I’m sorry I just can’t take economics seriously

4 stars but the breeding cranes chapter is 5 stars

I liked this a lot! it’s so cozy but captivating at the same time. very true of ruth ozeki that rose and benny (the book of form and emptiness) would easily be siblings. imo this is much better than the butterfly lampshade.

Just brilliant! I would be recommending this to anyone who is even a little interested in the environment. Here are some quotes I really liked:

English settlers believed that they were less cruel than their Spanish counterparts because instead of military violence, they were using “material forces” and “natural processes” to decimate Indigenous peoples. This belief is so extraordinary that it requires a moment’s reflection: in effect it simultaneously acknowledges that nonhuman forces are being used as weapons while also asserting that settlers bear no blame for the impacts because they are unfolding in the domain of “Nature,” through “material forces.” This conjuration neatly effaces the role human actions play in setting environmental changes in motion; it is as if they occur independently of human intentions. In this framing biopolitical warfare is strictly distinguished from other human conflicts. Indeed, it is not recognized as conflict at all; it is assigned to some other, supposedly independent, natural order. The Western idea of “nature” is thus the key element that simultaneously enables and conceals the true character of biopolitical warfare. (58)

In fact, studies of “virgin soil” populations in Amazonia have found that Amerindian immune systems do not function in a markedly different way from those of other groups. Why then did Native Americans succumb in such vastly disproportionate numbers? Quite possibly it was because their susceptibility to disease was greatly increased by the multiple kinds of structural violence that accompanied European colonization, such as: “overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion and infanticide).” (59)

Invasion was not an event but a structure (Patrick Wolfe) (69).

These developments are making it ever more evident that many “savage” and “brutish” people understood something about landscapes and the Earth that their conquerors did not. This, perhaps, is why even hardheaded, empirically minded foresters, water experts, and landscape engineers have begun to advocate policies that are based on Indigenous understandings of ecosystems. Experts even have a name, and an acronym, for this now— “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” (TEK). Yet the very name is suggestive of a fundamental misunderstanding: it assumes that Indigenous understandings are usable “knowledge” rather than an awareness created and sustained by songs and stories.

You cannot relate to Gunung Api as the Bandanese did unless you know that your volcano is capable of producing meanings; you cannot relate to Dinétah as the Diné did unless the Glittering World glitters for you too. (83-84)

In short, fossil fuels have from the start been enmeshed with human lives in ways that tend to reinforce the power of the ruling classes. This dynamic is perfectly expressed by the dual meaning of the English word “power,” which combines the idea of energy, “as in a force of nature,” with “‘power’ as in a relation between humans, an authority, a structure of domination.” (102)

Thus, for instance, it is often said that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It is telling that this aphorism has now attained the status of received wisdom— because it takes only a moment’s reflection to realize that it is patently untrue. The majority of the world’s population did not live in capitalist societies for much of the twentieth century. Even in the West the normal functioning of capitalism was suspended for years, during the two world wars. What has never been suspended, since the sixteenth century, are the dynamics of global empire; indeed, they were at the root of both world wars. Imperial powers, even as they fought each other in Europe, would often collaborate in the colonies to ensure that European dominance would continue afterwards. (120)

It may seem natural today that military and paramilitary personnel should lead the response to disasters. But there is no intrinsic reason why this should be so: civil society organizations like Médecins sans Frontières, Oxfam, and many others have all the necessary skills to act as first responders. If they lack aircraft and ships, it is only because no international mechanisms exist for making such resources available to them. It is because of a political choice, then, that disasters are being militarized, a choice that derives ultimately from a wider process whereby many societies have become saturated with militarism. That disaster relief is increasingly provided by organizations with massive carbon footprints is more than an irony: it creates a chain of consequences whereby disasters will accelerate disasters. It also ensures that disaster relief will itself become an arena for military competition. (128)

It is as if climate change were goading the terrain to shrug off the forms imposed on it over the last centuries. This is quickly becoming one of the distinctive features of the planetary crisis: the wildfires in California and southeastern Australia, the repeated flooding of Houston, and the increasing unruliness of the Missouri River all suggest that the planetary crisis will manifest itself with exceptional force in those parts of the Earth that have been most intensively terraformed to resemble European models. Essentially, these landscapes are throwing off the forms that settlers imposed on them, as a preliminary to switching to some new, unknown state. (144)

It is perhaps impossible to regain an intuitive feeling for the Earth’s vitality once it has been lost; or if it has been suppressed, through education and indoctrination. Even to retrieve a sense of it from the documentary record is very difficult, because written accounts of Gaian conceptions of the world are rare— simply because those who are most powerfully aware of nonhuman vitality have largely been silenced, marginalized, or simply exterminated by the unfolding of the very processes that lie behind the planetary crisis. (205)

In the end, all approaches to the planetary crisis, no matter whether technocratic or vitalist, must be judged by the same criteria, which have never been better summed up than by Pope Francis, in his 2016 encyclical, Laudato Si: “A true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” (233)