The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatization. The Robin Hood myths capture the essence of its concerns (and it is not too surprising that the popular TV series of the 1950s, "The Adventures of Robin Hood," was written anonymously by Hollywood screenwriters blacklisted for leftist convictions). By the seventeenth century, however, this Charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality.previously, viz. "The story of the extraction of natural resources and limiting indigenous people's access to land is repeated around the world... The indigenous voice from the jungle invokes the Magna Carta not only to assert the familiar protections against state power associated with constitutional democracies, but the right to common resources as well."
With the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized, a category that continues to shrink to virtual invisibility.
Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature–but they had their thumbs on the scale.Native American slash-and-burn agricultural practice radically transformed the entire ecology of North America: but this gets to be "living in balance with nature" because, you know, they're Native Americans and whatever we do we can't give up the Rousseauist myth of the Native American Noble Savage.
I think that the standard scientific assessment, at least for the last seven or eight years, is someplace between 40 and 70 percent of species would go extinct in a rapid warming scenario like the one we're entering. As I recall, that was the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] account of a three-and-a-half-degree rise in temperature...also btw...
A certain amount of climate change is clearly already baked in, and some of the effects are brutal. You know, this summer we saw the catastrophic melt of the Arctic. We've broken one of the world's biggest physical features. But if we do what we need to do now to get off coal and gas and oil, then we can limit the damage. There's still the possibility of keeping the rise of the planet's temperature below two degrees, which is the line that governments have drawn as the red line. But that would take an all-out, focused, wartime-footing kind of effort, and most of all it would take ending the political power of the fossil fuel industry that's forever delayed change.
More than anything else, The Dust Bowl is about a certain self-destructive strain in the American character that prizes individual will over collective responsibility, stigmatizes real or perceived failure, and stubbornly refuses to learn from mistakes for fear of being thought weak... There are appalling accounts of farmers continuing to use equipment that pulverized topsoil rather than return to more difficult but responsible methods — even after repeated expert warnings that they were destroying the land — because doing so would have been less "efficient," and because they didn't like academic pointy-heads telling them their business.more mckibben: How Can Individuals Help The Environment? - "Organize. It's important to change your lightbulb, but it's less important than coming together with other people to try and change the system."
"We always had hope that next year was gonna be better," says survivor Wayne Lewis. "We learned slowly, and what didn't work, you tried it harder the next time. You didn't try something different. You just tried harder, the same thing that didn't work."
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"Both parties, but Republicans especially, mostly spend their time protecting not the free market, as they insist, but big business interests.
I wonder if there's a capitalist nation where this is not the case?
/Off to read the links and get even more depressed.
posted by Mezentian at 1:21 AM on December 2, 2012