July 14, 2019, 12:18 a.m.
Gnamma #28 - "Keep Your Ugly Fucking Goldbricking Ass Out Of My Beach Community"
Gnamma
I saw this tweet on are.na and it got me stewing. I basically want to pull out some of the thoughts that Christine started on.
I am firstly concerned that, increasingly, top-down initiatives for protecting ecosystems will double as arguments supporting keeping out populations seen as the other—probably, those typically disadvantaged. I have not yet seen something explicit, but I can imagine a news piece about how the US-Mexico would help keep crowds out of our precious national parks or something similarly inane. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing touches on a case of this in The Mushroom At The End of the World, where the white, State of Jefferson-esque mushroom pickers of the Oregon coast ranges feel animosity towards the Southeast Asian immigrant pickers because they are perceived to not treat the forest as they "should", even when it seems the white pickers are more careless with their waste and not suffering the flight from persecution or military rule.
There are some regions on earth where it is, in a broad sense, more efficient to have hubs of civilization. Places proximate to fertile land, building materials, and water; places with reasonable climates and not too many natural disasters. This is some of the argument for re-wilding large swaths of land—emptying them of humans to restore ecological function. Re-wilding is grounded in the Poppers' "Buffalo Commons" (to empty out the American plains) and EO Wilson's "Half Earth". (More info in these two channels.) Ideas about where people should be on earth, however, are intractable because of powerful and important cultural narratives (some peaceful, some violent): senses of homeland, holy land, ancestral heritage, or destiny in-place. To say that the Great Plains need to be fully evacuated would be a technocratic wiping-out of plains cultures. (Could a softer rewilding be effective and responsible? Yea—I think so. More on that some other week.)
I remember finding an online post a while back that went like this: to keep home energy use for heating and cooling low, we should just cram as many people as possible into the Bay Area because of its natural air-conditioning. (The same would go for any Mediterranean-climate locale.) The Bay Area is a sublime natural harbor, proximal to the Central Valley (good farmland if you truck in water from the Sierras), and adjacent to timber. The biggest high-risk natural hazards are fires (manageable) and earthquakes (rare). The perfect geographic location, however, does not magically neutralize urbanization's own set of obvious difficulties: densification versus NIMBYism, dissolution of pockets of cultural activity, and meeting the demand for housing.
Just to complicate things further, the Bay, before huge population booms and the use of concrete, was an enormous wetland. Between 1850 and 2000, 2/3rds of wetlands in the Bay were drained or disconnected from the estuary via development. But we could use as much of that back as possible: wetlands are great long-term carbon sinks, very productive ecosystems, and natural barriers against sea level rise and nuisance flooding. Carefully considering how much of the space in this constrained geography should should be wetlands, port infrastructure, high-density housing, or otherwise, becomes a very tough arithmetic.
Climate migration may be driven by a range of reasons: individual choice, fleeing poor conditions for healthier or more stable climates, push out of an otherwise functioning place because of regional environmental strife. We may start seeing more legal pressures to move into more efficient urban environments in the spirit of rewilding. Where will migrants be allowed to go? Able to go? It is hard to imagine a form of environmental conservation that does not involve drawing a boundary line—between the city and the wild, between restricted and acceptable behavior, or between one group of people and another. Making decisions around where people should ("should") live is an obvious lever to enforce control over what kind of lifestyles and what kind of people are deemed acceptable: redlining.
Conversation further down this topic quickly gets into population and immigration control. (See the Sierra Club's history of opinion on immigration!) I'm not yet ready to dive into such, but I can see how the social landscape of self-professed environmentalists will fracture further across political categories. Environmental conservation is just another topic that can be used to leverage a variety of social agendas.
Preparing for nobody,
Lukas
I am firstly concerned that, increasingly, top-down initiatives for protecting ecosystems will double as arguments supporting keeping out populations seen as the other—probably, those typically disadvantaged. I have not yet seen something explicit, but I can imagine a news piece about how the US-Mexico would help keep crowds out of our precious national parks or something similarly inane. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing touches on a case of this in The Mushroom At The End of the World, where the white, State of Jefferson-esque mushroom pickers of the Oregon coast ranges feel animosity towards the Southeast Asian immigrant pickers because they are perceived to not treat the forest as they "should", even when it seems the white pickers are more careless with their waste and not suffering the flight from persecution or military rule.
There are some regions on earth where it is, in a broad sense, more efficient to have hubs of civilization. Places proximate to fertile land, building materials, and water; places with reasonable climates and not too many natural disasters. This is some of the argument for re-wilding large swaths of land—emptying them of humans to restore ecological function. Re-wilding is grounded in the Poppers' "Buffalo Commons" (to empty out the American plains) and EO Wilson's "Half Earth". (More info in these two channels.) Ideas about where people should be on earth, however, are intractable because of powerful and important cultural narratives (some peaceful, some violent): senses of homeland, holy land, ancestral heritage, or destiny in-place. To say that the Great Plains need to be fully evacuated would be a technocratic wiping-out of plains cultures. (Could a softer rewilding be effective and responsible? Yea—I think so. More on that some other week.)
I remember finding an online post a while back that went like this: to keep home energy use for heating and cooling low, we should just cram as many people as possible into the Bay Area because of its natural air-conditioning. (The same would go for any Mediterranean-climate locale.) The Bay Area is a sublime natural harbor, proximal to the Central Valley (good farmland if you truck in water from the Sierras), and adjacent to timber. The biggest high-risk natural hazards are fires (manageable) and earthquakes (rare). The perfect geographic location, however, does not magically neutralize urbanization's own set of obvious difficulties: densification versus NIMBYism, dissolution of pockets of cultural activity, and meeting the demand for housing.
Just to complicate things further, the Bay, before huge population booms and the use of concrete, was an enormous wetland. Between 1850 and 2000, 2/3rds of wetlands in the Bay were drained or disconnected from the estuary via development. But we could use as much of that back as possible: wetlands are great long-term carbon sinks, very productive ecosystems, and natural barriers against sea level rise and nuisance flooding. Carefully considering how much of the space in this constrained geography should should be wetlands, port infrastructure, high-density housing, or otherwise, becomes a very tough arithmetic.
Climate migration may be driven by a range of reasons: individual choice, fleeing poor conditions for healthier or more stable climates, push out of an otherwise functioning place because of regional environmental strife. We may start seeing more legal pressures to move into more efficient urban environments in the spirit of rewilding. Where will migrants be allowed to go? Able to go? It is hard to imagine a form of environmental conservation that does not involve drawing a boundary line—between the city and the wild, between restricted and acceptable behavior, or between one group of people and another. Making decisions around where people should ("should") live is an obvious lever to enforce control over what kind of lifestyles and what kind of people are deemed acceptable: redlining.
Conversation further down this topic quickly gets into population and immigration control. (See the Sierra Club's history of opinion on immigration!) I'm not yet ready to dive into such, but I can see how the social landscape of self-professed environmentalists will fracture further across political categories. Environmental conservation is just another topic that can be used to leverage a variety of social agendas.
Preparing for nobody,
Lukas