological limits to economic growth). But if we want to carry out a Latin American critique of capitalism, we must necessarily incorporate an ecological dimension, involving the role of natural resources as well as concepts such as Pacha Mama, ayllu or life-territories. The distinctive ecological features of our region are not found anywhere else. In addition, its principal developmentalist strategies rest on a massive extraction of natural resources, and therefore any analysis will be incomplete if these aspects are not considered.

Again I wonder if this limitation is not one of the reasons why progressive governments endorse Harvey, since it offers the possibility of radical discourse against capitalism but without addressing local ecological destruction, territorialized in each country. It is a very attractive theoretical crutch for a government that wants to criticise, for example, the transnational nature of corporations, without saying anything about their role in generating negative social and environmental impacts associated with resource extraction in their own countries. (As a warning to the reader, it must be recognised that in one of his visits to Quito, Harvey symbolically signed a petition by Yasunidos to request a public consultation for oil exploitation in the area of Yasuni, in the Ecuadorian Amazon).

A third point concerns the fact that Harvey pays little to no attention to the indigenous world. His discourse is committed to popular sectors, such as in cities in the northern hemisphere, but the knowledge and visions of indigenous people are almost nonexistent. It is a viewpoint informed by western and modern knowledge. I cannot find a place for the Ecuadorian sumak kawsay or the Bolivian suma qamaña in Harvey’s texts. A key reason is that the ways of understanding the concept of value are very different in this author and in the framework of Buen Vivir. Once again this offers a good reason for progressive governments’ invitations because his ideas allow for a critique of capitalism while avoiding indigenous demands. International financialization and power asymmetries in relation to capital can be treated at length without having to consider indigenous voices. This is also an untenable position for the Latin American context.

My last point is that alternatives to capitalism are given very limited space in Harvey. He seems to fall into pessimism, in suggesting that the only solution would be to move from exchange value to use value. This is very similar to the discourse of various rulers who say, for example, that they must remain extractivist because there are no alternatives to global capitalism. It is quite understandable that Harvey would find in Latin American progressive governments a step towards the alternatives he seems to hope for, given that they certainly have positive aspects compared to the conservatism of the governments he has known for decades in Europe and the United States. But that’s not enough for Latin America, since we now have different references for comparison. Here again, I cannot help to note the convenience for rulers to cite Harvey, since the alternatives he proposes are so abstract and distant in time that they can be embraced while continuing to negotiate with contemporary capitalism.

Nor should it be forgotten that in the continent there are civic organisations and reflections which explore much more substantial alternatives, not concerned exclusively with use value. The clearest example is the rights of Nature in Ecuador’s Constitution, which start from a recognition of Nature as a subject, and therefore with its own values. Here there is a huge theoretical gap in Harvey’s gaze, which many pretend not to see. For in Harvey’s classical Marxism there is value only in humans and their work, and therefore there is no room for the rights of Nature.

Recover our own thinking

As it can be seen from this brief review, the work of Harvey is good to discuss global capitalism, but it does not require addressing social, environmental or economic impacts within each country, or a dialogue with indigenous knowledge. It is very useful to understand the workings of Wall Street, but it misses what happens in our Amazon. Is comfortable for academics and progressive governments to quote Harvey (and something analogous happens with Tony Negri), as it allows them to adopt anti-capitalist discourses while skipping prickly issues such as the contradictions of the capital within the country. It is a type of analysis which allows them to avoid almost all thorny issues regarding their development strategies.

As I said above, this is not a problem with these authors; rather, we face limitations and contradictions in the creation of a thought that is specifically Latin American. We, Latin Americans, must carry this discussion forward, and not wait for Harvey, Negri or others to stimulate it. This does not mean they should be ignored, since in their writings there are many worthy and useful lessons which can contribute to our own debate. But this task should essentially be in our hands.

The problem with the abuse of the “Harvey fashion” is that such theoretical positions are friendly, and thus it is difficult for us to recognise their limitations. It is a weakness which is exploited precisely by those who want to silence debates about national contradictions or those who abuse academic power in order to limit reflections. This trend also reinforces a colonialism which searches in the “academic north” legitimisation and truths. In this way we hold onto a colonialism that hinders our own thinking and the possibility of exploring substantive alternatives.

To break this colonial fence, a critical look from a Latin American standpoint must always be anchored in national and local circumstances (it must be grounded), it must pay attention to the environmental implications (it must be ecological), it must necessarily incorporate and dialogue with indigenous peoples (it must be intercultural), and it must illuminate ideas and practices around alternatives to development (it must break the fence of Modernity).

*Eduardo Gudynas is a researcher of the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology (CLAES), Montevideo. Twitter: @EGudynas. This piece was republished with the author’s permission from rebelión.org. Translation by Diego Andreucci and Melissa García Lamarca.