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Hard to explain how fucked it is that we've let society centralise power to such a degree that the people who poison land (and thus people) are somehow able to escape the intergenerational effects themselves. Why? They never worked with the stuff. Cowards with no skin in the game
Guess I'm just buzzing out on how the whole 'connection to the land' image of farming sold/told to me by pākehā nz is in fact riddled with the same life-destorying approach as the colonisation of which it is but / the same : stolen land, damaged lives; hypocrisy & dishonour
Is this too harsh a read? Herbert Guthrie-Smith (1921): “Have I then, for sixty years desecrated God’s earth and dubbed it improvement?”
What's different now? Fucked river, soil loss, dioxin-poisoning generations exposed to chemical warfare: the hate of this earth, made extreme
What's different now? Fucked river, soil loss, dioxin-poisoning generations exposed to chemical warfare: the hate of this earth, made extreme
Conservation does some amazing work in nz, but the level of unaccountable power wielded by industrial farming is cooked - how else to explain them getting away with the destruction that they have? U can claim to love the land all u want, but action speaks louder than talk.
[this Mike Joy-adjacent rant brought to you by Let Us Spray, a TV3 special from 2006 on the legacy of Ivan Watkins Dow's use of the pesticides 245T/24D....all over the country]
The most fucked bit is that they were doing it to spray gorse which is literally the best plant to be where it emerges / because those are the conditions it evolved for: scorched earth, laid bare - its growth fast & nourishing, adding n2, sheltering the returning forest beneath
Hard not to sound 'conspiracy' / so well have those narratives been deployed to obfuscate and delegitimise genuine attacks on otherwise unaccountable accumulations of power - monoculture comes in many forms: this one exploits to make a buck, must be stopped.
Prompted by @dougald @leashless @jembendell &co / I've been thinking on what it *means* to know about our social & ecological crises, about the horrors & abuse on which modernity relies, & what it mean to understand it as a mirror of colonisation, entwined https://thegreathumbling.libsyn.com/
Mignolo (2009): "The basic thesis...‘modernity’ is a European narrative that hides its darker side, ‘coloniality’. Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity – there is no modernity without coloniality." https://monoskop.org/images/a/a6/Mignolo_Walter_2009_Coloniality_The_Darker_Side_of_Modernity.pdf
Respect for difference demands an approach of diversity, no single solution alone, but many, each lived on their own accountable terms – this is the essence of the Zapatista claim 'one no, many yeses' - rejection of the global monoculture via culture lived in & of your own place.
Many places to act, but I keep coming back to law - the need for regulation on a level equivalent to the scale of the harm. National companies require national regulation. NZ needs a law for ecocide, but the critical pressure is lacking. How else to hold polluters to account?
My research interest is small groups, but reading @David_S_Wilson has made me consider the interplay between nested groups, and the ways in which groups can & must link up to deal with threats of equivalent size – while still preserving autonomy in other spheres #polycentricity
I understand how small groups can be powerful agents of change, but still find it difficult to imagine what it would look like for our world to be organised in such a bottom up manner, and yet, all evidence suggests that for much of our history it was https://eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
This is (my sense of) the crisis of imagination @robintransition talks about, and the cause for both Mexico City & Bologna having some form of a "Ministry of Imagination" - how different might our lives actually be? https://www.robhopkins.net/2018/10/03/gabriella-gomez-mont-imagination-is-not-a-luxury/
