Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from Cooperative Evolution: Reclaiming Darwin’s Vision

August 6, 2023 – 1:11 pm

p. 1. Few were as far apart as the authors of this book when they first met in the 1970s. At  that time, a split was appearing in the practice of science. Traditionalists were persevering with the reduction of whole systems into their constituent parts, an approach that had led to the triumphs of the decipherment of the genetic code and the new science of genomics. A different way of thinking was combining science and new social movements. Post-normal science was beginning to accept that, for complex issues such as planetary climate change and global food security, scientists needed to practise their art where facts were uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. The authors met, 45  years ago, in the Department of Zoology at The  Australian National University (ANU). Chris Bryant was then a  reader, with a flourishing research group in parasite biochemistry. He had remained a reductionist, focusing his attention on the subcellular mechanisms of respiration in anaerobic organisms. Val Brown, having raised a family, was a mature-age PhD student working in the then-new field of holistic thinking as applied to the human sciences. She was already a fan of Lovelock’s space-engendered view of the Earth as a self-maintaining and self-organising planetary system he named ‘Gaia’.

p. 77 Reductionism has proved to be a useful tool in science, which progresses by accretion of knowledge, so that arguments improve as more of the unknowns become known. The contrasting view to reductionism is wholism: the idea that things can have properties as a whole (emergent properties) that cannot be understood from a simple knowledge of their individual parts. Even a quick look at evolutionary history suggests that the evolutionary process is a series of emergent phenomena. Emergent properties are generally the properties of complex systems, whose complexity is the consequence of many simple, reiterated, recursive interactions. Every major evolutionary event has led to consequences that a contemporary observer, from Mars, say, could not have predicted. … The whole of the biosphere, including human social systems, is an emergent consequence of the appearance of the first cell. To do them justice, many reductionists understood this phenomenon, but chose to ignore it in the process of studying what was possible, given the state of science at the time. Up to the middle of the twentieth century, the study of biological and human systems as a ‘whole’ was difficult, unreliable and time-consuming. It created an unfortunate but pragmatic situation, where things were studied more because they could be studied, rather than because they necessarily should be.

p. 78 The advent of genomics, the study of the highly variable genetic kit owned by all organisms (see, for example, Lesk 2017), brought about another wave of scientific reductionism. Readily available ‘cookbooks’ gave the simple and detailed instructions for gene sequencing and manipulation. Graduate students were exploited as intelligent workhorses to do the menial task of gene and protein sequencing. The cynical slogans ‘one polypeptide chain, one PhD’ and later, as techniques evolved, ‘one gene, one PhD’ were current around the turn of the twentieth century! The past is indeed a foreign country and, as LP Hartley remarked, they certainly did things differently there. The sense of the connectedness of things was lost during the Enlightenment when the scientific method of destructive analysis became de rigeur. Philosophers believed that understanding came from dissection, and much understanding did come. By unweaving the network of knowledge into its component threads, the philosophers of the time were so intoxicated by their so-called objective discoveries that they lost sight of the whole.

p. 94 Even a quick look at the evolutionary history in Chapter 3 suggests that the evolutionary process is built on a series of emergent phenomena. Although  emergent phenomena are commonplace, we rarely see them as such. Mistakenly, we tend to look at a whole as a static system – a  reductionist view – whereas in a dynamic system, wholes are consequences of the influences of other wholes. Recurrence of a different spring in the northern and southern hemispheres is a consequence of the spin of a planet with a tilted axis in a solar system. Individual plants and animals are consequences of a fertilised ovum. Humans are the consequence of a particular pattern of DNA expressed in a social and physical context. Microscopic examination of either an unknown seed or a fertilised egg gives no clues to its final destiny. WB Yeats wrote: O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? The nut that is planted becomes the ‘tree’ and the ‘tree’ is all of the things listed by Yeats in the one living form. One cannot know the ‘dancer’, nor the ‘dance’, by simply studying the choreography. ‘Dancers’ may be changed and the new ones master the same choreography with different interpretations, while the dance itself will be influenced by different settings.

p.120 , let us simply talk about cells, for the first modern cells are themselves tri- or tetra-symbionts: the interaction between two or more different cells living in close association, to the benefit of all parties. We now have a definition that includes the whole of biological creation. Individual animals and plants become symbiotic associations of cells.

p. 121

Rabbits make up for having a small, rabbit-sized intestine by eating their own faeces. This process is called coprophagy. At night rabbits produce soft, green, partially digested faeces and eat them, giving the microbes in their intestine a second go at breaking down cellulose. Important nutrients are synthesised by symbionts in the posterior, large intestine while absorption occurs in the anterior small intestine. What else can a poor rabbit do but recycle? Coprophagy also happens in rodents and it has been observed in koalas, ringtail possums, piglets, foals, dogs and nonhuman primates. Pigs regard human faeces as an excellent source of nutrition

p. 122 One truly remarkable mollusc, the sea slug Elysia, consumes algae and then makes use of their chloroplasts which go on photosynthesising for a considerable time, relocated in the skin of the sea slug and turning it into a ‘crawling green leaf’ (Mujer et al. 1996,

p. 123 The pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) has an endosymbiont bacterium called Buchnera; its primary role is to synthesise essential amino acids that the aphid cannot acquire from plant sap (Wilson et al. 2010). The tsetse fly Glossina has an endosymbiotic bacterium that is called, rather grandly, Wigglesworthia, a name that also commemorates a famous entomologist. Wigglesworthia synthesises vitamins that the tsetse fly cannot get from the blood it feeds on (Soumana et al. 2014). Without its endosymbiont, the tsetse fly could not survive – and the world would be free of the scourge of sleeping sickness

p. 124 Riftia is a marine worm that lives its strange life in close proximity to black smokers. Riftia lacks a gut and so relies for nutrition on endosymbiotic bacteria that can deal with this extreme environment (Bandi et al. 1999).

p. 143

One possible reason why the rate of change of mitochondrial DNA is greater than that in the nuclear DNA is because oxygen is dangerous stuff (Baker and Orlandi 1995). Mitochondria have to interact intimately with oxygen as it is used in energy metabolism. In making ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the ‘energy currency’ of the cell, they transfer electrons to oxygen to yield a molecule of water. In this process, highly reactive intermediate oxygen products that react with almost anything, including DNA, are produced. Damage to DNA is a constant possibility that must be avoided and there are protective molecules ready to scavenge the dangerous oxygen radicals. Even so, some of the highly reactive oxygen compounds do escape to do damage to important molecules and subcellular structures. Plants have to deal with the perils of oxygen in two systems; chloroplasts as well as mitochondria. Chloroplasts once were free-living anaerobic photosynthesisers producing oxygen as an end product of photosynthesis, and therefore have a much longer history of dealing with toxic oxygen than mitochondria. Perhaps they are better at it. They too have their antioxidants to deal with reactive oxygen. In any event, modern cells successfully crossed this barrier to symbiosis and the rest is all about you

p. 180

An Australian magpie of our acquaintance has taken the first step towards superstition. It has learned that it will probably get a morsel of food if it knocks on the window. Many birds do that, but this one hops down, waits until you open the door and then rapidly turns around on the spot. The number of turns, up to four, is a rough measure of its eagerness and appetite. It has been doing this for several years now, a behaviour that probably occurred accidentally on first acquaintance is now considered essential by the bird. It is in the position of the person who is an unfortunate performer of ritual behaviour to ensure a favourable outcome in a specific situation. Professional sportspersons often show this behaviour – footballers who insist on wearing the same socks for every game, cricketers who, when batting, perform a specific sequence of actions adjusting their armour before receiving the next delivery. It is not a great step from this to communities lighting ritual fires to ensure the Sun returns at the end of the winter. Such people – and, presumably the magpie – have an imaginary tiger by the tail. They dare not let go.

– p. 217

Studies have shown that infants in orphanages may die without emotional care before they are six years old. If they do not hear a language spoken before they are nine, they will never develop speech. If they do not use their hands (feet can replace them) as they grow, their thinking capacity will be limited. The conclusion is that humans are inherently social animals, co-dependent on opportunities for learning, and needing manual as well intellectual stimulation for growth. They learn to integrate with their social groups and learn of the rewards of cooperative behaviour.

p. 219

Genes for lactose tolerance have also spread rapidly through the British population in the last 2,000  years, presumably reflecting the historical growth of dairy farming. The introduction of milk in the diet had at least one unfortunate repercussion – the spread of tuberculosis (consumption) in Victorian England. In 1924 free milk (now tuberculin tested) in schools was introduced, and so a change of behaviours and increased health followed the first impact of the incorporation of a new component to the human diet; social evolution at its best.

p. 221

‘Survival of the fittest’ always conjures up in the popular mind the idea of competition. And that usually means, to the average farmer or gardener, competition between their crop plants and invading weed species. There is a famous cartoon from Punch of a beautiful cottage garden and a plaque on the cottage wall quoting TE Brown’s ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot’. The proud gardener is leaning on his wall and remarking to an admirer ‘You shoulda seen the mess it was in when God had it to hisself!’ A well-kept cottage garden (or farm) is so far out of natural equilibrium that it is indeed a battlefield requiring constant supportive assaults from gardener or farmer.

p. 223 Recently, a paper entitled ‘Gaia 2.0’, by Lenton and Latour (2018), put forward a plausible mechanism by which Gaia herself might evolve. It is derived from observations on automata that reset, or ‘reboot’ themselves. Each time they reboot, they tend to move to a condition of greater stability. Gaia has suffered half a dozen ‘great’ extinctions – or reboots – and 20-odd ‘lesser’ extinctions, in each case leading to a new period of stability during which complexity appears to have increased. Thus, each reboot is a resetting, as long as it is not a total extinction event, and Gaia can build on what has gone before. The evolutionary tendency is thus towards stability. Based on this, the so-called Anthropocene is merely a harbinger of a new steady state.

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Books History

Notes from The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Brith of the Classical Age from Persia to China by Christopher L Beckwith

July 21, 2023 – 1:56 pm

p. 6 “By the late 9th century BC, Central Eurasian speakers of Scythian, an Old Iranic language, developed horseriding and shooting from horseback and about a century later spread suddenly across the entire steppe zone of Eurasia, establishing an enormous empire. Partly because of the Scythian Empire;s brief unified existence, but mainly because of the linger prehjudice against pastoral peoples, the Scythians are not credited with any contributions to world civilisation, with the exception of better bows and arrows. Instead Herodotus credits many revolutionary changes in Ancient Near East civilisation to the Medes, mainly to their first historical king Cyaxares. However, close examination of these changes shows the Scythians were responsible to them.

p. 11 The usual rhetoric is that the Medes and Persians copied these weapons from the Scythians, but that is not correct. All evidence – including Herodotus – shows that the Medes were creaolized Scythians, or “scytho-Medes”, so their weapons were effectively native to them. The Persians were also partly crealized in the same way, though they remained distinct in language, as well as in many other respects, including their dress and weapons, which were identical to the Elamites at the time of Darius I.

p. 18 Perhaps the single most striking feature of the Empire under the Great King Darius I and his son Xerxes is their unprecedented, explicity belief in only one “Capital G” God, Ahura Mazda, whom they call Baga Vazarka “the (one) Great God. He was the God who created heave and earth – unlike the many “small g” gods or other Gods – and established the one Great King, the King of kings as ruler…. p. 19 Great God was the progenitor of the first king of the Scythians, whose lineage accordingly descended from God. It was the only legitimate royal line among Central Eurasian peoples for many centuries. “

p. 33 “Scythian culture did not spread by “influence” or “contact”, not to speak of “trade” or commerce along the “Silk Road”. These ideas, no matter hom popular they may be, do not conform to the data. The zone of Scythian culture did not expand in any of the ways many now think culture spreads. It spread beyond Scytia as a result of Scytian rule over large frontier areas at the edge of the steppe zone. … during the Persians’ rule of the Empire, they indirectly helped spread Scythian culture into neighbouring regions, increasing the territory where it was known and practices, because they continued to use the Scytho-Medes as the administrators of the Empire.”

p. 180 “The language of the Central Eurasian people near, and in, the crucially important ancient state of Chao in the Eastern steepe region on the northern Chinese frontier was Harya ‘Royal Scythian’… Chao was the home of Ch’in shih hunag ti, the First Emperor of China. He was born and raised in the capital Han-tan, the name of which is Scythian Agamatana… the name of Media’s capital.. The non-Chinese people of Chao and the region to the east of it, as well as the Hsiung-nu, whose homeland was in the Ordos steppe within the great bend of the Tellow River to the west of Chao, are all called Hu, Old Chinese Hara, in early Chinese sources, as are the Sai, Old Chinese Saka, ie Scythians, an East Scythian people licing to the west of Hsiung-nu territory in what is now Kazakhstan and the Ili River region of Jungaria and southwestward into Central Asia.. these people were contiguous neighbours and the arhcaeology has shown Hsiung-nu culture to be practically indeitical to western Scythian culture.

p. The single most famous shared feature of Classical culture in all of the nations that experienced a “Classical Age” is the appearance of philosophy in the strict sense, with a capital P: Philosophy. It was a new and unprecedented thing, and that particular period in the mid-1st century millennium BC is the only time in history that Philosophy flourished so spectacularly in those cultures…. Could Philosophy be a Scythian invention too? The first part of this chapter shows that the Greeks, Persians, Indians and Chinese were each taught by an early Scythian philosopher and thus experienced Scythian philosophy first-hand at about the same time, before there is any other sign of Philosophy per se in the lands where they taughter.

p 235 “The first great philsophers of Greece, China, India, Iran and Scythia who flourished between approximately 600 and 400BC were revolutionaries. They did something entirely new and unprecedented: all of them criticized and rejected the traditional beliefs and practices of the countries where they taught … Each one was arguably his adoptive culture’s earliest Philosopher … Chronologically they are

  1. Anacharsis the Scythian, a half-Greek Scythian who taught in Greece
  2. Zoroaster, a Scythian speaker who taught in the Scytho-Mede empire
  3. Gautama the Scytian Sage (who taught in northern India)
  4. Gautama (Lao-tan – Laotzu) who bears a Scythian name and taught in early China

each one is usually treated as if he belonged to a much later dominant local tradition, if he even existed. thus Anacharsis is supposed to have been a Greek cynic, Zoroaster a Late Zoroastrian Persian dualist, Buddha an Indiian pupil of Brahmanists and Hains, and Laotzu a mystical and inscrutable Chinese political theorist

p. 236 “Anacharsis was a Scythian prince who travelled to Greece in the 47th Olympiad (592-589BC) where he met Solon, a lawgiver considered to be one of the earliest pre-Socratic thinkers. The Greeks greatly esteemed Anacharsis, who is often listed as one of the Seven Sages of Antiquity, and Aristotle treats him as a major philosopher… indirect quotation “He wondered why among the Greeks the experts contend, but the non-experts decide.” The basic point of this comment is epistemological and sceptical, calling into question the basis of our entire cognitive ability, both individually and collectively. It is also a sceptical comment about the Greeks’ quasi-religious political belieg in “equality”. “

p. 242 Zoroaster… developed a perfectionistic, systematised version of steppe Scythian beliefs. Philosophiocally it is a unified religious-political system: virtuous monarchy both in Heaven and on Earth, valuing Truth and peaceful monarchistic Unity, while opposing Falsehood and warring polytheistic divisiveness. .. In the Achaemenid period Zoroaster’s teachings gradually merged with pre-Zoroastrian Mazdaidm to become Late Zoroastrianism, the first “world religion”.

p. 243 ” Hatama exounds a logical-epistemological system that denies the existence of a criterio to decide or judge between opposed absolute assertions or “views”… teachings are exclusively on ethics, particularly the problem of happiness of equanimity.”

p. 248 “There are other reasons for considering the Laotzu (the Tao te ching) to be inspired by Early Buddhism: its strictly philosophical teachings are traceable to the Buddha himself (not to the later, strictly religious forms of Buddhism, or Normative Buddhism, which contains much material foreign to Early Buddhism”… Laotzu’s core teachings are thus on logic, epistemology and ethics.He famously proposes to revolve conflicting antilogies by saying that they are bound to each other, that they are human creastions, that there are no inherent absolutes in nature: “When the whol world knows beauty as beautiful, ugly arises. When all know good, not-good arises. Existence and non-existence are born together. Long and short are mutually formed. High and low are mutually completed. Meaning and sound agree with each other. Before and after follow each other.”

p. 248 “It is easy to imagine that a Chinese who taught these exotic ideas would have been remember as ‘Guatama’ from the teacher’s frequent repetition of the name of the one who originally taught them, e.g. “Mast Gau(tama) says…)

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Miscellaneous

Notes from Beastly: A New History of Animals and Us

July 21, 2023 – 12:40 pm

p. 17 It’s mindboggling to imagine how they caught, kept alive and trasported the sheer numbers of dangerous animals brought to Rome 2,000 years ago. Carl Hagenback, a German animal dealer in the 1880s, gives us an inkling in his memoir, Beasts and Men. His father, a Hamburg fishmonger, ran a menagerie of lions, cheetahs and monkeys as a sideline, so when 14-year-old Carl was asked if he wanted to be a fishmonger or an animal dealer, there was no contest. So began a lifelong career in the trade that coupled his love for big wild animals with their capture.

“Here’s how to catch a giraffe, antelope or ostrich, chase them on horseback until they are out of gas. To catch a zebra, hire up to 2,000 men to surround the herd, drive them to somewhere they cannot escape, like a dry river bed with cliff sides and then (sorry) whip them with long lashes until they are so exhausted they can be fettered and tied. Elephants and young hippos were caught in pitfalls. Baboons were trapped at waterholes, pinned to the ground with forked sticks, muzzled, bound, wrapped in cloth and carrued suspended from a pole by two men, so that each captive looked like “a great smoked sausage!” On one momentous occasion in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) a group of captured baboons brought down a herd of 3,000 silver-grey hamadryas baboons from the hills by the din of their screaming. The radars made short work of the cage, released their clan, and beat off their human captors by the sheer force of their numbers. Hurray! Thei manes erect, they fought baring their teeth, beating the ground with their hands as they came. In this epic battle an injured infant was seen being swept up “by a great male from the very midst of the enemy”. Alas, most captives were less fortunate. Long caravanserais crept across deserts sands in the cool of moonlight, the shadows of giraffes or elephants walking in harness with drivers at their side. Hagenbeck reports wild baboons running beside the cages of their captive breathren, screaming to each other in an “ear-splitting chorus”. Lions and panthers were pulled by camels, other creatures were strapped to palisades and carried aloft. The six-week journey from Athara to Port Sudan required huge entourages of water carriers and shephers driving sheep and goats to provide fresh milk for the young animals or fresh meat for the carnivores. From the Red Sea to Suez, then by train to Alexandria, to catch a ship to Trieste, Genoa or Marseille, for the train to Hamburg. An unimaginable three-month journey. Those who didn’t make it fed those who did.”

p. 41 “On the Greek island of Lesbos, wading in the warm rock pools of the Pyrrha lagoon, a man is transfixed by the different crabs, sea anenomes, tiny fish, starfish and the vast assortment of life. His mind is not constrained by one god rustling up creatures in a matter of days. It’s 350 BCE…. Aristotle is free, robe slung over shoulder, to ponder and to observe. He collects specimens, cuts them open, inspects their anatomy. … Aristotle orders the animal world into a hierarchy, his Scala Naturae, a narrowing ladder that clims, getting warmer (and better) all the way up to Man. (Man indeed, ascribing them as hotter than women, and so the most perfect of all animals.) .. Aristotle belieced that everything in nature had a purpose. That while the perfect structure of each species lent the greatest advantage to itself, nature had made all things to benefit the next rung up the ladder, to lead inexporably (and purposefully) to us. To see the natural world as an ascending progression from the lower to higher orders became known as the Great Chain of Being. It is an outlook that persists deep in the human psyche and directs our attitudes (and language- spineless, bloodless) towards animals.”

p. 51 In 1637, an age beginning to tick-tock with the new mechanical marvels, the renowned French philosopher and scientists Rene Descartes dismissed animal behaviour as no different from the workings of a clock. Animals were complex automata, so if they yeled when you kicked them it was because of a conditioned reflec. Animals had neither language, nor intelligence, nor feelings, nor reason. All mental activity was located in the mind, which was located in the incorporeal soul – which animals did not have. Animals acted purely out of instinct; they could not fully express pain or pleasure or know anything. What a convenience. It was Descartes’ followers who nailed live dogs to t he dissection table and heard their howls as the screeching of gears. In 1674, ardent disciple Nicolas Malebranche … worte ecstatically “They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

p. 59 “Until recently Humboldt (1769-1859) had been ‘the great lost scientist’. The revolutionary idea that shaped his understanding of the natural world was the realisation he reached on his expeditions that everyting seemed somehow connected. And what journeys. In 1800 he and fellow explorer Aime Bonpland arrived at the vast South American tropical grassland plains of the Llanos, south of Caracas. Humboldt was struck by how much life gatehred around the tall, solitary Mauritia palms – birds fed on their fruit and their fanned fronds shaded the wind-blown soil that collcted around their trunks, keeping in moisture to provide perfect conditions for insects and worms. Each tree greated a community of life. Humboldt began to see nature as a dynamic living organism, and with that he was more than 100 years before his time. As they were paddled down the ‘Oroonoko’ hundreds and hundreds of large crocodiles lined their route, so numerous they were never out of view. Grazing along the banks were huge herds of capybaras, enormous guineapig-like rodents… escpaing the crocodiles, were as likely to run headlong into a jaguar’s jaws…. Humboldt rehected the man-centre conception of Nature of his predecessors. What he also observed was that rather than improviong nature, man’s interference most usually upset the natural nalance. The indigenous tribe showed him how Spanish monks took all the turtle eggs they could find from the riverbanks for oil to light their makeshift churchs in their remote missions, and how turtle numbers had fallen in consequence.”

p.62 Darwin 1836 “A book published anonymously that year would jog him along. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation rocked Victorian Britain by suggesting man was descended from the lower orders. The thory went that the Divine Maker had designed nature in his ‘terraqueous theatre” to progress, so that primitive life arose out of a vague electro-chemical process to develop gradually, from fish to repitle to mammal and upwards to man… Couched in pious tone, Vestiges remained respectful to God, if not to Genesis. The mystery author was rumoured to be Prince Albert, while men of the establishment suspected a female hand behind it for the guile and ‘hasty jumping to concluions’. It became an international bestseller. (In 1884, the author was revealed to be Robert Chambers, of the Chambers’ Encyclopedia family, 12 years after his death.) The buzz made its way into Benjamin Dsraeli’s 1847 novel Tracred, when Lady Constance explains how everything is proved by geology: “First there was nothing, then there was something; then – I forget the next- I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came – let me see – did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last .. Ah! that’s it: we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows”.

p. 64 In 9th-century Baghdad, the prolific Muslim polymath known as Al-Jahiz (CE 776-868) wrote books on many subjects: The Book of Misers about greed; The Art of Keeping One’s Mouth Shut; Against Civil Servants… His Book of Animals ran to seven volumers… his death at his home in Basra at the grand age of 93 was report as the consequence of being crushed by a toppling pile of books in his library. But this is what he wrote: “Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms the develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species, Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring.”

p. 75 “The German biologist Jakob don Uexkull (1894-1944) tried to imagine the world of an eyeless tick. waiying on a stem of grass for the whiff of butyric acid from the mammalian sevaceous follicles of a potential hairy host. A wait that could be as long as 28 years, until she leaps onto a passing meal of warm blood, embeds herself up to her neck (if she had one), gorges, then lays her eggs and dies. Uexkull believed any organism that reacted to sensory data should be judged a living subject and considered in terms of their sensory world. To describe an animal’s unique sensory surrounding world he used the term Umwelt. .. In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel concluded that a human cannot knwo what it is like to be a bat. His point being that a human imaghining being a bat was not a bat being a bat. Without echolocation, wings or fabulous ears, being unable to hang by our feet, without sleeping upsiode down or catching moths, we were on a losing wicket…. as the primatologist Frans de Waal points out, Nagel could not have reflected on what it felt like to be a bat at all had not an American zoologist named Donald Griffin, in 1940, tried to imagine how it was to be a bat, and so made the astonishing discovery of echolocation.

p. 94 In 2012 a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, which stated that all mammals, birds and many other creatures, octopiuses included, are conscious beings with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviour. The extraordinary thing is that it took so long. More extraordinary still, perhaps, is that it needed to be stated at all … the onus has been on providing incontrovertible proof, and until then we had to remain agnostic. Behaviourists also tended to ignore the golden rule of experimental science that absence of proof is not proof of absence. Antonio Damasio argues that reason actually requires emotion and feeling to guide behaviour and decisionmaking. yet we must still run the gauntlet with cautionary science if we want to talk about animal emotions.Pigs can ce stressed, their corticosteroid levels might rise, but they cannot be unhappy.”

p. 69 “Chuang Tzu and Hun Tzu had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed: “See how the minnows are darting about! That is the pleasure of fishes.”

“You not being a fish yourself,” said Hun Tzu, how can you possibly know what comsists the pleasure of fishes?”

“And you not being I,” retorted Chuand Tzu, “how can you know that I do not know?” Chuang Tzu on “The Pleasures of Fishes”

p. 98 Let the animals speak for themselves. “A chimpanzee walks down a track with her two young. The mother chimpanzee stops and looks back at her son lagging behind. Cat Hobaiter, a scientists studying chimpanzee body-language gestures in wild populations in Uganda, stops the video … ‘Right there,” Hobaiter says, pointing to where the mother is showing the heel of her foot and giving it a little widdle. This foot gesture is not very obvious (to us) but once Hobaiter had seen it a few times she worked out what it meant: Hop aboard. Each time the mother stopped and waggled her heel, the infant jumped on board.

Green herons lure fish into their range by dropping berries, twigs, feathers or crumbs of bait.

Archerfish knock insects from overhanding leaves and brancjes by firing jets of water up at them.

Burrowing owls collect mammal dung to attract dung beetles.

Caledonian crowds carry their favourite handy tools with them

p. 99 Kelly the dolphin learnt that whatever the size of the rubbish she collected from her pool at the end of the day she was rewarded… Kelly began to find lots and lots of small pieces of paper, for which she was rewarded with lots of fish. When the pool was drained for maintenance, a stash of paper was found under a rock. Kelly had her future fish supply banked by multiplying her harvest then rationing the humans with torn bits. But Kelly was about to hit the big time. One day a gull flew into her pool; she presented the drowned feathered prize to her trainer, who have her several fish. So Kelly saved some of the fish under her rock and used them to lure other gulls into the pool to ctach and get more fish. This involved planning and delayed gratification. She then taught her calf, who taught other calves, and gull-baiting in Mississippi’s Marine Life aquarium caught on.”

p. 238 Even moth parasites control their populations to protect the habitats they rely on. Dicrocheles mites live in the ears of noctuid moths. Although their occupation means breaking therough the tympanic membrance, which results in defeaning the moth’s ear, they will never migrate to the other ear. That would not do for a moth who needs to detect the echolcation calls of hunting bats … the mites send scouts across to the clear ear to lead any stray wayfarers back home.”

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Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from An Environmental History of the Caribbean: Sea & Land

July 20, 2023 – 11:20 pm

p 52 The islands, representing just 0.15 percent of the world’s land surface are home to over 2% of the world’s endemic plant species, 3% of the world’s amphibians, 5% of the world’s land snails and 6% of the world’s reptiles. Of the approximately 13,000 plants presently found in the Caribbean, about half are indigenous and unique to the region. The two continental islands of Trinidad and Tobago, sharing much with the mainland, harbour almost 7,000 plant species. Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, has the richest flora and about half of its approximately 6,000 species of flowering plants are unique to the island.”

p. 56 On a rather uninviting island such as Barbuda – low and flay, and made largly limestone, with thin soils and limited fresh surface water – the Amerindians cleared land through regular burnings. In addition to the nutrient bonanzas for their fields, they exploited lignum vitae, a drought-resistant hardwood spexies, and greenheart and torchwood, for fuel and house construction. They engaged in these practices for 14 centuries before abandoning their homeland ca 1300CE. When the Europeans arrived a few centuries later, the vegetation had rebounded. What seemed untouched and unoccupied was in fact secondary growth and a modified landscape.”

p. 57 Not n the scale of the Guianas and not generally in swampland, Native Americans in other parts of the Caribbean engaged in conuco agriculture – constructiving mounds, some as high as a meter and about 3 metres in circumference, in which they planted a mixture of crops – which helped preserve soil fertility and protected against erosion. Arranged in regular rows, the mounds improved drainage, permitted more lengthy storage of mature tubers in the ground, and made it easier to weed and harvest the crops. Even in places where soils were shallow and the limestone bedrock lay close to the surface, indigenous farmers enhanced their gardens and plots on which they grew cotton and food crops by adding nutrient-rich red clays and mxing it with organic matter to increase fertility. ALso Amerindian farmers allowed their lands to regenerate after a fairly short period of cultivation.

Following the Amerindian example, Europeans cleared land by burning the vegetation, but they did so on a massive scale. One early observer noted that “all the earth is black with cinfers”. The resulting rich soil was of course decieing. The assumption was that fertility was boundless, indinite … contemporaries occasionally expressed disquiet at the rapidity and extent of the destruction. Compared to the Caribs “who wisely left shady groves standing in the midst of their fields,” an observer on St Kitts in 1625 botes “the French cut and slashed right and left, intent on only clearing the ground as rapidly as possible, and without a thought of future protection against the sun.”… Europeans engaged in commercial monoculture that quickly exhausted soils; their sugar boiling houses introduced lead and mercury into the ground; increased mining, coal combistion and waste incineration have rise to the emissions of metals into the atmosphere… introducing livestock into a region with no previous history of large mammals, allowing them to roam and breed at will, led to soil compaction and considerable soil runoff.”

p. 59 The shoares, mangrove swamps and waterways … teemed with aquatic birds – tens of millions, it has been estimated, but home to fewer than 2 million today. “

p. 63 Among introduced mammals, dogs stand apart. In archaeological depoist they are found as fragmented, burned bone, indicating that Amerindians ate them, but they also appear in burials, both alone and associated with human remains. At one site in Guadelope, 16 dogs were found buried among 30 humans, four were interred at an individual’s feet, one was buried with four shell beads around its neck, another witha Queen Conch shell on the pelvis, and almost all of the dogs were buried with their pegs pulled together, as if bound. Most of the dogs were not from the island in which they were buried, and their diet was not dissimilar to humans, suggesting they fed on scraps and leftovers. In contrast to those found in burials, specimens found in middens are of larger stature, suggesting the possibility of distinct dog types that served dedicated purposes – some as hunting com[anions, others as food. Columbus duing his first voyage reported two types of dogs in the Bahamas: one akin to a larger mastiff, the other to a smaller terrier. He also encountered “dogs that never barked” on the north coast of Cuba… Archaeologists have noted the frequent absence of the fourth mandibular premolar in Caribbean dogs, which may represent the intentional removal of teeth to facilitate tethering by the mouth… According to Fray Ramon Pane, the Taino revered a canin zemi, Opiyelguobiran, the guardian spirit of the dead, as their guide to the underworld.”

p. 71 The Caribbean basin was the last region of the Americas to be settled. The earliest record of human habitation on the continental portion bates 16,00-14,000 BP in what is now Colombia and Venezuela, and 13,000-10,000BP elsewhere. About 10,000 BP bands of hunters and forgares frequented what became Trinidad prior to the island’s separation from the mainland following sea-level increase… attributed to its size, its proximity to the mainland, and its lack of hurricane destruction, since it lies on the margins of the tropical hurricane belt. These three factors help explain Trinidad’s high biodiversity, which served as another inducement to colonisation.

About 7,000 to 6,000 BP, other migrants left Central America and settled in Cuva and Hispaniola.

p. 73 “The motives of migrants … are hard to decipher. Population pressure, lack of food, limited carrying capacity, drastic environmental change and conflict situations may have played a role but do not seem pivotal. More likely the islands were attractive for settlement. Available land could support tropical agriculture. Abundant marine life more than compensated for the lack of terrestrial fauna.”

p. Archaic Antilleans were more than mobile hunters. Some communities set down roots and decame sedentary. Arhcaic Age Indians made pots long before the beginning of the so-called Ceramic Age. As early as 4,600 BP, Archaic Age communities in Cuba began using pottery in small quantites,. In addition, and array of plants, grains and fruit trees – sapodilla, wild avocado, yellow sapote, primrose and palms – have been idenitified in Archaic Age deposits. These earliest Antilleans also cultivated maize. They used tools, often made of shell, to feel trees, dig heavy soils and process plants. Since at least 3,300 BP in Puerto Rico, “the Antillean botanical trinity of manioc, sweey potatoes and maize” existed.”

p. 80 Since the last Ice Age glaciation, otherwise known as the Holocene epoch (11,700 years ago to the present), the Caribbean has experienced more mammalian extinctions than any other global region. Before humans arrived, the Antilles contained a remarkable 130-40 terrestrial species, including sloths, insectovores, primates, rodents and bats, but only 73, just over half, have survived… The end of the last glaciation produced significant environemntal change … but correlating the dates of extinction of native mammals and the presence of human demonstrates widespead overlap. On Hispaniola and Cuba, humans and sloths likely coexisted for more than 1,000 years. On Jamaica, a species of monkey persisted into the period of human occupation, making it likely that its extinction was antropogenically driven.”

p. 94 On Cuba, shipbuilding had a greater impact on forests than ranching. Because Cuban hardwoods proved so durable and value, local officials developed an interest in conserving them. As early as 1550, the Havana city council … prohibited enslaved blacks from cutting mahogany and cedar within a radius of 2 leagues around the city. Two years later, they banned nonreisndets and ships of foreign flags from felling and exporting trees… By the early 18th century, when Havanna was Spain’s most important shipyard, royal edicts reserved the best woodlands for ship building.”

p 98 “The true ecological maelstrom to hit the Caribbean involved the transformation to sugar. Barbados’s rapid conversion to a fully commercial sugar economy destroyed its forest cover within a generation.. sugar cultivation began in eanest in Barbados in the 1640s, and towards the end of the decade 40% of the island’s forests were gone; by the next decade, alarmed island authorities began restricting timber cutting; by then, it was too late. By the late 17th century, the island’s open landscape reverberated to the sound of turning windmills rather than burdsong… Soil erosion was such that one heavy downpour in 1668 carried hundreds of coffins from a local churchyard out to sea.”

p. 118 The green and hawksbill turtles are iconic Caribbean marine animals. One estimate of the pre-Columbian number of green tutleds … ranges from 33 million to 39 million; another calculates the population at 91 million adults, and a third, based on the carrying capacity of seagrass beds, is a startling 661 million. If these numbers seem esaggerated, recall that early Europeans spoke of the seas being “thick” with turtles and ships “bathing in them”. For hawkbills, the pre-Columbian estimates are from half a million to 11 million. The present day numbers are 300,000 and 30,000 respectively.”

p. 142 “The population debate carries major significance for the disease history of the Americas. The larger the estimates, the larger the disease catastrophe that befell Amerindians. The smaller the estimates, the more plausible it is to suppose that diseases played only a modest role and that vioence, starvation and other causes of death mattered more. Low counters often reject the notion that the pathogens might have run ahead of contact and killed large numbers of people who had never seen Europeans or africans.

p. 154 As late as a century ago, Polnesian populations still suffered terribly from infectious disease. In the sping of 1911, measles killed about 19% of the people on the island of Rotuma. On Samoa, 22% of the population succumbed to t he 1918 flu in a few weeks. The influenze pandemic killed the inhabitants of French Polynesia at 31 times the rate it killed people in France (15.5% vs 0.5%). Medical care had little impact on flue victims in 1918; a tender grandparent was just as effective as the best doctor, whether in Papeete or Paris. The difference lay partly in population density and partly in prior exposure to a wide variety of respiratory pathogens and the preparedness of immune systems.”

p. In 1647 yellow fever made its deadly debut in the Caribbena, signaling the advent of a new disease regime and a second syndemic. The yellow fever epidemic lasted five years, killing 15% of Barbados’s po;ulation and about 30-35% of Havanna’s, to take the best -documented cases, and faded out in 1652.But the new syndemic continued for two centuries. Several disease formed a cluster of infection, all of them made either possible or more prevalent by the social oppression characteristic of the Caribbean in the age of slavery. The architects of the new socioeconomic order accidentlaly built a paradise for pathogenms, and a hell on earth for humankind. The plantation regime helped shape the disease regime, while the disease regime helped shape the plantation regime.”

p. 253 Humboldt was correct in seeing that the colonial stsrem was fracturing even as the Caribbena region came under the influence of the rising new power to the north. Haiti proclaimed its independence from France in 2804; the rimland colonies of Venezuela, Colombia and Panama threw off the Spanish imperial yoke in 1819, and the Dominican Republic emerged from Haitan occupation in 1844. A sharpe critic of colonial exploitation, Humboldt was in favour of states conrolling their own destinies. ..he did not anticipated that the United STates, by both formal and infomal means, would repalce European nations as the hegemonic imperial power in the region.Through trade, investment and capital flows, as well as invasions, occupations and aquisitions, the United States came to dominate the region. As early as the mid 19th century, it was the single largest market for Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s exports (primarily sugar), absorbing almost half of their output; in 1851, the US consul in Havanna declared Cuba a de factor economic dependency of the US. As a result, the Caribbean areas has given rise to some of the longest-alsting examples of colonialism in world histroy.. Today Anguilla, the three Cayman Islands, and Montserrat are among the last colonies in the world; Martinique and Guadeloupe are oversease departements of France and Puerto Rico is an internally self-governing territory of the US, and as some would say, the oldest colony in the world.”

p. 258 Cuba was stripped of its vast forests in little over a century – the island was 80% forested in the early 19th century, but only about 15% remained in the early 20th – due to t he freedom private property owners had to fell their woodlands and the highly industrialised and mechanised form of sugar production that consumed vast amounts of lumber and firewood… Puerto Rico, where forest covered just 10% of the island in the 1940s, but recovered 40% a half-century or so later … largely a function of the scale of agricultural abandonement and secondary woodland replacement, which produced a more homogenized forest than ever before.. Haiti .. in the 1920s forest covered about 60% of the country; today, the percentage is contested but at best 30%. Accompanyiong this extensive land clearance has been major soil loss, gullying,, landslides and silting of streams.” (mostly fo charcoal as the primary source of domestic energy)

p. 259 Technological changes, such as the growing use of pesticides, have had negative consequences. Bauxite mining, significant in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Siriname and Guyana, is particularly damaging, leaving behind toxic red mud lakes and polluting groundwater aquifers. The introduction of alien animal species is no longer on the scale of the early arrival of deomsticated livestock, but has had enduring aftereffects. For example, the mongoose, a motably voracious predator, was transplanted in the late 19th century to eradicate canefield snakes, but went on to kill rice rates, nesting birds, and the Ciban solenodon. Extinctions have continued to mount in modern times: the Cuban red amcaw in 1864, the Martinique muskrate in 1902, the monk seal in 1952.”

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Notes from Revolution: An Intellectual History by Enzo Traverso

July 20, 2023 – 9:09 pm

P. 28 During the 20th century we became accustomed to victories and defeats as military clashes; revolutions cornered power with weapons, defeats took the form of military coups and fascist dictatorships. The defeat we suffered at the turn of the 21st century, however, must be measured by different criteria. Capitalism has won because it has succeeded in shaping our lives and our mental habitus, because it has succeeded in imposing itself as an anthropological model, a ‘way of life’. The most powerful armies are not invincible. The peasants of Vietnam, one of the poorest countries in the world a century ago, succeeded, through a struggle that can justly be defined as heroic, in defeating, first, Japanese and French colonialism, and then, despite the napalm attacks, American imperialism. What we have not managed to stop, however, is the ongoing process of universal commodity deification that, like an octopus, is enveloping the entire planet. Capitalism took its revenge through the current Vietnamese economic boom.

P. 44 

Railways also offered a metaphor for both the circulation of capital and its cyclical crises. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has brilliantly shown, the concept of circulation, previously related to the lexicon of biology and physiology, in the 19thcentury enlarged its scope and was quickly metaphorized to express systems of communication and the unification of the social body. Circulation meant a healthy body, whereas any static element appeared as an obstacle or a symptom of disease. Cities, territories and nations began to be viewed as living bodies, the objects of what Foucault would later call modern bio politics. Schivelbusch quotes a popular book by Maxine du Camp, published at the time of Huassmann’s reshaping of the French capital under the Second Empire, which was significantly titled Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions, as vie. The wide boulevards that replaced the old labyrinth of small streets and redesigned the structure of the city along modern, rational lines, mean “a double system of circulation and respiration”. The social concept of “traffic” joined the physiological concept of circulation. According to Marx, circulation is, alongside production, a crucial moment of capital’s life, and the link between them is time. The three volumes of Capital depict a conceptual totality: the linear, homogenous time of production in the first volume; the cyclical time of circulation in the second, where Marx analyses the process of rotation and enlarged reproduction of capital; and the organic time of capital in the third, where he reconsistitutes the entire process as a unity of the time of production and the time of circulation”

P. 52 Machines are motors that replace the muscular energy of workers and animals… radically modify the old metabolic pathways between human beings and nature… introduce an anthropological break between ‘labor’ and ‘labour power’ which Agne Heller has depicted as the transition from a ‘paradigm of work to a ‘paradigm of production’ Now, socialism meant liberation from Labour rather than rough labour … .. This conception contains the premises of a socialist utopia grounded on an idea of total freedom and human liberation from any material constraint, and t the same time a dangerous idealisation of technology that announces the controversial relationship between socialism and ecology in the 20th century. In fact, Marx’s entire ouvre is shaped by an unresolved tension between the two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, a positivist attempt – so typical of the time – to discover the ‘laws of motion’ of the capitalist mode of production and, beyond capitalism of history, which resulted in the evolutionary scheme of the succession of social formations described in his introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ON the other hand, a dialectical vision of history as an open process, made of unpredictable turns and bifurcations, with a predetermined direction and whose final result depends on human agency. In this second conception, the development of productive forces – science, technology, motors, machines etc – was a premise for both socialism and a negative dialectic that reinforced exploitation and destroyed nature itself. This tension between a ‘determinist’ and a ‘constructivist’ Marx, that never found a satisfactory resolution in his work, makes sterile the antipodal portraits of him either as a ‘Promethean’ advocate of productivity or the forerunner of modern political ecology.

P. 96 It was Walter Benjamin, a heterodox Marxist, who turned Marx’s metaphor upside-down. He proposed a radically anti-positivist historical materialism that would have ‘annihilated in itself the idea of progress’….famous theses on the concept of history contain the following sentence: ‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely the human race – to activate the emergency brake.” … Marx celebrated the ‘demonic energy’ of industrial capitalism and the rising workers’ movement. Benjamin wrote in 1940, when it was ‘midnight in the century’. Today railways evoke Aushwitz sooner than glorious revolutions. 

P. 79

At the end of 1918, when he was Commissar for the Arts in Vitebsk, Marc Chagall painted Forward, Forward, a canvas which he described as a study for the anniversary of the October Revolution…portrays the Revolution as it was perceived by its actors, a jump towards the future and a feeling of weightlessness. This feeling can very well coexist with the worst material conditions – the ravages of war, food shortages, penury – and arises from the deep conviction that everything is changing, that the old world is finishing and a new one is coming, brought about by a transformation from below.Building a new society is a difficult task, a titanic ambition that requires enormous sacrifices and whose outcome still remains uncertain, but the present is shaped by this gravity, a sensation that affects bodies like an electric pulse and energises them. Revolution is also a corporeal experience.”

P. 82 The events of Hune 1848 revealed the birth of a new political body: the constitution of the oppressed and the labouring classes into a historical subject. In his recollections Tocqueville mentions some individual figures, and even describes the barricades, bit it is only when speaking of his own class that he distinguishes its members (‘landlords, lawyers, doctors’) Describing the popular classes of Paris, he paints them as a single body that acts by moving its different organs.. This people acted as a conscious body, what Marc, in the same years, called ‘a class for itself’. .. IN My Life (1929) Leon Trotsky devotes similarly striking pages to portraying the effervescence of Petrograd in 1917 and the awakening of its proletarian classes. He did not write as an external observer but as a leader of the revolution , and so it was from inside the people itself that he experienced the molecular process through which it moved to the centre of the political stage. This meant, n his words, ‘the inspired frenzy of history’ This frenzied inspiration was eminently creative…Trotsky explained the way in which he himself, a leader, had been absorbed by a people who ‘suggested’ the words of his speeches to him and transformed them into the wilful expression of an unconscious collective process”

P. 126 Some pages of Literature and Revolution sketch an impressive image of a future nature completely reshaped by technology and leading to a redefinition of human life itself. .. In a socialist future, men ‘will be accustomed to look at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life’. .. According to the principles of functionalism, art will be ‘formative’ rather than ‘ornamental’ and will achieve a new a harmonic relationship with nature, not in a Rousseauiam sense – a romantic return to the primal and idyllic ‘state of nature’ but rather thought the complete submission of the planet to the needs of a superior civilisation. This would bring significant changes in distribution of mountains and rivers, forests and seashores…. In his anthropocentric view, the relationship between human beings and nature had to be hierarchical… socialism would reshape human life itself by accomplishing a bio political plan that would ultimately take a eugenic form’.

P. 146 Antonio Gramsci elaborated an impressive theory of socialism as redemptive of (rather than liberation from) labour… Whereas Taylorism transformed workers into ‘trained gorillas’ by breaking the ‘pschyo-physical nexus of qualified professional work’ socialism would re-establish such a nexus on a superior level, by creating a ‘new type’ of conscious worker, able to control and manage the labour process in which he was involved. This superior kind of producer and human being, Gramsci stressed, was the outcome of an almost eugenic plan: “A forced selection will ineluctably take place; a part of the old working class will be pitilessly eliminated from the world of labour, and perhaps from the world tout court.” This regenerated ‘superior’ specimen would possess some corporeal and ascetic habits forged by his role as producer. … Proletarian power, he explained, meant ‘self-coercion and self-discipline (like Algiers trying himself to the chair)”… this biopolitical reshaping of human beings as productive and disciplined bodies fetishised both the homo faber and the development of productive forces. The advent of the New Man as an ascetic producer was incompatible with the hedonism of the socialist ‘winged Eros’. 

P. 148-9 

“The Atlantic Revolutions of the last quarter of the 18th century – a cycle of uprisings that swept from America to France to Saint-Domingue (Haiti), establishing the ideological and political bases of our modernity – are deposited in essentially national memories. They were obviously correlated n the consciousness of their actors, but their entanglement did not produce supranational memories: whereas the American and French revolutions are frequently opposed as two antipodal paradigms, the Black Jacobins have been silenced for a century and half and therefore excluded from an essentially Western revolutionary canon. .. At once an omnipresent heritage and an ungraspable memorial object, revolutions have today again become, to use Edmund Burke’s famous phrase exhumed by Marx and Engles, ‘spectres haunting Europe’. They speak to us of the past but perhaps they are still announcing the future. Their universal legacy is, first of all, a concept. If the world ‘revolution’ is old, it is only after 1789 that it takes on, in all languages, its modern significance. Borrowed from astronomy, it was previously used to designate a ‘rotation’, meaning the re-establishment of stable institutions after a period of troubles. This is how the British defined their ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688… while the upheaval led by Cromwell in the 1640s was considered a ‘Civil War’. .. [US] their rebellion was a ‘War of Independence’ and one would have to wait two decades for it to become the ‘American Revolution’. 

P. 159 “Roman Law, Agamben argues, distinguished between auctoritas and potetas: the first embodied by a personal, physical, one could say ‘biopolitical’ authority; the second by a juridical and representative body. The state of exception was the junction of auctoritas and potestas, ‘Two heterogeneous yet coordinated elements’, in the figure of the dictator”. This distinction is the source of two opposed currents in the history of juridical thought: o the one hand, the thinkers of political sovereignty and, on the other, those of juridical positivism: decisionism versus normativism, the two traditions in embodied in the 20th century by Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsey. Schmitt thinks of the state as forged and shaped by an existential and political will (Nomos); Kelsen, on the contrary, as a structure of formalised norms. The former posit is the priority of power; the later that of law. For decisionism, I is power that determines the norm, as the original source of any juridical system; for normativisim, on the contrary, it is the law that determines power, which exists only thanks to a system of rules that structure it. In fact, power is usually the resul of a combination of force and law… That is why Weber did not which to dissociate force (Macht) from legitimacy (Herrschaft).

P. 162 

“In the 1790s, the philosophical background of counterrevolution was irrationalism, which considered the idea of a world regulated by reason as downright nonsensical. Created by God, the world of Legitimism was organised by Providence, not reason… Burke, however, represented the ‘moderate’ current of counter-revolution; he was attached to the juridical framework of the British monarchy, had approved of American independence and looked positively on the development of market society. In continental Europe, counterrevolution was far more radical and sometimes took on an almost apocalyptic favour. It thinkers considered social and political inequalities to be just s natural as the vocation of human beings to obey their superiors. Contemptible and descpicable, mankind deserved only to be chastised. History was a torrent of blood, a perpetual massacre, a slaughter in which human beings were punished for their sins. Authority, hierarchy, discipline, tradition, submission and honour; these were the values of counterrevolution.”

P. 167 

“In the 1920s the profile of counterrevolution also changed.The collapse of the European dynastic order fixed by the Congress of Vienna.- what Karl Polanyi defined as “The Hundred Years Peace” – had rendered obsolete that philosophy which, for a century, had inspired the partisans of order and found its pillars in Catholicism, anti-republicanism and conservatism… the right became ‘revolutionary’ and conquered a mass support that it did not have, except for very short periods, in the previous century. .. Nationalism acquired symbols and rituals borrowed from a Jacobin model – the people in arms – previously abhorred. It’s leader, often of plebeian origins, had discovered politics in street fights and the revolutionary lexicon suited them better than parliamentary rhetoric.”

P. 184 

“For Ernst Bloch, the author of The Principle of Hope (1954-9), the dreams of a better world arise from the tensions of a ‘non-synchonic’ world, in which different and sometimes antipodal temporalities, belonging to different eras, coexist in the same social space. In his view, this heterogenous structure of historical time – he called it Ungleichzeitigkeit – is the source of utopian thinking and imagination, in which the past and the future merge to invent a new aesthetic and intellectual configurations. Thus, his work consisted primarily in excavating the past as an inexhaustible reservoir of experiences, ideas and objects that hear witness to the search for a liberated future: imprints, vestiges, traces (Spuren) of collective dreams, the images that portray a desired community of free and equal human beings. The principle of Hope, a three volume book like an impressive encyclopaedia of utopias, is paradoxically devoid of any prediction of a future world. It is rather a historical investigation of ‘future pasts’, a critical inventory of the innumerable ways in which people have gained or ‘anticipated’ the future down the ages… Bloch is a kind of archaeologist who, with incredible erudition, patiently unearths and recomposes the ‘daydreams’ of our ancestors : exhibitions, circuses, dancing, travel, songs, movies and more. Bloch analyses utopias inscribed into the entire spectrum of human knowledge, from medicine to architecture, via aesthetics and technology.. on the one hand there is the ‘cold stream’ of utopias prefiguring a hierarchical, authoritarian and oppressive order like Plato’s Republic, Saint-Simon’s New Industrial Order, and Etienne Cabet’s Icaria… on the other hand, the ‘warm stream’ of libertarian and communist utopias well represented by Thomas more, Charles Fourier and Karl Marx… in the 20th century, the apocalyptic age of wars and revolutions, utopias had become both concrete and possible, abandoning their previous character of abstract fantasy.”

P. 226 “In France and Western Europe, the word ‘intellectual’ is usually related to the Dreyfus affair, the political crisis that deeply shook the Third Republic. .. Before that the word existed and was used – infrequently – to designate certain new actors or modernity: scholars, writers, journalists, clerks, lawyers, in short people living by the pen. Th word often took a negative meaning. Unlike ‘intellect’, a noble human faculty – the ‘intellectual’ was cast as a modern, ‘cerebral’ agent, divorced from nature, condemned to sterile and uncreating thinking, shut inside an artificial world made of abstract values.”

P. 227 “Unlike in France, where intellectuals were well represented within the institutions of the Third Republic – above all the universities which, including the Sorbonne, were Dreyfusard bastions – in Germany the gulf between scholars (Gelehrte) and intellectuals (Intellektuelle) was almost insuperable and even deepened under the Weimar Republic. There, scholars belonged to state institutions, embodied science and order, and transformed the universities into strongholds of nationalism. Whereas academics educated the superior layers of state bureaucracy and selected the political elites, the real of intellectuals was located in civil society, outside the academy. Temples of tradition, some of the best inverse ties were located in small cities and rural regions. The intellectuals, on the contrary, were at home in the big cities, where they emerged with the rise of a powerful culture industry.”

P. 230 in Russia “they were a minority of outcasts, in a twofold sense: on the one hand, as a group of cultivated people in a nation of illiterate peasants, and on the other, as representatives of literature, journalism and liberal arts in a society with a still embryonic and repressed public sphere. Their clash against absolutism pushed them towards political radicalism, and tsarist despotism pushed them towards political radicalism.”

P. 239 “In contrast to anarchism, which always welcome bohemian artists and writers as its own natural representatives, Marxism looked at the intelligentsia which suspicious, never quite coming to terms with a strange actor that appeared simultaneously attractive and highly repulsive. Insofar as Marxist thinkers were themselves intellectuals – sociologically speaking at least – such paradoxical behaviour clearly revealed a crisis of identity and a reluctant self-definition. This uncanniness began with Marx and Engles …”

P. 245 “a) intellectuals are a bourgeois layer b) they can join the proletariat only by deserting their own class c) the proletariat needs the intellectuals in order to build its socialist ideology d) déclassé intellectuals – lumpen or bohemians – are an unstable and unreliable social stratum that tends to join the political reaction, as in France in 1848. One of the most striking aspects of this debate lay in self-negation: nobody was ready to admit that the overwhelming majority of Marxist leaders, activists and thinks were themselves déclassé intellectuals… Wedded to a teleological vision of history that posited the transition from capitalism to socialism as an ineluctable process bringing the triumph of science, culture, technological progress and a higher development of productive forces, Marxist thinkers could not imagine these colossal accomplishments being carried out by marginal actors.”

P. 246 “Michael Bakunin ,a wandering anarchists coming from the Russian aristocracy, lucidly recognised that the transition from the ruling classes to the radical left implied a willing declassement.”

P. 270 “‘Artists are often outsiders and transgressors,’ writes Michael Lowry, ‘but few of them embody as many boundary-defying qualities as Claude Cajun: lesbian, surrealist, dissident Marxist, non-Jewish Jew, photographer, poet, critic and Resistance activist. Claude Cahun was an heiress, in Bourdieu’s sense of the word, since she had bourgeois origins – her father was an established publisher and her uncle, the literary critic Marcel Schwab”

P. 278 “Whereas the introduction of Marxism in China expressed both the powerful attraction of European modernity and a critical reassessment of Confucian culture, in Dutch Indonesia it reflected a new relationship between nationalism, anti-imperialism and the Islamic tradition amongst a young generation of intellectuals who, like their Chinese comrades, had experienced both Japanese and Western emigration. This was the case of Tan Malala.. introduced to Marxism by Hank Sneevliet, one of the leaders of Dutch socialism and a founder of the Indonesian Community Party. …  during the 1920s .. ravelled throughout the east, from China to Thailand, from the Philippines to Singapore, as an agent of the Communist International, being arrested several times. 

P. 334 “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘ freedom’ becomes a special privilege.” Rosa Luxembourg, The Russian Revolution.

P. 380 Herbert Marcuse “Freedom is living without toil, without anxiety: the play of human faculties. The realisation of freedom is a problem of time: reducing of the working day to the minimum which turns quantity into quality. A socialist society is a society in which free time, not labour time is the social measure of wealth and the dimension of the individual existence.” (Preface 1957 to Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today.

P. 446

 1920 “the Bolsheviks organised a Congress of the People’s of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Society Socialist Republic which convened almost 2,000 delegates from 29 Asian nationalities … despite their small number among the delegates, women played an important role in the discussions. The chairmanship was equal – two male and two female presidents – and the question of women’s rights was put on the agenda. The Turkish feminist Najiye Hanukkah insisted that there was no national liberation without women’s emancipation and claimed a complete civil and political equality for women in the East. Their struggle, she emphasised, went well beyond “the right to walk in the street without wearing the chador”. … congress prefiguring “what today would be called intersectionality”. 

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Notes from Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees

July 17, 2023 – 8:32 am

P. 33 The ancient forests of Mount Lebanon contained junipers, firs, and pines, but only cedars became literary metaphors and economic indicators. The reason is resin. Cedar wood contains organic polymers that resist shrinkage, warpage and rot, making it ideal for woodworking. Additionally, its resin can be refined into medicines and salves as well as agents for calking, wood preserving and embalming. When 20th century archaeologists exhumed a ship beside the Great Pyramid of Giza, the 4,500 year old planking still smelled wet. Egypt obtained its everlasting wood from Phoenicia, a group of coastal city states in present-day Lebanon and Syria. Every major power in the ancient Near East traded with Phoenician timber merchants. According to the Torah, some of the best cedar ended up in Jerusalem, after ing Solomon of Israel contracted with King Hiriam of Tyre. Solomon finished the First Temple in aromatic cedar, and for himself constructed an opulent residence called the House of the Forest of Lebanon…. In a wood scarce region, conquest led to recycling. No city has been conquered more times than Jerusalem. P. 34 Through radiocarbon dating, researchers have discovered that Al-Aqua Mosque… was built in part with decaf beams reclaimed from Roman temples, which themselves were made with material taken from the monuments of Herod, the Jewish king who erected the Second Temple. The plunder goes back further, Nebuchadnezzar II sacked Solomon’s Temple in the 6th century BCE… by the Europhrates, Nebuchadnezzar raised a cedar-roofed palace and a decaf- jointed ziggurat. … IN the second century, Hadrian placed the equivalent of 100 “no trespassing” signs around Mount Lebanon. … Today, scrubland surrounds these Roman boundary stones, and people dig around them, looking for buried treasure. P. 3 In the early medieval period, for the first time, large numbers of people moved to the Levantine high country, Mount Lebanon became a refuge for ethnoreligious minorities, notably Maronites (eastern Catholics) who cleared forests and terraced land for cereal crops. On a continuing basis, locals cut trees for firewood and charcoal. Highlanders also tended goats, which nibbled the understory to the ground each season. Conifers did not evolve with mammals, much less grazers. It takes decades for a Cedric’s Lisa I to reach sexual maturation and produce its distinctive upright cones. .. p. 35 Starting around 1550, European pilgrim tourists began journeying to the top of the Qadisha Valley to see these incorruptible relics of biblical time. Visitors obsessively enumerated the grove’s remaining @Ancient Ones@ – specimens coeval with Creation, or the Deluge, or the Prophets… 16th century tallies varied from 23 to 28. The problem became proverbial. The Cedars of Lebanon cannot be counted. By the 19thcentury, the number of “Patriarchs” or “Saints” had fallen as ow as five or ten… p. 39 A new age began in the 1990s. The government gave blanket protection to the national tree, established new reserves, and authorised new plantings of the species. Fr its part, UNESCO gave World Heritage designation to the Qadisha Valley, including the famous grove, now called Arz el-Rab (Cedars of God) in Arabic…. Modellers predict that by 2100 only a handful of high-altitude locations on Mount Lebanon will be able to support cedar – assuming that people continue to assist their migration and defence.”

P. 48 Gingkos even lived through an end of time at the end of the world – Year Zero at Ground Zero. As Hiroshima burned, scores of injured residents who survived the initial impact ran to Shukkein Garden – 1,370 metres from the epicentre – and perished amid the skeletonised trees, including an almost toppled ginkgo. Defying death, the tree used out new buds and generated a second layer of annual good, a double ring for 1945. To this day, the leaning gingko stands… Each autumn peace activists come to collect seeds for distribution around the world… gingko is longevous on two scales – in evolutionary age as a Claude and in biological age as individuals. … At the organismimal level, it avoids senescence, as recently proven at a cellular and molecular levels. A gingko’s ability to do the stuff of living – growing full-sized leaves, photosynthesising, generating viable sperm and seeds, producing anti-microbial chemicals – doesn’t decline over time. Wood production declines slightly past two centuries, but not enough to shift a gingko from its default mode of immortality. The organism dies from external stress, not internal aging…. Catalstrophic injury can lead to life renewal, thanks to lignotubers and aerial roots”… like olives, gingkos hollow out, denying scientists of tree rings and radiocarbon dating going back ten centuries or more.”

P. 50 “Since the 19th century, plant hunters, mainly Westerners, have searched the mountains of China for the oldest, wildest gingkos. To the Chinese, “wild” has little cultural resonance, and little practical meaning. All the land below 1,000 meters in elevation was deforested in ancient times. .. a few old gingko populations exist – as demonstrated by genetic testing – in highland refugia. One of these remnant groups grows adjacent to an important Buddhist monastery at Tianmushan, Zhenjiang province. Did monks plant these trees, or did monks plant themselves here because of these trees?

P. 82 “Firm evidence that baobabs can live 1,000 years came in the 1960s… Southern Africa will continue to get hotter and drier, shrinking the habitat … for as long as ecologists have studied the baobab – just one century – they’ve noted a paucity of young trees as well as centuries gaps between mature cohorts. This is characteristic of various slow-growing, long-lived trees. … the multi year co-occurrence of atmospheric and soil conditions needed for seedling recruitment simply happens rarely. Now that people and livestock have greater footprints and hoof prints – and now that industrial countries have irrevocably alterered he climate of the planet. Who know when that optimal sequence will recur in Africa… now required human care for baobab to remain. 20th century Africa inspired two remarkable tree-planting NGOs. The Men of Trees led by Richard Sr Barbe Baker, and later the Green Belt Movement led by Wangari Marathai. Of the two, Maathai’s Christian feminist indigenous environmentalism seems capable of longer life. Maathai understood the intersectional possibilities of stewarding land, empowering women and reforming government. As the Nobel laureate once said: “ You have to nurture it, you have to water it, you have to keep at it until it becomes rooted so it can take care of itself.@ She was talking about a tree, and she was talking about so much more.

P. 86 As dated by the molecular clock, the Taxus family evolved around the end-Cretaceous extinction event. Taxus does well in oceanic climes, and it thrived in the Tertiary period when the planetary north was mild and humid. Then came the Quaternary, when extreme climatic oscillations dried, iced, thawed and re-iced the European subcontinent. Once a hotspot of conifer diversity, Europe was repeatedly, progressively, deconiferised.  During deep freezes, Europes’s yews retreated to Mediterranean refugia.  With each interglacial, the species faced stiffer competition from aster-growing angiosperms, particularly beeches. T bachata requires decades to reach sexual maturity, and then, to reproduce, requires male and female members as well as avian seed dispersers.  In the Holocene … the lowland Med grew too hot and dry for yews. The species advnaages – tolerance for shade, endurance over time – count for more in clement, stable climes.”

“After catastrophic injury, it can restart life from the roots or from epicormic buds in the trunk – even from the stump. … downward growing branches root themselves, then grow new leads upwards. A single old organism can thus compromise a tiny grove. A hollow specimen can even layer from the inside, filling its voice with a new branch-cum-trunk that fuses with the old shell.”

P87 The Palaeolithic Clayton spear – the oldest known woodworked object …. Dates back some 400,000 years. … when Homo heidelbergenisis and Homo Neanderthal is walked the shored of future Albion.. from the bogs of northern Germany and Denmark, archaeologists have dug up hundreds of yew shafts and bows from the Neolithic. The ancient man dubbed Otis – mummified in Tyrolean ice from 5,000 years – carried a stave of yew.”

P. 87 “Taxus is toxic. Every piece of the plant, save one, can poison ruminants, horses, humans – and human cancers, as now evidenced by Taxol … the exception is the aril, the fleshy seed pup that turns bright red in fall. (Yes lack cones, despite being conifers.) The somber foliage – the most chemical part of the tree – occasionally shows up in Greco-Roman sources, and in pathology reports, as a means of suicide.”

 P. 90 The latest, best gazetteer goes by the name Ancient Yew Group, an interactive website built on Google Maps. … maintenance of the website falls to one sel-effacing volunteer named Tim Hills….although Tim knows the website will outlive him, he worries that future webmasters may not have the time, resources, or inclination to maintain his high standardS. The ephemeral it’s of digital information haunts him.”

P. 117 From the Revolution onward, the French state had emphasised the protection of built monuments. Revolutionaries and later the Commune defaced or destroyed many edifices; in response, the nation asserted its powers of classification and preservation over royal and ecclesiastical monuments, reimagined as the patrimony of the people. Analogous to gGermn foresters registering ancient trees while modernising the forest, French planners created architectural protection zones while Hausmannizing the city. This top down effort resulted in the seminal 1887 French low on the “conservation of onuments and objects of art of historical and artistic importance”. 

P.274 The sweet chestnut did not become the ‘bread tree’ until the early medieval (Carolingian) period. It was the perfect plant for changing times. While the western Roman Empire had existed, rural peoples could produce grapes and grains for export to urban centres. After it fell apart, there were fewer labourers as well as consumers. Economics had to become localised and self-sufficient. Groves of chestnuts required little labour compared to vineyards and wheat fields, and they thrived in hill topographies unsuited to cereal crops. .. the species expanded all over the Italian peninsula, and throughout the western Mediterranean, from the 9th century onwards. .. the fruits of this bio cultural landscape helped to sustain regions such as Campania and Lombardy until the revival of the coastal trade around the 1st millennium BCE, at which point smoked chestnut themselves were a tradeable commodity. … people perfected techniques of breeding, grafting, pruning, compiling and pollarding .. stewards encouraged cycles: feces from goats and sheep became fertiliser for the trees; leaves from he trees became litter for stables; and discarded cupules became additional fertiliser for cereals intercropped between the trees. Even dying chestnuts could be useful as sources of tannic acid for leather making.A well-managed chestnut woodland was sustainable centuries before Europeans invented the idea of sustainability.’

P. 276 “Ink disease” – the consequence of a species of water mould – arrived in Europe in the 18th or early 19thcentury, causing root and collar rot in chestnuts. A century later came chestnut blight, a pathogen that had annihilated the mighty chestnuts of eastern North America. After arriving in Genoa in 1938, the Bligh spread throughout Italy, then France and Spain. People assumed the worst outcome before something unexpected happened – the papers of hypovirulence, or a virus that attacked the fungal pathogen. The phyvirulence transmitted quickly and widely enough to prevent complete devastation, an example of all-natural biological control… Cankered but not killed by blight, old chestnuts have survived in great enough numbers t permit a partial revival of foodways.”

P. 277 @In the 1990s and early 2000s, geographers, anthropologists and historians engaged in a debate about the so-called pristine myth, part of a larger discussion on the ‘trouble with wilderness’. At the end of it all, the intellectual consensus came full circle: experts descibed the pre-colonial Amazon as a “manufactured landscape”, an “anthropogenic forest” and an independent Center of domestication, complete with “garden cities”… a hybrid: a ‘natural’ forest thoroughly interspersed with patches of anthropogenic woodland in which specific tree species achieve ‘hyperdominance’. One of these species is Brazil nut …. A specimen takes decades to reach reproductive age, then starts dropping large, heavy capsules. The fatty, protein rich ‘nuts’ encased inside are technically seeds. Very few creatures can open the woody capsules – large rodents, monkeys, humans. Some scientists speculate that the tree is anachronistic, because the homphotheres (elephant in megafauna) that presumably dispersed the seeds ent extinct some 10,000 years ago. Today, Brazil nuts generally appear in well-spaced population clustered. This pattern does not fit models of random distribution. Of the estimated 16,000 tree species of the Amazon, Castaneda is one of a handful that is wildly over-represented. Others include Marisa palm, rubber tree, and cocoa trees – all similarly useful to humans. … Paleo-Indians … creating and managing stands of trees that provided food perennially, supplementing annual crops such as squash and cassava. All the evidence about Brazil nut – including he near-uniform genetic composition of many stands – suggests that humans have for millennia been its primary dispersal agent.”

P. 286 Wollemi pine “counts as a living fossil, though less definitively than Gingko for it still has relatives at the family level. With its primitive branching system, Wollemia bears a spindly resemblance to the monkey puzzle tree, its Chilean in… a few hundred persevere in the wild – four stands total… a single system of sandstone slot canyons in the Blue Mountains…p. 288 at the genomic level, the 90-odd-million-year-old Wollemia genus is moribund. Barely any diversity exists in the four remaining stands.”

P. 288 One of two types of elderflora that Australians suddenly appreciated in the late 20th century. The other example … came from southwest Tasmania, involving a species called Huon pine, which, like Wollemi pine, is not a pine. It’s closest relative, a fellow polo carp – a family of southern conifers – occurs in New Zealand. .. the 1980s, when the government commissioned a survey of the species. By this point, 90% of all stands had been logged. … cored living specimens over 1,000 years old … every Huon pine on Mount Read was male. After determining that this hectare-sized population represented a single genet – one clinal superorganism – they tried to measure its place time. By radiocarbon dating onsite wood as well as pollen from an adjacent lakebed, they assembled strong evidence that the organism had been growing in place for at least 10,000 years.”

P. 294 There is no Ur-tree ancestor common to all plants that people honour as trees, by which I mean largish single-trucked plants that live a longish time. Arborescence (treeness) has happened – and unhappened – many miles in evolutionary history. Plants are nothing if not plastic. Some herbaceous plants like strawberries have woody ancestors, while some woody plants like mulberries have herbaceous ancestors… aborescence exemplifies convergent evolution…. Even grasslike angiosperms (monocots) can achieve treelike form if they produce enough lignin to rigidity and thicken their outer tissue Palms are monocots that can grow taller than most lignophytes. Other monumental monocots include dragon trees and Joshua trees, both in the asparagus family. .. cycads in particular defy categorisation. They have plamlike fronds, but they are gymnosperms, unrelated to palms. They produce some of the most amazing ones in nature without being conifers. They contain wood yet lack growth rings. In terms of evolutionary age, they rank among the oldest plants that people call trees, though people rarely do.”

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