America Podcasts
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Avsnitt 350 är här! Självklart inleder vi och pratar om ”The Backbone of America” - Cheva 350! Sen är det åter dags för en klassisk battle. Vad är egentligen bäst - Rod eller Kustom? Ponkan fortsätter och utmanar Krick i segmentet ”Konservera, pressa eller köra”. Denna gång är temat 70-tals sportbilar. Efter detta så blir det lite gnäll kring hur vi alltid vänjer oss vid trista saker. Sen är det analys-dags när vi sätter tänderna i Patten från Borlänge och hans kärlek till Bubbletop och den märkliga vänskapen med Kryckan. Veckan rundas av med lite kina-kvalitéts-hat och annat dravel. Häng med!
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Ja även detta opinionsbildningspris sjunger ju på sista vers... Donald Trump: "Du måste förstå, David - och jag förklarar detta för henne också, jag förklarar för vem som helst, jag var under belägring av den falska Rysslands-, Rysslands-, Rysslandsutredningen och Mueller-bluffen och alla dessa saker. Jag var under belägring och jag måste slå tillbaka. Så vissa människor skulle säga, wow, varför bråkar han alltid? Jo, du måste kämpa annars skulle du göra det – jag sparkade Comey, jag blev av med McCabe och alla dessa människor som var så hemska att jag menar bara hemskt för vårt land och många av dem och många andra, och slog Deep State. Jag kämpar mot Deep State och vinner. Du kan inte bara vara en riktig, jag tycker att jag är en väldigt trevlig person men om vi ska vinna måste vi vara tuffa och vi måste slå tillbaka. Och återigen var jag under belägring och jag förklarade att för folk så fort jag förklarade det så håller de alltid med. Och illegal belägring. Det kom precis ut i Twitter-filer att situationen i Ryssland var en total bluff. Vi visste det ändå, men det var en total bluff och nu erkänner de det alla och de borde ärligt talat ge tillbaka sina Pulitzer Awards. De fick Pulitzer-priset för att rapportera om Ryssland och rapporteringen var exakt de falska nyhetsmedierna och Washington Post och New York Times och rapporteringen om Ryssland var faktiskt helt fel. Det var precis tvärtom. Och de borde lämna tillbaka dem och vi är faktiskt i en rättstvist med Pulitzer Foundation om det eftersom vi tycker att det är löjligt att de ger Pulitzerpriset till människor, de har fel, och nu är det allt de har fel. Så låt oss se vad som händer. För att de tappade mycket trovärdighet, Pulitzer. Så det är, jag menar, i grund och botten måste du slå tillbaka och när du slår tillbaka, vill jag slåss för att vinna, jag vill vinna för landet, jag vill vinna för folket och jag kunde se att Kellyanne sa att han var t väldigt trevligt men jag vill inte vara snäll. Det här är människor som är ligister. De är väldigt sjuka och väldigt dåliga människor och om jag slår tillbaka så låter du inte så trevlig som du borde men vi vinner alla tillsammans. Make America Great Again" - Pulitzerpriset är den mest prestigefyllda nationella utmärkelsen i USA för prestationer inom tryckt journalistik, onlinejournalistik, litteratur, dramatik och musikalisk komposition. Det instiftades 1917 till minne av journalisten och tidningsmannen Joseph Pulitzer, som hade gjort sig förmögen som tidningsutgivare. Priset administreras av Columbia University. Priset delas ut årligen i 21 olika kategorier, bland andra undersökande journalistik, kritik, historia och fotografi. 101 Nobelpristagare har varit knutna till universitetet som studenter, lärare eller personal. Columbia är en av de fjorton grundmedlemmarna i Association of American Universities och var den första skolan i USA att bevilja titeln M.D. (Med. dr). Noterbara alumner och tidigare studenter vid universitetet och vid dess föregångare, King's College, inkluderar fem amerikanska grundlagsfäder, nio domare i USA:s högsta domstol, 20 nu levande miljardärer, 28 Oscarsvinnare och 29 statschefer, däribland tre amerikanska presidenter - Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Barack Obama. #CarlNorberg #DeFria De Fria är en folkrörelse som jobbar för demokrati genom en upplyst och medveten befolkning! Stöd oss: SWISH: 070 - 621 19 92 (mottagare Sofia S) PATREON: https://patreon.com/defria_se HEMSIDA: https://defria.se FACEBOOK: https://facebook.com/defria.se
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Att känna sig mäktig och att ha makt är inte samma sak… är bara en av många hot takes från avsnittets bok. Saga och Myrna samtalar om sjuklig stress som ett sätt att få kvinnor att skärpa sig, den inneboende motsättningen mellan psykologi och aktivism och varför psykiatriska diagnoser egentligen har ökat med ettusenfemhundra (1500) procent.
Böcker vi läst till avsnittet:
The myth of empowerment: women and the therapeutic culture in America – Dana Becker
Lite skojig läsning för den som är intresserad av ämnet:
All alone in their white girl pain - https://hiptowaste.substack.com/p/all-alone-in-their-white-girl-pain
"Manic pixie dream world" - on the anti-recovery zeitgeist, the power of hope, and the myth of the radical sad girl, with friend & girl genius Eliza mclamb https://internetprincess.substack.com/p/manic-pixie-dream-world (kan behövas en prenumeration för att läsa denna, vilket rekommenderas)"There Is No Moral Imperative to Be Miserable" - Yes, capitalism is why you're sad and anxious. Now what? https://mentalhellth.xyz/p/there-is-no-moral-imperative-to-be -
Hello Interactors,
Happy 2023! Today we launch into a season on topics related to human behavior. So much of how we interact with people and place comes down to language. It shapes how we communicate with one another, but how much does language shape our behavior? And if one language dominates, how much does that domination shape our global society?
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?
Last week I caught up with a friend of mine who left Microsoft soon after I did. He was a technology executive and is now pursuing a degree at Cambridge on ethics in artificial intelligence (AI). His coursework is very different from his engineering past and Taiwanese education. Fewer numbers, more words. He is reading multiple philosophy papers a week, sometimes 30 pages long. He must then write his own analytical essays. Predictably, these papers he is reading are written in English – his second language.
It can be challenging enough to read philosophy in a native language. When he encounters a word, he doesn’t understand, he often consults his Chinese dictionary to better understand the concept. But then when he compares that definition to the English dictionary definition, the meaning is sometimes different. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote,
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
For my bi-lingual friend for whom English is his second language, it seems the language is the battle against intelligence by means of the bewitchment of philosophy.
This is an increasingly common phenomenon around the world as English is the dominant language of higher education. An estimated one in six people on this planet speak some form of English. While seemingly small, it is the largest population to speak a common language in the history of our species. Still, with over 7000 different languages spoken around the world language diversity dominates.
In the United States 80% of households speak English only at home. Those homes are likely to remain monolinguistic. But as immigrant populations in America grow and Indigenous languages resurface the number of bilingual or multilingual households is expected to increase. When the first wave of immigrants came to America in the late 1800s, many children were encouraged to drop their native language in favor of English. My American born Italian father-in-law was discouraged to speak Italian and thus never learned it. Meanwhile, the cost of learning English was too great for his mother, so she was discouraged to learn English. They never shared a richly common language.
Even though the United States has never declared English the official language, it is often assumed. As a result, there exists not only a monolingual bias, but an English bias. Given the last two global trotting colonizing superpowers have English as the dominant language, it follows the English language dominates. As a result, schools, including higher education replete with international bilingual diversity, is also dominated by the English language and all that comes with it. That includes the branches of the field of cognitive science intent on understanding how language affects how the brain works.
It was my father-in-law’s strict dad that insisted he speak English only. His attitude was ‘you’re an American, so you’re speaking English.’ It was common for immigrant parents during these times to attempt to erase their past in hopes of appearing more ‘American’. But this attitude may have been buoyed by a long-held belief there exists a cognitive cost of switching between two or more languages. A belief that was surely substantiated by the high cost of learning a second language proficiently. It seems advantageous to just pick one and stick with it. And for many of those early immigrant children in America, that choice would have been English.
But I’m reminded of another friend who grew up in Malaysia learning English and Malay while speaking her native cultural language and English at home. Malaysia’s population is a blend of Malay, Chinese, and Indian descendants, and the informal language, Manglish, blends words from English, Chinese, and Tamil. She is so comfortable jumping between these languages that when she and her sister talk, they sometimes use words from multiple languages in a single sentence. For her, there is no cognitive cost in switching. In fact, she may even benefit from using many languages at once.
YES, UH-HA, I AGREE
Some research in cognitive science points to a ‘bilingual advantage’. Multi-lingual speakers showed a greater “ability to plan, focus, and execute a wide array of tasks’ compared to single language speakers and the effect was pronounced among older adults. As a result, replicated studies show performance varies greatly depending on the task, age, language experience, and frequency of switching languages. Still, as cognitive research increases in parts of the world where bilingualism is more common, more is sure to be learned.
The bulk of knowledge in cognitive science comes from studying WEIRD people. They are predominantly White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The ‘E’ could just as well stand for ‘English-speaking’. The discipline is dominated by English-speaking researchers, studying a sliver of the English-speaking population, writing papers in English, and in countries that that are culturally Anglocentric. This flaw has been recognized for nearly a decade. But increasingly more research uses diverse sample populations, in more diverse locations, and is conducted by less Anglocentric researchers who use English as a second language.
In 2022, a group of scholars published a paper investigating how over-reliance on English may hinder cognitive science. It included a chart that illustrates a sampling of differences emerging from these more diverse studies. It shows how aspects of the written and spoken English language differ culturally, linguistically, and cognitively from certain other languages. For example, English speakers tend to frequently rely on words of gratitude to maintain healthy social relations. One study revealed English speakers were four times more likely to say ‘thank you’ than other languages. A language in Ecuador, Cha’palaa, doesn’t even have a word for ‘thank you’. Even ‘please’ is avoided without conflict. Thirsty? ‘Give me water’ is sufficient and considered polite.
Conversely, languages other than English tend to use words more frequently that promote and sustain social cohesion. One of the more extreme versions of this is Japanese where attention to social behavior is more closely monitored by all members of society. During conversation, the person whose ‘turn’ it is to speak is listening and looking for short affirmative confirmation, like ‘yes’, ‘uh-huh’, or head nods without losing their ‘turn’. Meanwhile the listener is listening and watching for breaks in phrasing to offer forms of affirmative confirmation. Linguists call this ‘back-channeling’ and can be found in cultures rich in social cohesion. Perhaps the English language and the American egocentric culture isn’t helping to heal our societal divisions.
The ordering of words in Japanese versus English has cognitive implications too. All languages have a linguistic ‘head’ that determines certain properties of a phrase. The Japanese language puts the head at the end of a phrase while English puts it at the beginning. This has implications for differences in working memory between Japanese and English speakers. When recalling a sequence of figures, like numbers, objects, plants, or animals, Japanese speakers have higher precision on the last item in the list and English speakers the first.
Cognitive differences in ordering arrangements can extend beyond listed figures to spatial reasoning. For example, English speakers use their own relational viewpoint as a frame of reference when describing spatial locations, like ‘left’ or ‘right’. In contrast, certain native languages in Australia and Namibia use cardinal directions like ‘west’ or ‘east’. These differences in linguistic encoding are shown to influence learning of spatial configurations, search and find tasks, and tracking moving objects. Again, the apparent egocentrism of English speakers is seemingly creeping into even how we see ourselves in the world.
ADVERSITY TO DIVERSITY
The ’left-right’ bias shows up not only in space, but also time. English speakers typically think of a timeline as going from left to right. This ‘left-to-right’ bias can be attributed to many factors, including the ordering of words in a sentence or a math equation. Solving a math problem or writing a sentence in English involves ‘starting’ on the left and over time ‘ending’ up on the right. Those taught to read and write or do math in English or similar languages thus have a linguistic coding in the brain that associates the past with the ‘left’ and the future with the ‘right’.
But those who have not been exposed to these encodings have no such associations. And given there are 7000 languages spoken in the world, that accounts for a lot of humans. As more humans gain access to the internet, more and more of these languages and cultures will be exposed to the 1.2 billion internet users speaking English. The fastest growing languages online are Chinese (0.9 billion), Spanish (0.4 billion), and Arabic (0.2 billion). More people in America speak Spanish than all of Spain.
Given this growing linguistic diversity, these researchers conclude cognitive science is not doing nearly enough “to live up to its original mission of developing an interdisciplinary exploration of ‘the mind’”. They say English language dominance may be the field’s “original sin” and call for a commitment “to research that seeks to systematically explore, generalize, and falsify our models of human cognition by exploring non-English-speaking peoples and societies.”
As we enter a new year, English speaking students, like my continuing adult education friend, will be returning to classes and campuses dominated by the English language. Others will be drawing that timeline planning the next quarter. Many spent this holiday season exchanging in culturally supported niceties perpetuated by language. Santa only delivered the presents if the child had been saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ all year. We will spend the next year looking to do the same as we all struggle to keep those new year’s resolutions.
The words ‘spent’ and ‘spend’ bring up another peculiarity of English – tenses. It turns out those living in countries using languages that don’t have an obligatory future tense like English may be better at keeping their resolutions. They tend to smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. And, hey, tax time is also just around the corner in the United States. It turns out those not obliged to use future tense in their language also save more.
But these researchers admit these studies deserve scrutiny. There is much debate about how culture and history shape language and how language shapes culture and history. Teasing out language from cognition and culture will continue to confound scholars, researchers, and practitioners. However, advances in neuroscience and brain imaging together with increased diversity of research subjects, locations, and researchers are sure to yield more practicable results. These tools didn’t exist at the onset of the study of language.
In 1863, the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, and brother of the more famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, wrote three volumes on comparative linguistics after studying the Kawi language of Java. He noted then there “resides in every language a characteristic worldview.” One day we may be able to discern just what elements of worldview cognition are common to all human brains – and the brains of other animals – regardless of language and culture.
Until then, this is all that is left to write for today. In English. While my sentences have flowed from left to right, the beginning is at the top and the end is here at the bottom. I wish to ‘thank you’ for reading or listening and invite you to ‘please’ click ‘like’ or leave a nice comment. If you feel so obliged. It’s been my ‘turn’ to speak, now it’s yours.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io -
Få tekniska landvinningar har präglat ett århundrade på samma sätt som kärnvapen präglat 1900-talet. Efter Trinitytestet den 16 juli 1945 och de ödesdigra bombningarna av Hiroshima och Nagasaki några veckor senare, vändes stormakternas militära planering på ända och världen blev inte riktigt sig lik.
Likt en traumapatient hanterade världssamfundet nyheterna med tveksamhet, oro, bestörtning och så småningom även acceptans. Vad gör man med ett vapen som kan förinta din fiende, men som samtidigt är omöjligt att försvara sig emot?
I den nymixade reprisen av avsnitt 27 av Militärhistoriepodden diskuterar historikern Martin Hårdstedt och idéhistorikern Peter Bennesved om 1900-talets kärnvapenutveckling och dess betydelse för 1900-talets militära historia.
Än idag finns kluvenheten i synen på kärnvapnet kvar. Kärnvapnen inkorporerades i stormakternas vapenarsenaler och förändrade deras taktiker och doktriner, men kärnvapnen kom aldrig att användas i annat syfte än i tester och som politiska symboler för stormakternas eventuella förmågor. Hur kunde det bli så?
Nådde mänskligheten den tekniska förmågans slutpunkt i och med möjligheten att förinta sig själv? Hur ska vi se den massiva upprustningen och bärsystemens utveckling? Finns det några historiska paralleller, eller är kärnvapnen en unik företeelse i mänsklighetens militära historia?
Med start i Manhattanprojektet diskuteras kärnvapnens tekniska utveckling, de olika presidenternas inställning, försöken att legitimera vapnet, doktrinerna ”Massive retaliation” och ”Mutually Assured Destruction”, samt de många olika formerna av bärsystemen och deras betydelse för hur stormakternas olika positioner i kalla krigets komplexa politiska sceneri. Frågorna hänger kvar i luften.
Bild: USA:s provsprängning av vätebomben Castle Romeo på Bikiniatollen, Wikipedia.
Bild omslag: Svampmolnet efter atombomben över Nagasaki, Japan 1945, Wikipedia.
Lästips:
Margot A. Henriksen (1997), Dr. Strangeloves America, Society and culture in the atomic age.
Geir Lundestad (2004), Öst, väst, nord, syd: huvuddrag i internationell politik efter 1945
Nina Tannenwald (2007) The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945.
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Founder of the C-Level Agency - it’s an agency where they help small online business with the operations of their business through system, processes and building teams.
In this episode, Katherine Sawyer and I chat about her transformation from feeling burnt out in corporate America to taking charge of her health and finding new ways to combat the stress she was under.
We discuss how she knew she was burnt out, what symptoms she was experiencing, how she knew she needed a change and to heal and what her path to healing has looked like.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone who is struggling with feeling mis-aligned in their life or wondering if they are struggling with burn out.
www.theclevelagency.com
https://www.instagram.com/theclevelagency/
www.alidamron.com
www.alidamron.com/consults
www.alidamron.com/heal
www.alidamron.com/period
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www.facebook.com/groups/alidamron
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Artisten Jay Z rappade på sin låt The story of OJ. "You ever wonder why jewish people own all the property in America…" Vill du veta varför får du lyssna på låten som du finner länk till på aronflam.com i manustexten. Jag varnar dig, svaret är inte nödvändigtvis antisemitiskt.For more info: https://bit.ly/DKVSYE1STÖTTA DEKONSTRUKTIV KRITIK på:SWISH 0046768943737paypal.me/ARONFLAMDKs Patreon: bit.ly/ARONFLAMDKBitcoin: 3EPQMEMVh6MtG3bTbGc71Yz8NrMAMF4kSHEdited by Marcus Blomgren Intro by: Intractable by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/...) Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-... Artist: incompetech.com
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Hello Interactors,
I stumbled across a book that picks ten influential economists and teases out elements from each that contribute to ideas circling the circular economy. It turns out bits and pieces of what many consider a ‘new’ idea have existed among notable economists, left and right, for centuries.
The first is a name known to most worldwide, even if they only get their history from Fox News. But had a gun been aimed more accurately, his name nor his global influence would have been a part of history at all.
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
THE DUEL AT SCHOOL
Class boundaries come into focus in college towns as diverse clusters of first-year students descend, mingle, and sort. Such was the case for one young man in Germany. It’s not that he was poor, but to the über he was. Having been born to Jewish parents, he was used to being bullied. Though he thought violence was an absurd remedy for injustice – after all, he went to college to study philosophy and belonged to a poetry club – but he also believed that sometimes one must stand their ground by whatever means.
And so there he stood, 18 years old, with his back to his adversary, about to engage in a duel. As he breathed in, I imagine he could feel the cold pull from the barrel of the pistol pointed to the sky inches from his chin. With each step his pulse must have quickened. He must have felt the gun handle twist in his sweaty palms as he gingerly rested his tremoring finger on the trigger. He knew at any second, he must turn quickly. He must not flinch. And he must not die.
In his final steps I imagine his world must have slowed down. And then, in a blur, he whirled around and fired at his challenger. The blast must have lit his face, punctuated by the sound of a whirring bullet. He felt the skin just above his eyebrow burn. I can see him lifting his shaking hand to his forehead expecting blood. But it was just an abrasion. The bullet had grazed his skull. That bullet was millimeters from ending Marxism before it even started. Had it landed, Karl Marx would have been dead at 18.
My sense is that when most people read the word Marxism, they think Communism. He’s best known for two massive publications, The Communist Manifesto, and Das Kapital – or often simplified and anglified to just Capital. But he eventually distanced himself from the direction Communism and even Marxism had taken. As we shall see, he was a professional journalist for most of his adult life and thus a staunch free press and free speech advocate – two freedoms communist authoritarianism eradicated.
The word, ‘Marxism’, today is often used by some to discredit progressive pro-social political and economic ideas given its connotations to communism. A holdover from American Cold War McCarthyism. It turns the disparaging came long before the 1940s and 50s. It was used the same way in France and other parts of Europe in the late 1800s. So much so that Marx’s collaborator on The Communist Manifesto, Fredrich Engels, once wrote,
“What is called ‘Marxism’ in France is certainly a very special article, to the point that Marx once said to Lafargue [Marx’s son-in-law]: "What is certain is that I am not a Marxist."
Marx’s economic work is less well-known and Das Kapital remains the most accurate and lucid critique of the negative effects of capitalism. Marx was first and foremost a philosopher and his arguments take aim at the moral and ethical implications of capitalistic systems. Which is why circular economic advocates often turn to Marx for their own philosophical underpinnings.
Coincidently, the man credited with capitalism, and whom Marx often took aim, Adam Smith, was also a philosopher. In fact, he mostly wrote about liberal philosophy and relatively little about economics. I wonder if today these two philosophers, who many see representing the left and the right of political economics, would be unsuspecting allies or dueling advisories?
Karl Marx’s first year at university in Bonn, Germany was like many freshmen. He partied a lot. But Bonn was also home to radical politics at the time. Students were heavily surveilled by the police due to semi-organized radical attempts by student organizations to overthrow the local government. It turns out the poetry club he had joined was not about poetry, it was a front for a resurgent radical political movement. Though, having already spent a night in jail for drunken disorderly behavior, Marx may have mostly been interested in the social side of the club.
Paralleling political turmoil was class conflict between the so-called ‘true Prussians and aristocrats’ and ‘plebeians’ like Marx. The near fatal event came about when an aristocrat challenged Marx to a duel. Marx indeed thought dueling was absurd, but evidently, he, like many men in those days, thought it a worthy way to ‘man up’. His dad certainly didn’t think so and accelerated the plan to transfer his son to the University of Berlin to study law.
HEGELIAN REBELLION
While in Berlin, Marx also continued to study philosophy and wrote both fiction and nonfiction on the side. One of his most influential professors was Eduard Gans. Gans had been brought to the university by none other than the influential German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel had died just four years before Marx arrived in Berlin, and Marx, like many, was fascinated by his work.
After Hegel’s death, Hegelians (as his disciples were called) became divided between Right Hegelians and Left Hegelians. The right interpreted Christian elements in his philosophy seeking to associate his ideas and popularity with the Christian-led Prussian political establishment. The left embraced aspects of reason and freedom of thought they believed Christianity and the Prussian government limited. Gans’ lectures tended more toward the left and so did Marx who joined a radical group of Young Hegelians seeking revolution.
After graduating, Marx left for Cologne, Germany in 1842 to become a journalist for the Rhineland News. He expanded on Hegel’s ideas around the role of government in providing social benefits for all and not just the privileged class. He openly criticized right leaning European governments and his radical socialist views garnered the attention of government sensors. Marx said,
“Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear."
He also became interested in political economics and became frustrated with other Young Hegelians who continued to focus the movement on religion.
His critical writing eventually got him kicked out of Germany, so he fled to Paris. There too his writing got him in trouble. The Prussian King warned the French interior minister of Marx’s intentions and was expelled from France. On to Belgium he went where he, again, was kicked out. Marx eventually took exile in London in 1850 where he familiarized himself with the writing of Europe’s leading economists, including Britain’s most famous, Adam Smith.
His research passion project brought in no money. Risking extreme poverty for him and his family, he took a job as European correspondent writing for the New-York Daily Tribune in 1850. After ten years, he quit when the paper refused to publicly denounce slavery at the start of the civil war. During that decade, he continued to research in the reading room of the British Museum amassing 800 pages of notes which became the source material for his first successful 1859 book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. At the time, he was also witnessing firsthand the deplorable conditions London factory laborers endured at the dawn of the industrial age and the destruction of nature with it.
Marx’s primary critique was summed up in a single German word: Produktionsweise which can be translated as "the distinctive way of producing" or what is commonly called the capitalist mode of production. Marx believed the system of capitalism distinctly exists for the production and accumulation of private capital through private wealth, hinging on two mutual dependent components:
* Wealth accumulation by private parties to build or buy capital, like land, buildings, natural resources, or machines, to produce and sell goods and services
* A wealth asymmetry between those who accumulate the wealth and capital (employers) and the those needed to produce the good or service (laborers) in a way that yields the profits needed to accumulate the wealth (i.e. cheap or free labor)
Capital accumulation existed in markets long before Karl Marx and Adam Smith, but the accumulation was limited, including by nature. For example, let’s say I start a garden next year growing zucchini. Zucchini grown in the Northwest United States can become overwhelmingly productive. I would likely yield more zucchini than my family could consume. I could decide to exchange the remaining zucchini for money at a local farmer’s market. In economic terms, I grew a commodity (C) and would be exchanging them for money (M) thereby turning C into M.
Let’s imagine while at the market I am drawn to another commodity that I’m not willing to make myself, honey. I can now use my money (M) to buy a commodity (C1) grown by someone else. The beekeeper could easily take the money I gave them (M1) and exchange it for a good they’re unwilling to grow or make themselves (C2). This chain of exchange could continue throughout the entire market.
This linear exchange of money through markets was common leading up to the industrial age. Money was the value exchanged but the generation of money only happened at the rate of natural production or extraction of natural commodities or by industrious human hands. Wealth accumulation could indeed occur by saving it or exchanging it for something that may rise in value faster than, say, zucchini, like property or gold.
THOSE DUTCH DO MUCH
With the dawn of the industrial age, Marx observed capitalists showed up to the market with large sums of accumulated wealth at the outset. Wealth often came through inheritance, but also rent of property (sometimes stolen, as occurred during colonization) or profits from an existing or past enterprise. This money (M) is then used to invest in the means necessary to produce, or trade, a good or service (C). The capitalist themselves need not want or need their good or service, they may not be interested in it at all. Their primary concern, according to Marx, is to covert their initial investment (M) into more money (M+) through profit made on the sale of the good. They then take their accumulated money (M+) and use it to invest in the production of, or trade with, another good or service (C+).
Due to the efficiencies gained through the advent, invention, and innovation of energy and machines the rate of production greatly increased in the industrial age. And with it profits. This inspired entrepreneurs to take risks into new ventures thereby diversifying the market while creating additional engines of wealth and capital accumulation. Herein lies the Marxist claim on the primary motivation of capitalism – turn capital into more capital through one or many forms of profiteering.
Again, this concept predates Marx or Smith. In the 1600s the Dutch created a market expressly for the exchange of money for a piece, (also known as a stock or share) in a company. It was another way to accumulate wealth for the purpose of building capital. The first to utilize this market in 1602 was the Dutch India Company leading Marx to comment, “Holland was the head capitalistic nation of the seventeenth century.”
Marx predicted the eventual outcome of unbridled wealth accumulation would be monopolistic behavior. Those who accumulate wealth also generate the power to buy out competitors leading to not only consolidation of wealth, but power. And not just economic power, political power too. We all know too well how wealth and power can sway election results and lobbying strength.
Those sucked into capitalism need not necessarily be greedy. It’s the nature of the pursuit of business in a capitalist system to compete on price. This was particularly apparent in what Marx observed. One way capitalists lowered the price of a good was to flood the market with it. The only way to do that is to increase production. But to earn necessary profits to accumulate necessary capital on a lower priced good meant lowering the amount of money spent on capital (i.e. real estate, raw goods, or machines) and/or labor (i.e. employee wages). This led to increasing wealth disparities and further strengthened the asymmetry Marx claimed was necessary in the capitalist mode of production. It’s not necessary to be greedy to win, but you can’t win without competing on price. And too often it’s the workers who pay the price. This was Marx’s biggest beef with capitalism.
Wealth disparities are now the greatest in history and the number of natural resources needed to create low-cost goods in the competitive global race to bottom barrel prices are nearing earthly limits. Meanwhile, as more people are pulled out of poverty and urban areas grow exponentially, more natural resources are demanded. Including for the necessary energy to make, move, and manage the mess we consumers create. We seem compelled to continually capitulate to creeping capitalism.
It leads many to wonder, do we need capitalism? Marx concludes in Das Kapital that capitalism cannot exist forever within earth’s natural resource limitations. But he may be surprised to find that it has lasted as long as it has. To reject capitalism, or assume, as Marx did, that capitalism is a natural evolution on a path toward some form of communal economically balanced society, does not necessitate rejecting markets. Nor does it necessarily imply going ‘back’ to pre-capitalist times, like 16th century Holland.
But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look to the Dutch. They may be onto something yet again. A Dutch company called Bundles has partnered with the German appliance manufacturer Miele to create an in-home laundry service. Instead of, or in addition to, Miele racing to making more and more washing machines, selling to more and more people, at lower and lower prices, they lease the washer and dryer to Bundles who then installs and maintains the appliances in homes for a monthly fee. The consumer pays for a quality machine serviced by a reputable agent, Bundles and Miele get to split the revenue, and Miele is incented to make high quality and long-lasting appliances to earn higher profits. They’ve since expanded this idea to coffee and espresso machines. It’s an attempt at a more circular economy by reducing consumption, energy, and resource extraction, all while utilizing existing markets in a form of capitalism. It’s a start.
But perhaps not enough of a change for Marx. Or maybe so. In 1872, eleven years before his death and twenty-two years before Miele was founded, he gave a speech in Amsterdam. He acknowledged, “there are countries -- such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland -- where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.” As in his youth, it appears he found violence to be an unworthy course of action for injustice. But also consistent with that eventful day in Bonn, 1836, as he was challenged to a duel, he also has his limits. His speech continued, “This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labor.”
REFERENCES:
Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (RLE Marxism). Boris Nicolaievsky, Otto Maenchen-Helfen. 2015. Published originally in 1936.
Alternative Ideas from 10 (Almost) Forgotten Economists. Irene van Staveren. 2021.
Letter to E. Bernstein. Friedrich Engels. 1882. [“Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi je ne suis pas marxist” (Friedrich Engels, “Lettre à E. Bernstein,” 2 novembre 1882. MIA: F. Engels - Letter to E. Bernstein (marxists.org).]
La Liberte speech. Karl Marx. The International Working Men's Association.1872.
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De nordiska länderna har alltid haft en speciell roll inom Nato, konstarerar professor Mary Elise Sarotte från Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, som nyligen utkommit med den prisbelönta boken Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate.
Den brittiske journalisten Iain Martin intervjuar tio av talarna på Engelsbergsseminariet 2022 som hade temat "Liberty". Ämnena för intervjuerna spänner från hur Kina och Ryssland påverkar den frihet vi länge tagit för given till betydelsen av frihet för författare.
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Hello Interactors,
Fall is upon us and so Interplace transitions to economics. I’ll be writing about how location, distribution, and the spatial organization of economic activities interacts with and affects humanity. The current dominant economic model insists on persistent and endless growth despite acknowledgement of its role in climate change, income inequality, and disappearing limited stocks of natural resources. There’s got to be a better way, and I’m on the hunt to find alternatives.
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
FLIGHTS OF NASTY
I attended a panel discussion last Friday on environmental justice. One panel member represented a nearby Seattle community called Beacon Hill. It’s a 6.5 mile long stretch just north of the SeaTac airport putting it on a flight path. Roughly 65% of flights land over Beacon Hill when the wind is out of the south. During busy times, a plane descends over their homes nearly every 90 seconds to two minutes. And because it’s on a hill, they’re 300 feet closer to the noise and pollution.
FAA guidelines require a 65-decibel limit, and Sea-Tac claims they comply, but Beacon Hill is beyond the boundary for which they monitor. Even the U.S. Bureau of Transportation and Statistics reported in 2017 levels in this area were between 40-75 decibels. When residents organized and measured noise themselves, they never recorded any plane below 50 decibels and some hit 80. That’s about as loud as a kitchen blender and too loud to hear the person next to you.
But what this panel member shared, sometimes through tears, is it’s not just the noise but the repetition. With each passing plane the stress mounts in anticipation of the next one. It’s hard to concentrate or hold a conversation. She worries about her son. How much does this environmental stress contribute to his ADHD? His trouble at school. Her husband, who rides his bike most places, suffered from esophageal cancer. How much did the air pollution contribute to his condition?
In the time between planes, the ultrafine particles (UFPs) from the last plane have already mixed with the air they breathe. Jet engines uniquely expel plumes of ultrafine particle pollution. A recent University of Washington (UW) study confirms similar studies in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, New York, and Amsterdam. Flight paths are home to high concentrations of ultrafine particles raining down over unsuspecting victims. In Los Angeles, 90% of school children in the flight path are exposed to these particulates one hour out of every school day.
These particulates are smaller than the PM2.5 typically found from fossil fuel combustion and tire and brake dust. They’re also not as widely studied. Nobody really knows what kind of long-term effects they may have on the human body. However, there is animal evidence showing long-term exposure to ultrafine particles leads to adverse health effects, including neurological. A 2019 study published by the Washington State Department of Health reports,
“UFPs have many unique qualities that make them possibly more harmful to human health than larger particles. UFPs are able to travel deeper into the lung than larger particles. They are also small enough to avoid the body’s attempts to clear particles from the lungs, allowing them to stay in the body longer, to build up, and to cause damage. They can also move from the lungs to the bloodstream and to other organs.”
Evidence of short-term effects on human health are conclusive. The study warns,
“Certain groups of people are more sensitive to UFP exposure. These groups include people with pre-existing heart and lung disease, infants, older adults, people with diabetes, communities with a lower socio-economic status, and pregnant women.”
Beacon Hill is a place where 70% of residents identify as Black, Indigenous, multiracial, or persons of color. More than half speak a language other than English. They’re also flanked by two major interstates and have another smaller airport, King County International Airport (KCIA) (aka Boeing Field), between them and Sea-Tac. The UW study showed anyone living within 150 meters of the freeway would also be exposed to ultrafine particles from passing vehicles, especially semi-trucks on their way to and from Sea-Tac.
In 2021, the Puget Sound Regional Council published a Regional Aviation Baseline Study. There are 27 public-use airports in Western Washington’s Puget Sound region, and the three biggest are Sea-Tac, King County International Airport, and Paine Field just north of Seattle. Scheduled passenger service is only available at Sea-Tac and Paine Field. In 2018 these two airports served 24 million enplanements. One enplanement is a single passenger per airplane. By 2027 they project this number will grow to 29 million. By 2050 it will double, 49 million at the low end and 56 million at the high end.
That’s just commercial passenger traffic. What about cargo? In 2017 540 thousand metric tons of cargo flew through Western Washington. Eighty-five percent goes through Sea-Tac. By 2050, it too is projected to double to 1.5 million metric tons. However, these peak loads are seasonal. During harvest time, Washington State’s value crops, like cherries, increase cargo demands. So how is this increased demand to be met?
FLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN
To assess solutions to growing demand, the 2019 Washington State Legislature formed the Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission (CACC). Their objective is to recommend a new primary commercial aviation facility and additional ways to add capacity to six existing airports across the state to accommodate future demand.
To get an idea for how governments intend to shape outcomes of commissions they assemble, it’s good to look at the backgrounds of invited commissioners. In an era of increased awareness and needs for environmental, economic, and social justice, a good commission should be comprised of a diverse set of points of view and expertise. Especially given the current and historical economic, social, and environmental injustices existing power structures have created.
Through this lens, the list of commissioners is disappointing. Of the fourteen voting members, there are just two women, one person of color, and only one has a background in environmental law. The rest are white men, with one of Asian decent raised in England. Their bios read like a who’s-who of business leaders, economic development advisors, aviation enthusiasts, airport directors and developers, military leaders, and even representatives from Southwest and American Airlines. One member offered no bio at all and seemingly has no presence on the internet.
The remaining twelve non-voting members must then balance this majority of aviation zealots geared toward economic development. Nope. More of the same – former senators, regional transportation directors, air cargo specialists, a member of the Civil Air Patrol, an aviation officer…the list goes on. They do have a state senator, Tina Orwall, who has “20 years of experience working in the public mental health system.”
So, two people out of 26, an environmental lawyer and a left-leaning woman senator, may offer a voice for environmental justice and sustainable economic development. The rest will be fighting for state and federal dollars for airport and economic expansion. While public documents give lip service to ‘community engagement’ and ‘the environment’ history shows there is little likelihood this collection of people will have environmental justice as a top priority.
Every level of government wants the number of flights to increase, despite having goals to reduce carbon emissions. With increased flight traffic comes increased ground traffic, despite also having goals to reduce congestion. If this weren’t so tragic, it would be a comedy.
This is the essence of environmental justice; the unfair exposure of poor and marginalized people and places to harms associated with an economy these people and places are least responsible for – an economy which disproportionately benefits the prosperous and mainstream members of society. It’s an economic model, to which we’re addicted, requiring unlimited growth despite relying on the extraction of natural resources which are limited.
The environmental scientist, complex systems icon, and author of Limits of Growth, Donella Meadows, offers a series of questions these commissioners and elected leaders should ask whenever arguments for economic growth are put forth. She said,
“Growth is one of stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture. We’ve got to have enough. Always ask: growth of what and why, and for whom, and who pays the cost, and how long can it last, and what’s the cost to the planet, and how much is enough?”
Meadows, and many environmental justice activists and scholars, are calling for system change in the fight against climate change.
Reading Washington State’s plans for addressing its aviation woes, it’s clear system change is not on their radar. If Washington’s economy were a plane, elected leaders and assigned commissioners believe this plane can climb to infinite heights.
Imagine a plane gradually ascending beyond its physical limits and the bodily limits of its passengers. Now imagine cries to pilots to please level-off from suffering passengers first and most impacted. They’d be met with quizzical looks and ignored while most passengers would gleefully encourage the plane to climb faster and higher. That’s what it’s like when individuals in impacted communities cry and call for limits on the pain, suffering, and pollution at the hands of our economy.
Apart from a few local elected officials, they mostly are ignored. Most are too busy trying to grow the economy. Which in turn will increase the number of flights to Sea-Tac, the area’s economy, suffering, and the number of premature deaths due to air and noise pollution. Meanwhile, many Beacon Hill residents are too busy holding multiple jobs, too weary from the fight for justice, and too disempowered or discouraged to speak up.
The assembled aviation and business experts no doubt have good intentions, but it’s clear they’re tasked with one thing: tip the nose of the economic plane upwards while steadily increasing the throttle. After all, the model dictates that the state must remain competitive in a national and international race upwards toward a misleadingly infinite extractive consumer economy. This assumes there is no limit to growth despite empirical planetary evidence to the contrary. What’s the worse that could happen? Evidently, so far, nothing bad enough to prompt leaders to change the system.
To be fair, this commission and the Puget Sound Regional Council, do consider the air quality studies out of the University of Washington. They also consider another UW study exploring alternative ground transportation, including high-speed rail. There are other ‘sustainable’ elements the state is exploring, including biofuel and electric planes. However, creating a pipeline of biofuel to Sea-Tac they admit has its own challenges. Though, they pale in comparison to the struggles sourcing enough biofuel to meet demand. So that leaves electric planes, like electric cars, as the great savior.
ANOTHER INLAND LOGISTICS EMPIRE
Just this week, the dream of electric flight made one stride toward reality. A prototype of an electric nine-seater passenger plane successfully took off, circled the airport, and landed. A Washington first and a necessary first step toward certification. The plane was assembled in Washington state, made of engines and parts largely made in Washington state, and by a Washington state company called Eviation. Their CEO, Greg Davis, said “What we’ve just done is made aviation history. This is about changing the way that we fly. It’s about connecting communities in a sustainable way…ushering in a new era of aviation.” He may be right. But when?
When asked if this flying equivalent of a large Tesla, with 21,500 battery cells accounting for half of the plane’s weight of over 4 tons, is ready for passenger flights, he quipped, “The answer is no, absolutely not.” At least he’s honest. I optimistically believe some of our regional transportation problems can be solved by sustainably leveraging the thousands of municipal airports under-utilized across America. But it’s decades away.
Meanwhile, I believe this flight was mostly a PR stunt. The airport chosen for this historic flight was the Grant County International Airport at Moses Lake. Until this flight, most of Washington state didn’t know there was even an airport at Moses Lake. But it’s one of the top choices by the commission for expansion and they’ll need public support to pay for it.
Back in 2016 a group of senators formed a ‘roundtable’ to examine the growing air cargo industry. This is what eventually became the Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission. They noted, “The top five air cargo commodities through Sea-Tac are cherries, seafood, footwear parts, aerospace components, and aluminum alloy and graphite.” All of these serve the Washington economy except for footwear parts which likely serves Nike and the footwear economy in Portland.
Knowing back then Sea-Tac had reached capacity, the attention turned to Eastern Washington. A Spokane roundtable member offered they had “Plenty of capacity and land reserved…to be developed for cargo…”, but then asked “How do we make strategic corrections?” There was a recognized need to make Eastern Washington attractive to air cargo carriers. Building or expanding alone doesn’t lead to success, you need private companies to believe it will succeed. Enter Moses Lake and the Grant County International Airport.
Ideas were thrown out. “Cold storage [for locally grown produce…like cherries and apples]…may be an incentive.” They imagined cargo planes could “Park in Moses Lake then” rail and trucks could “go back and get cargo.” They imagined “This would help open the runways in Sea-Tac,” but wondered “Would this financially work?” Before concluding the ‘roundtable’ they agreed they needed “to hear from businesses and companies.”
So, they commissioned the ‘Joint Transportation Committee’ to conduct a “study of air cargo movement at Washington airports” with a 2018 deadline. In that 2018 report seven airports were identified as targets for expansion, including the Grant County International Airport at Moses Lake which is right smack between Spokane and Seattle…and close to nearby produce.
In 2018, a “Washington State Air Cargo Movement Study” offered this as a recommendation:
“To attract the logistics/distribution market, the State of Washington should promote to individual airports the “inland port” or airport logistics park model…branding themselves ‘Global Logistics Centers.’”
This reminds me of a piece I wrote last year about Southern California’s ‘One Click Buy’ Empire. Moreno Valley, California is building out a World Logistics Center. Forty-five percent of the nation’s imports are already trained, trucked, or flown into this “Inland Empire”, unpacked, sorted, and reloaded onto trains, trucks, and planes then fanned out again across the nation. California’s South Coast Air Quality District estimates the new logistics center will add an additional 30,000 heavy-duty trucks to area roads per day.
Heavy-duty diesel trucks emit 24 times more fine particulate matter than regular gasoline engines. Those living closer to the freeways will be affected more. And we all know who lives next to freeways…predominantly poor and people of color. Just like in Beacon Hill.
This last August the state conducted a survey across six counties in Western Washington seeking input on potential expansion and brand-new airports around the Puget Sound region. From 56-77% of participants, depending on county, said ‘No’ to new airports. Only Paine Field received support for expansion averaging 58% in favor.
Environmental concerns are the overwhelming reason for why people oppose more airports or airport expansion. It seems everyone who can afford it wants cheap and available flights, next day deliveries, and fresh Washington cherries. And those lucky enough to have a 401K or stock portfolio want the market and the economy to grow, grow, grow. But nobody wants more flights or more pollution. That’s particularly true for those already suffering from environmental injustices – like those in Beacon Hill and countless other homes in the path of jets jettisoning plumes of particulate pollution. Far flung fumes consumed by our lungs triggering affects unknown.
How do we change this system so we all can prosper under economic vitality while minimizing the negative environmental and socio-economic impacts? If we’re going to grow, what are we growing and why? For whom? Who pays the cost? How long can it last? What’s the cost to the planet? How much is enough?
This is what I intend to explore throughout this fall as I unpack what I believe to be the front runner for a new economic model: the circular economy. I’ll look at not just the theory but attempts to put it into practice. Perhaps our economy can be like the journey of an airplane after all – take off, level off, land, take off, level off, land – an infinite circle flown within the limits of the plane, the earth, and its occupants.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io -
Hello Interactors,
Last week my daughter showed us a glimpse of the Empire State Building from her friend’s dorm room. Every time I see that building, I think of the original black and white movie, King Kong. The image of that poor animal atop what was then world’s tallest structure getting pummeled by machine gun fire sticks with me for some reason. Maybe it’s because it was unfair. That creature was captured from his homeland and brought to America only to be gunned down? What kind of society does this?
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
FAREWELL TO THE KING
Merian C. Cooper got the idea of King Kong from the French-American explorer and anthropologist, Paul Du Chaillu. He was the first of European origin to confirm the existence of Central African gorillas in 1860. This made him a much sought-after speaker in the late 1800s, and his books were immensely popular. Cooper’s uncle gifted the then six-year-old nephew with one, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. It tells of one gorilla locals noted for its “extraordinary size”:
“They believe, in all this country, that there is a kind of gorilla — known to the initiated by certain mysterious signs, but chiefly by being of extraordinary size — which is the residence of certain spirits of departed natives. Such gorillas, the natives believe, can never be caught or killed.”
And then, while Du Chaillu was out hunting with locals, an encounter occurred. As Du Chaillu recalls,
“When he saw our party he erected himself and looked us boldly in the face . . . with immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms, with fiercely-glaring large deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face, which seemed to me like some nightmare vision: thus stood before us this king of the African forest.”
And so, they did what they believed to be impossible but predictable. Du Chaillu continues,
“[The gorilla] advanced a few steps— then stopped to utter that hideous roar again- advanced again, and finally stopped when at a distance of about six yards from us. And here, just as he began another of his roars, beating his breast in rage, we fired, and killed him.”
Cooper went on to call this creature King Kong and made a movie about him. He wanted King Kong to be portrayed as being 50-60 feet tall. After all, he was kidnapped from a fictional small island that was also home to dinosaurs.
It turns out a gorilla that size is biologically impossible. For every doubling of height comes a tripling of weight. The joints and bones of a creature of this size simply could not bear his weight. King Kong was also impossible to portray on the big screen. Animators and cinematographers had difficulties portraying an animal of that size in the 1930s. Consequently, King Kong ends up appearing much smaller. Instead of weighing a couple hundred tons, let’s assume this mythical beast was shorter and weighed something more like 15 tons.
Still huge, that would be about two times the mass of an elephant requiring about 12,000 watts of metabolism to survive. And that is just the energy required to keep the organs running and nothing else. Around the time the original King Kong was being released, a biologist named Max Kleiber was plotting various animals’ metabolic rate and mass on a graph. To his surprise, the dots on the graph loosely aligned along a straight line sloping upwards with a mouse near the origin and an elephant to the upper right.
Kleiber had discovered a scaling law in nature known now as Kleiber’s law. For most animals, their metabolic rate scales to the 3⁄4 power of the animal's mass. Put another way, for every doubling of size the energy needed to survive decreases by ¼. Theoretical physicist and former President of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West, and his colleagues, believe ¾ scaling occurs due to the nutrient distribution through the efficiency seeking fractal-like structures of the circulatory system. The ‘3’ in ¾ comes about, it is believed, because the particles needed to arrange these mechanisms exists in a three-dimensional geometric universe.
Animals observed in the wild maximize their energy to survive. Every bit of energy spent above and beyond what is required for their body to function only pushes their caloric needs into debt. GPS tracked tigers, for example, reveal highly optimized search strategies over space and time in their hunt for prey. A lounging cat may appear lazy to us, but their maximizing their energy.
Early human hunter-gatherers were seemingly not that different. For similar reasons, they had to be deliberate about the energy they used. However, as their cultures evolved, along with their brain, they became increasingly effective at harnessing that energy. They used some of their energy to fashion spears, arrows, and hooks out of wood, bones, and rocks. They also used wood to make fire for heating, cooking, and controlled grassland burns to promote plant harvest renewal. In doing so, they were not only expending their own energy, but also the energy stored in that wood and other forms of biomass.
The appropriation of elements of the ecosystem for energy to support biological and social well-being, like plant harvesting, animal domestication, or consumption of biomass like wood and coal, is called social metabolism or sociometabolism. The social metabolism of these early societies sometimes had small effects on the ecosystem, but other times catastrophic. For example, the misuse of fire could lead to imbalances in ecosystems with detrimental cascading effects on plant and animal populations.
The arrival of North America’s first homo sapiens, as another example, coincided with the extinction of 33 species of large animals. Similar extinctions occurred upon the arrival of humans in South America and Australia. It turns out even the earliest human colonizers had detrimental impacts on the environment.
PLOTTING THE PLODDING AND MARAUDING
By studying existing hunter-gatherer societies, scientists can estimate the social metabolism of ancient hunter-gatherers. Geographer Yadvinder Malhi analyzed this data and determined,
“The energy use per capita of a hunter-gatherer is about 300 W, and this is almost entirely in the process of acquiring food for consumption, and to a much lesser extent other materials and the use of fire. This sociometabolism is greater than the 80–120 W required for human physiological metabolism, because of the inefficiencies in both acquiring foodstuffs, and in human conversion of food into metabolic energy, and also in the use of biomass energy sources for fuel.”
Malhi then plotted where a hunter-gatherer would sit on a Kleiber plot relative to the biological metabolism of other animals. A typical hunter-gatherer’s combined biological and social metabolism puts them just between a human and a bull.
The social metabolism of homo sapiens continued to grow steadily, and along with it their capacity to harness nature for their lifestyle. And then, 5,000-10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic revolution, a simultaneous innovation occurred around the world – farming. The start of the Holocene witnessed the emergence of agriculture in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, the Yangtze valley, New Guinea, West Africa, Meso-America, and the Andes. The end of the ice age softened the earth, human language and communication had evolved and spread, and coincidently the colonization and exploitation of ecosystems.
Agriculture, the colonization of plants, allowed for geographically condensed energy to be grown which could support larger populations of people. This put a huge dependency on area of land needed to support and grow plants and animals. But these new densities of biomass reduced the amount energy required to roam large distances hunting and gathering. As a result, many hunter-gatherer societies could not compete, and Iron Age plant and animal farmers came to dominate. These clusters of agrarian societies grew around the world and with them languages and cultures. Soon the age of the agrarian came to dominate human existence. Using data from a well documented 18th century Austrian agrarian society, Malhi went to work to plot where a typical ‘agriculturist’ may fit on the Kleiber plot. He surmises:
“Compared to the hunter-gatherer sociometabolic regime, by the 18th century human sociometabolism per capita had increased by one to two orders of magnitude.” Given the population density such a society could support, the “per unit area energy consumption” grew “three to four orders of magnitude greater than that of a hunter-gatherer society.”
This plops the typical human agriculturalist below a rhino on the Kleiber plot. In other words, an active member of an 18th century agrarian society would have consumed as much energy as a resting animal nearly 10 times their mass. It seems over-consumptive human habits started early in our evolution.
Agrarian societies and hunter-gather societies were both constrained by land area. While agriculturalists were more efficient with land use than hunter-gatherers, they were nonetheless constrained by land. This is especially true for their primary source of fuel for heating and cooking – trees. That all changed with the birth of the Industrial age and the discovery of coal.
The potential energy in trees is stored solar energy from the relatively recent past. Coal is solar energy stored in biomass that accumulated and fossilized over millions of years in the deep layers of the earth’s outer crust, the lithosphere. For the first time in history, humans could exploit energy stored in deep time. Coal could more easily be transported over great distances. In theory, this would reduce the need to further exploit land and wood, but instead their destruction increased.
The Industrial age brought new forms of locomotion and transportation networks accelerated the expansion of colonization, land development, and the destruction of grasslands, swamps, and wooded areas. Healthy, thriving ecosystems were sacrificed for new and expanding cities and farms. Coal powered machines extracted elements from nature to make fertilizers, sawed, split, and planed trees into lumber, and stamped, squeezed, and shipped goods around the world feeding growing economies and their consumers. Fossil fuels accelerated and intensified the destruction of the biosphere and continue to do so to this day. The energy use of the biomass past to support today’s social metabolism puts in question the biomass of the future, including its human consumers.
CAPITALIZING ON A MONSTER APPETITE
Malhi identifies two key factors of industrial social metabolism:
* The amount of biomass needed for biological metabolic survival (i.e. food) is small compared to fossil fuels and other high-density energy sources.
* Fossil fuels used for building transportation networks meant population centers need not be co-located with food and energy production.
So where does the typical ‘industrialist’ sit on the Kleiber plot? Just above an elephant. That is, the amount of metabolic energy needed for a human to lead a typical industrialized lifestyle today is the equivalent of a resting elephant. Imagine the streets of the most populated cities being roamed by humans the size and weight of an elephant. Streams of cars on the freeway being driven by a five-ton mammal with an insatiable appetite. That’s us. Well, many of us, anyway.
Those numbers are for the average ‘industrialist’ in the UK where Malhi teaches. American’s stereotypically love our exceptionalism, and we are certainly exceptional in this regard. Sorry, Canadians, you’re implicated too. North American’s are the King Kong’s of energy consumption. Our dot on the Kleiber plot sits where a mythical 15-ton mammal would sit. The typical human in the United States and Canada consumes energy like King Kong. That’s well over 100 times the mass and energy needed for basic survival and 10 times more than agriculturalists that existed just 200 years ago.
When Du Chaillu and his native guides shot the king of the forest, Du Chaillu did not exploit the energy of that innocent animal as food. He instead chose to eat the deer they also killed. But the local hunters, who allegedly had long pursued the so-called king of the jungle, did. Including his brain. Eating the brain from the skull of a gorilla, Du Chaillu reported, was believed to bring “a strong hand for the hunt…and success with the women.”
Perhaps this played into Cooper’s storyline in King Kong. After all, it was a native tribal king on Skull Island who offered to trade six tribal women for the attractive American blonde woman, Ann Darrow, accompanying the crew on their expedition. She is then captured by a band of natives and offered up to King Kong as a sacrifice. But King Kong is felled by a gas bomb by American explorers and shipped back to New York to be put on display. King Kong then breaks from his chains and hunts down Ann. That’s what leads to the iconic scene of King Kong getting massacred atop the Empire State Building. War pilots fire machine guns from their planes as King Kong swats at them like flies while intermittently fondling the captive heroin, Ann.
King Kong, the movie, has since been interpreted as a story of race (King Kong as a metaphor for a Black man stolen from his homeland in bondage), sex (a white blonde woman who, fetishized as a sexual object pursued by Indigenous and Black men, must be saved), and rebellion (King Kong, as a Black man, breaks from his shackles and must be violently subdued). He has rebelled and therefore must be killed.
But before this interpretation, King Kong was said to represent FDR’s ‘New Deal’. Cooper was a devote anti-communist and conservatives like him regarded the New Deal as a menace – an imprisoned import of a policy from a faraway land unleashed on society. Just like King Kong. It must be killed.
I’ll offer my own interpretation:
King Kong is an outsized mythical beast so absurdly huge that it can’t bear its own weight. When it does manage to move, it destroys the environment in its path. What is erected before us, since the dawn of the Anthropocene (or is it the Capitalocene), is an over exploitive and consumptive way of life that is off the charts. It has ‘an immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms.’ It has ‘fiercely-glaring large deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face.’ It ‘seems to me like some nightmare vision.’ What stands before us is this king of environmental destruction. And it must be killed.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io -
When the cat's away, the mice will play. Amat is away on business, so I'm running the show this week. I heard about this Bingo Rimér "Pimps & Hoes" party (shout out to the 90s) and I had to bring in my boy – pop culture and political satire specialist – Daniel Sanchez to talk about it. Is the outrage warranted? What do two comedians think about it? Listen in and find out.
Then I sat down with our pod sister and brother Fanna and Kenxo to talk about the phenomenon known as code switching; changing your demeanor and speech pattern depending upon who is around you. We discuss the difference in code switching in America and Sweden. Do you change how you talk when the other person is older? White? Rich? What about if you're a homosexual traveling to your staunchly Christian native country of Burundi? Listen in as we break it down from all angles.
Stötta oss på Patreon för regelbundna bonusavsnitt + mer!Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Hello Interactors,
I’m back from planting our kids at college. Now we watch our not-so-little Weed’s grow from a distance. I had a recent visit from a plant scientist friend last week that inspired me to dig into the blending of traditional Western science and Indigenous knowledge. Each have a lot to offer human adaptation strategies to the effects of climate change, but to do so will require new approaches and increased sensitivities to generations of abuse, neglect, and disrespect. This is part one of a two-part series that starts with a grounding in what integration exists today and why it’s important.
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
TEARS OF JOY AND SORROW
It was cause for celebration, but hers were not tears of joy. It was the ten-year anniversary of the largest dam removal in United States history. The Elwha Dam was completed in 1921 to dam the 45-mile-long Elwha River for electricity generation under the settler colonial banner of “Power and Progress.” A second larger dam was built in 1927. The Elwha is the fourth largest river on the Olympic Peninsula that sits on the western most Pacific coast of Washington State. It was once home to the country’s second largest salmon run behind Alaska. After the dams were built, they robbed these fish of 40 miles of habitat.
They also robbed the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe - ʔéʔɬx̣ʷaʔ nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕ – “The Strong People” of their food source and economy while submerging their spiritual land and identity in 21 million cubic yards of sediment. That’s over one million dumpsters full of rocks and sand. If you stacked them, they’d reach over 700 miles into the air. Placed end to end they’d stretch over 3000 miles across America coast to coast.
And now, ten years later, the salmon are running again, habitat is getting restored, and the sediment is redistributing. So why the tears? For scientists to accurately measure the successes of dam removal – and further justify the removal of more dams worldwide – the federal, state, and tribal governments agreed to a moratorium on fishing the returning salmon. It seemed a worthwhile compromise to the tribal community, but after over one hundred years of suffering their losses – and seeing the fish run as their elders had once seen – their yearning for a return to their cultural heritage has intensified over the last decade. Recent years of healthy salmon runs have tested their patience with colonial powers continuing to dictate their way of life – even as they simultaneously celebrate their joint successes.
It was the U.S. Congress who passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act in 1992 to restore dwindling salmon populations, but it was the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe who had fought to have those dams removed even as they were being built. They also helped fund the research necessary for successful removal. And now they want to live as they once did – in a self-determined and self-sustaining autonomous but integrated coexistence with their neighbors.
A friend of mine is a plant scientist for the project who attended the celebration event in Port Angeles, Washington last week. The early economic growth of this city depended on the electricity generated by those dams. He told me the words and subsequent tears by the woman representing the tribe was the most gripping and poignant moment of the event. It left many scientists conflicted about the proper path forward.
Continued research will help with planning of future dam removal projects, including what would displace the Elwha project as the largest dam removal effort in history on the Klamath River. This project involves the removal of four dams that stretch across the Oregon and California border.
But what is more important? More data collection and academic papers supporting future dam removals or resuming the human rights of an abused and afflicted Klallam community? The answer won’t come from the scientists, but from deliberations between multiple levels of governments, agencies, and departments strewn across many jurisdictions.
BRIDGING BARRIERS
The Elwha dams are representative of countless ecological discontinuities brought on by colonial expansion and attempted erasure and conversion of Indigenous cultures and populations around the world. The Elwha dam removal indeed created a precedent that inspired ecological restoration projects worldwide. And while the collaboration between members of the Klallam people and U.S. government officials, volunteers, and scientists has largely been healthy, the tension that spawned the removal in the first place still remains – competition for fishing rights.
These dams posed an immediate threat to the Klallam people and their way of living, as they still do for the Klamath people and others like them. But a greater compounding threat grows more imminent every day – the effects of climate change. Despite minimal contributions to causes of climate change, Indigenous populations suffer the greatest risks of the effects. This is most apparent and acute right now in Pakistan as one third of that country remains flooded.
Pakistanis are indeed in need of outside help. But too often Western aid swoops in with relief and then disappears leaving them with little support for how to survive the next disaster. Just as profit seeking colonists left the Klallam people with little support for survival. But instead of resorting to fatalistic language and traditional paternalistic hero mentalities that portray Indigenous communities as helpless and hopeless, some scientists and activists are shifting toward community-based adaptation strategies. These efforts start by first experiencing and understanding how these communities are affected, but then recognizing many of them also have deep ancestral knowledge and history of how to adapt to a changing climate.
To strike a healthy balance between Western government aid and scientific knowledge and local needs and culture will require increased sensitivities to historical traumas inflicted by colonization, extreme capitalism, and forced acculturation. There is a myriad of language, linguistic, and cultural gaps that challenge the documentation, translation, and integration of Western scientific approaches with Indigenous ecological and cultural knowledge so that it is accurate, complete, and fair. Meanwhile, the planet is warming, the environment is shifting, and the pressure for adaptation systems and mechanisms is mounting.
To bridge these knowledge gaps requires a concerted effort around the globe to establish consistent approaches to Indigenous knowledge integration in scientific literature. In 2020 a group of researchers started by asking this fundamental question:
“How is evidence of indigenous knowledge on climate change adaptation geographically and thematically distributed in the peer-reviewed literature?”
What they found is the number of publications per year focusing on Indigenous knowledge and climate change adaptation has grown considerably over the last ten or so years. Between 1994 and 2008 their search yielded just six scientific publications that included evidence of Indigenous knowledge. There were that many in 2009 alone. Ten years later, in 2019, the number grew sevenfold to 42.
The majority, 133 of the 236 sampled, came from the field of Environmental Science. Social Sciences (97) and Earth and Planetary Sciences (50) had the second and third most publications respectively. Then came Agriculture and Biological Sciences (36), Medicine (22), and Health Professions (14). The word-cloud they generated from the corpus ranked these as the most common words: ‘vulnerability’, ‘resilience’, ‘drought’, ‘community’, ‘perception’, ‘impact’, ‘food security’, ‘agriculture’, and ‘adaptive capacity’. Given the most repeated words all relate to health and survival, researchers in the health and human services academy and industry have some work to do.
In terms of geographic distribution, a large proportion of publications study regions in Africa and Asia. The most studied countries are India, Zimbabwe, and Canada. There is no worldwide count of Indigenous populations and most studies don’t mention tribal names, so it’s hard to determine fair distribution. However, based on the data available, the authors suggest the biggest gaps may be in central Africa, northern Asia, Greenland, Australia, parts of South America and Polynesia.
Of the attributes of Indigenous knowledge represented, most publications (170) included “Factual knowledge about the environment and environmental changes” like precipitation, temperature, ice thickness, and wind speed. Two of the least represented attributes were:
* “Cultural values and worldviews (61) like relationship to land, stewardship, values of reciprocity, collectiveness, equilibrium, and solidarity.
* “Governance and social capital” (61) like food sharing and social networks as well as informal social safety nets.
These seem to me to be valuable sets of knowledge in the face of worldwide human ‘vulnerability’, ‘resilience’, and ‘capacity to adapt’ to the effects of climate change. Some scientists are shifting from describing the facts of climate change toward better understanding of human mitigation, migration, and adaptation.
BLENDING BARRIERS
One of the reasons Indigenous communities are so helpful is their cultural lineage and oral history traditions include solutions, strategies, and innovations of past human adaptations to a changing climate. This all despite past attempts by evil colonizers to suppress and destroy their knowledge, traditions, and even their existence. But these people and civilizations gained and sustained through generations of ecological experimentation. They benefited from innovations in grassland growth, fire management, and crop alteration.
Over decades and centuries, they evolved countless trials of seed germination, hybridization, and dispersal to achieve maximal crop yields. (e.g., symbiotic ‘Three Sisters’ crop clustering). They also developed predator management schemes enabling them, and their crops, to survive and thrive. Their mediation of the environment provided a mutualistic food web rooted in natural forms of ecological reciprocity. But this knowledge was not and is not static.
They had to endure and adapt to environmental dynamism at varying scales of time and space. Change occurred at a local level with daily shifts in the weather but also at a regional level from sudden climatic and geological perturbations like earthquakes, floods, droughts, and volcanoes. All of which had effects lasting decades and centuries.
These events led some populations to hunker down and innovate new methods of survival amidst a changed but familiar environment, while others migrated near and far to survive. For those who didn’t make it, their knowledge is lost. However, some traces of their existence, their paths of migration, shelter, and food habits do, and we rely on archeologists to bring those facts and interpretations to light.
But even in the best of situations, as evidenced with the Elwha project, balancing hard quantitative science with qualitative humanitarianism while in search of adaptation and survival strategies poses a host of challenges. Not the least of which is the fact that within these works exist many gaps in human and environmental knowledge across the spectrum of global space and time.
But a new approach in archaeology and ecology is emerging called ‘archaeoecology. It strives for a more robust intellectual understanding of the interaction of people and place that spans the globe and the past 60,000 years of existence. It’s a proposed blending of ecological and archaeological research that, when augmented with Traditional Ecological Knowledge, can fill gaps of the past so that plans can be made now for how humans can survive in the future. And as the Klallam people have reminded us, regardless of the past, the time for healthy adaptation to a changed environment needs to start now.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io -
I detta avsnitt intervjuas Oksana Shmulyar Gréen, docent i sociologi, om ett forskningsprojekt som undersöker ungdomars erfarenheter av migration. Därefter diskuterar Håkan Thörn och Åsa Wettergren boken The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, av William I. Thomas och Florian Znaniecki. De uppmärksammar också det så kallade Thomas-teoremet, som formulerades av W.I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas.
Litteratur
Oksana Shmulyar Gréen, Charlotte Melander & Ingrid Höjer: “Identity Formation and Developing Meaningful Social Relationships: The Role of the Polish Catholic Community for Polish Young People Migrating to Sweden”. Frontiers in Sociology, vol. 6, 2021, s. 1-14 https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.660638
Oksana Shmulyar Gréen, Charlotte Melander & Ingrid Höjer: “Mobility and Conection to Places: Memories and Feelings about Places that Matter for CEE-born Young People Living in Sweden”, 2022, kommande i Central and Eastern European Migration review, special issue on 'Relocating East-West migration'.
Duraid Al Khamisi (2015) Regnet luktar inte här: ett familjeporträtt (Atlas, 2015)
Ulla Björnberg: “Caught Between a Troubled Past and an Uncertain Future: The Well-Being of Asylum-Seeking Children in Sweden”, s. 261-276 i A. M. Mingues, A. M. (red) Family well-being (Springer 2012) https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-94-007-4354-0.pdf
Lisa Ottosson: Utan given hemvist. Barnperspektiv i den svenska asylprocessen. (Barn- och ungdomsvetenskapliga institutionen, Stockholms universitet, 2016)
Live Stretmo: Governing the Unaccompanied Child – Media, Policy and Practice. (Institutionen för sociologi och arbetsvetenskap, Göteborgs universitet, 2014)
William I. Thomas och Florian Znaniecki: The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Edited by Eli Zaretsky. (University of Illinois U.P., 1996)
William I. Thomas & Dorothy Swaine Thomas: The Child in America: Behaviour Problems and Programs (New York 1928)
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