AMAZON AND ON AND ON (OR NOT)

If you could get through the news of the Amazon fires without several dozen “oh people were so freaked out about Notre Dame burning but the Amazon fires have barely made the news” hot takes, congratulations, because those takes were awful and self-satisfied. (And wrong, incidentally. The Amazon fires weren’t really news previously because A) their cause had been purposely obscured and B) natural fires in the Amazon aren’t quite so uncommon that they are immediately news unless they go on for a while, as the current fires have done.) In any event the news of the fires spread and people got alarmed, and rightly so because once you get past the “lungs of the planet” meme, the simple truth is that due to overclearing the Amazon is dangerously close to entering a feedback spiral where it starts to self-dry out (because rainforests are rainforests in large part because of volume - trees evaporate water vapour into the air as part of the photosynthesis process, so rainforests literally create rain) and turn into savannah. Which would be very bad! Because all of the rain that the Amazon creates doesn’t fall on the Amazon - a fair amount of it travels north on wind currents and falls in Mexico and the United States.

But, anyway, the fires are news now, partly because we’re all a lot more sensitive to the idea of tipping points in the fight - such as it is - against climate change, and partly because this bit of news illustrates the massive political problems of simply coordinating an international response to climate change in the face of individual recalcitrance. Or, to put it another way: there’s the age-old adage about it being impossible to get somebody to understand something when their livelihood is dependant on not understanding the thing. What happens when that goes to the level of nations?

Because, as grimly amusing as it is to make fun of Jair Bolsonaro for insisting that the Amazon rainforest fires were actually started by evil hippies who want to make him look bad - the excuse of every dime-bag shit authoritarian out there when they get caught being shit - those fires didn’t get started for no reason. They got started to clear land, because Brazil wants to make as much money as possible in agriculture and agriculture needs open land and Brazil doesn’t have enough of it unless it burns rainforest down. (This isn’t about food security, by the way. It’s never about food security - the majority of countries are net food exporters, and Brazil is not an exception.) Now, the average Jordao or Julinha Brazilian probably doesn’t have a deep stake in burning down the rainforest so Brazil can sell more soybeans around the world (Brazil has a service and manufacturing based economy anyway so their economy hardly hinges on this), but the agricultural oligarchs paying for all that rainforest to get smoked certainly do, and they’re the ones who backed Bolsonaro.

How do you achieve international structural change when whole countries, big ones, actively oppose any sort of change like that happening? I am not posing a rhetorical question here. This is the big question of the next twenty years if we want the twenty after them to be, like, survivable, and I do not have good answers, and my imagination unfortunately usually concludes that there’s going to end up being some wars fought over this.

(Aside: a few economists, over the past week, have argued that Donald Trump’s trade war with China has partly contributed to this problem. The working theory here is that when Trump announced tariffs on China because he’s a trade protectionist who understands little to nothing about international economics or trade, one of China’s retaliatory measures was to stop buying American soybeans. But China needs soybeans, so they started buying up Brazilian soybeans, which meant that the Brazilian agriculture industry saw opportunity, and the next thing you know, the Amazon is burning down. Which means the “Donald Trump will get us all killed” people were probably right.)

GEE, SEVEN AGAIN

The G7 summit is ongoing, which is a problem because Donald Trump is there and unlike at the G20 - where there are a lot more people and countries, because, and you may be shocked to hear this, twenty is more than seven - the G7’s small membership means that you can’t just do the diplomacy version of elbowing your neighbor and say “look, me and Japan and South Africa, we’re gonna go out on the balcony and talk about Pacific trade routes, don’t let Donald know or the stupid asshole will come in and start yelling about how we should nuke hurricanes, just wait a couple minutes after we’ve left so it looks natural.” No, at the G7 you pretty much have to engage with Donald Trump, and that means listening to Trump complain that all the rest of the countries want to talk about climate change and climate change is so boring you guys, and also why don’t we let Russia back in and call it the G8 again? (This is very much what is actually happening as reported by multiple news outlets.)

Anyway, it’s bad enough that Boris Johnson, of all people, is making warning noises about how if Trump continues his multiple trade wars there will be a global recession (which is possible) and that everybody will blame Trump for that (extremely likely regardless of whatever else happens because Trump is globally unpopular on a scale that comparatively makes George W. Bush look like Mahatma Gandhi). “When Boris Johnson is right about anything, at least consider the possibility that you are wrong about everything” is a maxim that should be spread wider for circumstances exactly like these.

ITALIAN POLITICS (INSERT JOKE ABOUT PIZZA)

Trump’s only support at the G7 thus far (such as it has been) has come from Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister. Or, rather, he was Italy’s prime minister, because as of Tuesday he won’t be prime minister any more.

I’ve written about the current state of Italian politics here previously in brief while discussing other things, but here is the slightly longer but still relatively short version: the most important force in Italian politics is the Five Star Movement, which was started by Beppo Grillo, a comedian who initially proclaimed himself above politics until he decided he sort of liked politics after all, although he sort of cooled off on it the moment it started being serious work and let someone else be leader. The Five Star Movement is weirdly populist - it’s firmly environmentalist and pro-social welfare, but it’s also vociferously anti-immigrant/anti-refugee and EU-skeptic. The Movement rejects traditional political labels, but on the other hand every political movement says “we’re not about labels, maaaaaan” so whatever, it’s a big-government anti-elitist nationalist party more than it is anything else.

In 2018, the three most important parties in Italy were the Movement, the Democratic Party (AKA the Partito Democratico or “PD”, your typical Euro-friendly center-lefties and the incumbent government) and the Northern League (now simply called the “League”), a hardcore right-wing nationalist party led by a cheery chucklefuck named Matteo Salvini who is exactly what you would expect a right-wing nationalist to sound like. (There are of course a bunch of other parties, but most of them are just allied with either the PD or the League.) The Democrats had tried to appease Italian anti-immigrant sentiment by allying with the League and cracking down on refugees, but it didn’t work and they lost the 2018 election, with the Movement getting the most seats of any party and the League’s coalition getting more than them. Because Italian politics get stupidly complicated sometimes, the end result was a new coalition government between the Movement and the League, with an independent member of parliament - Conte - acting as Prime Minister. (This is not unlike a Canadian election where neither Justin Trudeau or Andrew Scheer get enough seats to become Prime Minister, so they team up to form a government where Drake becomes the PM for some reason.)

Anyhow, Conte has been in charge for about a year and change and the League has been gaining in opinion polling, and Salvini has been pretty obvious about wanting to be in charge, so he withdrew the League from Conte’s government in an attempt to force an election via a non-confidence vote. (The question of why anybody at all is surprised by this when this is exactly what Salvini tried to make happen previously is one worth asking.) Conte, in response, resigned - which gives the Movement, as the largest party in parliament, the opportunity to form a new government. So of course they’re now talking with the PD because the Five Stars and the PD together would have a slight majority in both houses of Italy’s government, and give them a few more years for Salvini’s popularity to cool off.

Of course, this being Italian politics, there’s no guarantee at all that this obviously logical thing happens and there is a non-zero chance that Roberto Benigni ends up being Prime Minister next week.

THE CURRENT SHITTY THING HAPPENING IN INDIA

There’s a law in India called the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, usually just called either the Forest Right Act or the Tribal Land Act. The basic principle of the act is that about one-tenth of the people living in India are members of indigenous tribes who live in and around forests which are, legally speaking, public land, but realistically have never been treated as public land. The Forest Rights Act was a well-intentioned effort by the then-in-charge Indian National Congress party to try and ensure that forest tribes wouldn’t get kicked out of the forests they lived in by giving them rights to the land.

The problem is that the law is flawed, in that it requires people who want land rights to prove that they’ve been living in or around the forests for three generations. This is difficult, mostly because a lot of these people don’t have any official documentation proving that they’ve been living in the forest for centuries, and even unofficial documentation is difficult to come by. (There are other similar problems with the law as well.) Previously, the government was willing to work with these indigenous people, letting them appeal decisions that went against them in a generous and reasonably friendly manner, because the INC, for all of their flaws, really did seem to want this legislation to work.

Unfortunately, Narendra Modi’s BJP is a whole different ball of wax, and back in February the Indian government ordered those states with forest peoples to start evicting those forest peoples whose claims have been denied from the forests (about 20% of all claims). We’re talking millions of people, most of whom are very poor. The states who were ordered to undertake these evictions started suing to be able to refuse, because it’s easy to say “evict a million people” to somebody else when it’s not your problem as to what happens to those people who all still live in your state that you run.

Over the past couple of weeks, the states have brought evidence showing that as many as 1.3 million claims were rejected without following due process, which should surprise nobody because A) the process was flawed in the first place and B) when you have a flawed process it becomes much easier to abuse and C) the BJP are a Hindu nationalist party who aren’t really interested in indigenous rights. This story is essentially an unfortunate lesson: when you’re writing laws, put in the due diligence to make sure they work properly, because shitty people might be the ones enforcing them in the future.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

The Farewell (2019, Lulu Wang, theatre) - 5/5

The French Connection (1971, William Friedkin, TV) - 4.5/5

A while back I dropped ten dollars on a Humble Bundle full of the Transformers comics IDW published over the past decade, and I have finally gotten around to reading them, and the hype was mostly pretty justified - there’s a lot of really smart sci-fi writing going on here about these robots what turn into cars and whatnot, exploring ideas like how romantic relationships work in a non-sexual society, or how gender can be adopted, or how societal strati can be created from basically nothing. It’s fascinating, and as characters grow and evolve over a decade’s worth of comics it’s interesting to see them change positions and stances based on character rather than the demands of plot. Occasionally the art is a bit confusing (a lot of the giant robots look kinda alike) but mostly you can get past that.

See you in seven.