#indigenous environmental network

[cgn-event]

［August 2021］　

FOLKTALE-Community Theater Workshop Project Online Event

~Theater Project on Environment Issues for the Youth of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Japan

Main Venue: Sai-no Tsuno, Ueda City, Nagano Prefecture

Partcipants:

Workshop participants from Ueda City, Cordillera and Aceh, Indonesia

Organizers / Co-organizers:

Cordillera Green Network (CGN) (Philippines)

Komunitas Tikar Pandan (KTP) (Indonesia)

Theater & Arts Ueda (Japan)

Daichi no kioku Executive Committee (Japan)

Cooperation:

Manalabo- Learning Design for Environment and Peace (Japan)

:Grant

The Japan Foundation Asia Center Grant Program for Promotion of Culture Collaboration

Osaka Community Foundation

Kodomo Yume Fund

YouTube Playlist of "FOLKTALES - Community Theater Workshop Project 2021"

#environmental education #philippines #theaterworkshop #npo #indigenous people #cordillera #cordillera green network #Youtube

[reasonsforhope]

"Mexico’s government recently announced the creation of 20 new protected areas across 12 states and two coastal areas in the country, covering roughly 2.3 million hectares (5.7 million acres). This follows a series of budget cuts to the nation’s environmental agencies.

Officials introduced four new national parks, four “flora and fauna protection areas,” seven sanctuaries, two biosphere reserves and three “natural resources protection areas” under the protection of the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas (CONANP).

“This is a commendable step toward biodiversity conservation and environmental protection,” said Gina Chacón, director of the Wildland Network’s public policy program in Mexico. She told Mongabay these new areas will help preserve the country’s rich ecosystems, foster sustainable practices and protect a broad range of important species and habitats. Though some environmental and Indigenous groups are wary the budget cuts could hinder efforts to conserve these areas.

The newly protected areas will preserve habitat and ecologically important marine areas for various species, including whale sharks (Rhincodon typus), Mexican prairie dogs (Cynomys mexicanus) and jaguars (Panthera onca). They will also help safeguard ecologically important coral reefs and areas of cultural significance to Indigenous communities.

Bajos del Norte, a new national park in the Gulf of Mexico, is the largest new protected area, covering 1,304,114 hectares (3,222,535 acres), almost nine times the size of Mexico City. The area is important to the more than 3,000 families that belong to fishing communities on the Yucatán coast. It is also one of the main grouper fish (Epinephelinae) reproduction sites in the Gulf of Mexico and will safeguard threatened species, such as the rocky star coral (Orbicella annularis) and the hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata).

Joaquín Núñez Medrano, the secretary of the UEFAHG or Union of Forestry and Agricultural Ejidos Hermenegildo Galeana A.C. (Unión de Ejidos Forestales y Agropecuarios Hermenegildo Galeana), lives in an ejido — a type of communally owned land used for agriculture and forestry purposes — called Cordòn Grande in Sierra Grande of Guerrero, along the Pacific Coast. For more than 10 years, Medrano’s community has monitored species such as the jaguar and sustainably managed the ejido’s natural resources, without government assistance.

But now, the ejido has been designated a protected area in this latest round of decrees, as it falls inside part of the new Sierra Tecuani reserve. “The goal is to strengthen what we have already been doing but with support to do it much better,” he told Mongabay.

The second- and third-largest newly protected areas are Sierra Tecuani, a 348,140-hectare (860,272-acre) biosphere reserve threatened by illegal logging, forest fires and land use changes, and the Semidesierto Zacatecas Flora and Fauna Protection Area, which is important for the recovery of the Mexican prairie dog.

The state of Oaxaca is where the government created the most new protected areas, numbering three: the 90-hectare (222-acre) Playa Morro Ayuta Sanctuary, the 56-hectare (138-acre) Barra de la Cruz-Playa Grande Sanctuary and the 261-hectare (645-acre) Playa Cahuitán Sanctuary. Other protected areas were created in the states of Quintana Roo, Veracruz, Campeche, Nayarit, Zacatecas, Chiapas, Colima, Durango, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Guerrero and the State of Mexico...

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has protected more areas than any previous administration, with a total of 43 new areas across 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres). But Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), which works to safeguard the environment, has become severely cash-strapped throughout his six-year term.

SEMARNAT is one of many sectors in Mexico undergoing funding cuts. In recent years, Obrador’s government has implemented a series of strict austerity measures to free up more money for other areas like pensions and wages, boosting the leader’s popularity among citizens, particularly the working-class. Judicial workers, health services and academia have also had their budgets slashed in 2024...

Juan Bezaury-Creel, the director of the organization Fundación BD BioDiversidad Mexicana, said a protected area is better than no protected area because, once a decree is formalized, the government has a duty to protect it. However, this puts “huge pressure on existing personnel because they have to take care of more surface area with less resources,” he told Mongabay.

“The personnel from CONANP are heroic,” he said. “They are putting their lives on the line many times with little budget and little help.”"

-via Mongabay, January 25, 2024

#mexico #lopez obrador #andrés manuel lópez obrador #protected areas #environment #deforestation #environmental issues #national park #gulf of mexico #yucatán #oaxaca #endangered species #good news #hope #whale shark #prairie dog #jaguar

[txttletale]

youve previously spoken about i was a teenage exocolonist and its confused politics, and i agree, and now im thinking, how would one revise the story so as to improve them?

i think the game would have to either not be so proudly About Colonialism or would have to revise its story so that the theming actually matches the events. like imaginining that my proposed rewrite aims to 1. make the game's politics coherent while 2. changing as little as possible and 3. keeping the game's intended themes, i think the things that are most dissonant and jarring are:

the game not understanding what colonialism is but wanting to very much assure you that It's Bad

the game not understanding what fascism is but wanting to very much assure you that It's Bad

the game not understanding what capitalism is &c. &c. &c.

the bizarre unexamined eugenicist elements

so let's start on the first thing. you would want to lean much more heavily on the colonists as 'refugees' rather than 'colonists' -- the game treats 'colonizing' a place the exact same way as 'living there', and that kind of sucks (a common problem when using 'Space Colonization' as a 1-1 metaphor for actual colonization). so while we want to keep the weird culty aspects of the colony's society we'll ditch most of the colonial intentionality until the Helios arrives. secondly, we need to have the planet's indigenous people, like, actually present and not secretly hiding away as supercomputers.

so, like, let's keep the Gardeners as artificial life forms dedicated to protecting the ecosystem, but let's make them biotech. let's make them giant, imposing trees that reach up into the sky, with root networks that span the whole planet. then, rather than the colony being colonialist because it straight up doesnt know indigenous people exist (because they're secret computer people), we can make a much more interesting conflict by having the colonists be ignorant (and, as the game progresses, willingly ignorant) of the gardeners' sentience. have the raids start after the colony fells one of the trees (killing a Gardener) to make room for their own expansion, maybe really lean into the nasty parts of the colonial metaphor by having the Gardener's wood be the construction material of the new wing of the colony.

then Lum arrives as part of an intentional colonization project from the Earth we fled, assumes military command as in the current story, and immediately ramps up existing exploitation and destructive enviromental practices. his administration deliberately suppresses information of the Gardeners' sentience and spreads propaganda about them being 'monster trees'. have Lum clearly backed by Earthbound corporate interests, seeing the colony as an excercise in extracting value and using fascist dictatorship (usurping elections and the council with a permanent state of emergency and martial law) as a tool to maximize that value.

instead of defeating Lum at the ballot box, you can remove him in a coup. you can keep the getting-the-councilors-on-side minigame, you can even make it a bloodless coup if you don't want to put revolutionary violence in the game (but considering how much other violence there is in there, including terrorism, genocide, and murder, seems like a strange omission tbqh). and dont make him your fucking tiktoker put the guy in Jail. hes killed people sol.

have Sym still have his humanboo interests but also hint at an internal power struggle within the Gardeners, make it clear that there is a real and thriving culture among these indigenous gigantic environmentally networked tree-ecosystem-people, make his motivations for seeking peace more multifaceted.

then make the peaceful resolution to the whole colonialism issue to integrate the settlers into Gardener society rather than the weird siloed reservation thing going on in the base game. the head of the settlement or an ambassador (probably Dys) gets to go to the big fancy Gardener meetings where they decide things, the settlement gets permission from the Gardeners to farm and expand sustainably and is integrated into the ecosystem rather than neatly separated from it. the excolonists stop being colonists and become citizens of the planet.

as for the capitalism stuff, you can just drop that from marz' character, honestly. or if you want to make it make more sense without having to get into What Capitalism Is (which i think would be outside the mission statement of these proposals), make her thing wanting opulence and excess (it already kind of us, the game just keeps saying 'Capitalism'), have her excited when Lum starts giving people the opportunity to have that, then have her moment of excitement turn sour when she looks into Earth history and realizes how destructive this kind of extraction is in the long term.

and the eugenics--i think the simplest case here while still keeping all the cool genetic mutant character tics is just to make the genetic mutations a random glitch in an artificial womb system the refugees were using to have kids in space. this lets you keep the weird and wacky stuff going on with tangent and dys without raising questions like 'hey isnt this society insanely fucking dystopian'.

that's my in-a-nutshell rewrite of the game. obvsies an actual rewrite would need to change some more in-depth things, but i think off the top of my head these are the changes to the narrative that would make the heavyhanded attempts at political commentary work for me (that said, you could also go the opposite route, stop trying to draw parallels to colonialism and fascism and keep all the weird shit as is. but i think that's less interesting and more like stuff that already exists)

#ask #rain-rome #hi rome #i was a teenage exocolonist

[transmutationisms]

okay so i’ve never really grasped this, might as well ask now — how exactly does the cyberspace & nft stuff mine resources? i’ve heard the basics (i.e. crypto mining uses energy and what not) but i’ve never been able to understand how internet connects to real resources. could you sort of explain that (along the lines with the spam email post) in a simpler way?

ok, put very simply: it's easy for people who only interact with the internet as users to treat 'cyberspace' or 'the virtual world' as immaterial. i type something out on my phone, it lives in the screen. intuitively, it feels less real and physical than writing the same words down on a piece of paper with a pencil. this is an illusion. the internet is real and physical; digital technology is not an escape from the use of natural resources to create products. my phone, its charger, the data storage facility, a laptop: all of these things are physical objects. the internet does not exist without computers; it is a network of networks that requires real, physical devices and cables in order to store, transmit, and access all of the data we use every time we load a webpage or save a text document.

this is one of google's data centres—part of the physical network of servers and cables that google operates. these are real objects made of real materials that need to be obtained through labour and then manufactured into these products through labour. the more data we use, the more capacity the physical network must have. google operates dozens of these data centres and potentially millions of servers (there is no official number). running these facilities takes electricity, cooling technologies (servers get hot), and more human labour. now think about how many other companies exist that store or transmit data. this entire network exists physically.

when you look at a server, or a phone, or a laptop, you might be glossing over a very simple truth that many of us train ourselves not to see: these objects themselves are made of materials that have supply chains! for example, cobalt, used in (among other things) lithium-ion batteries, has a notoriously brutal supply chain relying on horrific mining practices (including child labour), particularly in the congo. lithium mining, too, is known to have a massive environmental toll; the list goes on. dangerous and exploitative working conditions, as well as the environmental costs of resource extraction, are primarily and immediately borne by those who are already most brutally oppressed under capitalism: poor workers in the global south, indigenous people, &c. this is imperialism in action. digital technologies cannot exist without resources, and tech companies (like all capitalist firms!) are profitable because they exploit labour.

all commodities require resources and labour to make and distribute. digital technology is no different. these are material objects with material histories and contexts. nothing about the internet is immaterial, from the electromagnetic waves of wi-fi communication to the devices we use to scroll tumblr. it is, in fact, only by a fantastical sleight-of-hand that we can look at and interact with these objects and still consider the internet to be anything but real resources.

#tech

[fatehbaz]

The Grupo Tortuguero Comcáac, the Sea Turtle Group of the Comcáac people, in El Desemboque de los Seris is fighting to increase the population of sea turtles, a sacred animal, in the Gulf of California. In the past five years they have managed to release more than 8,000 olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) hatchlings along 14 kilometers (9 miles) of the Mancha Blanca and El Faro beach. [...]

Mayra Estrella’s father always spoke to her about sea turtles. [...] “We are more tied to the leatherback sea turtle, but we are also connected to the green sea turtle [...].” Mayra Estrella [...] has dedicated 23 years to working with these reptiles or marine chelonians, earning her the affectionate name “turtle mom” among her colleagues and the people in her community of El Desemboque de los Seris – or Haxöl Iihom, its original name in cmiique iitom, the language of the Comcáac people. She earned her nickname after others saw the love she has for the little animals that leave the nesting pen in the turtle camp located between the desert and the sea in the municipality of Pitiquito, Sonora, in northwestern Mexico. 

This camp was created to ensure the survival of turtles in oceans, not only because they are seriously threatened, but also because of what they represent for the Comcáac people. Because of this, Mayra Estrella and a group of 20 others in her community [...] are working to protect [...] turtles and their nests [...]. In the last five years she has witnessed a growth in the number of nests and hatchlings released, with more than 8,000 olive ridley turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) released into the waters of the Gulf of California. By the end of November 2021, this figure is estimated to be 11,000 hatchlings.

---

“My dad loved to tell me stories, songs and tales about our ancestors,” Estrella adds. “He told me that the leatherback sea turtle [Dermochelys coriacea], was a man before becoming a turtle [...].” It has been several years since the community has seen a leatherback sea turtle in the area. [...] [T]he leatherback sea turtle is one of the most endangered turtles in the world. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies it as critically endangered. [...]

While waiting for a leatherback sea turtle to return, Mayra Estrella takes care of the rest of the turtles that come lay their eggs along 11 kilometers (7 miles) of the Mancha Blanca beach and 3 (2 miles) of the El Faro beach. At night, when the female turtles finish laying their eggs and return to the sea, the turtle team collects and takes them to the camp to protect them from coyotes (Canis latrans), their natural predators in the desert.

Their workdays last up to 12 hours [...]. Over time, they began receiving funding from the state during the nesting seasons. However, Mayra Estrella maintains that “the work achieves more than the resources because [the funds] are cut off too soon.” She explains that they are currently “working without one peso,” though this does not stop them because they love their work. [...] Germán Barrera works at CONANP, is an analyst of protected natural areas and the technical manager of the Comcáac turtle project, where he serves as liaison between the indigenous community and CONANP. [...] According to Barrera, the Comcáac Nation team works hard without seeing limited funds as a stumbling block [...]. “Since the start of the project, there has not been a single year that they have not carried out activities. [...]”

---

The Grupo Tortuguero Comcáac (Sea Turtle Group of the Comcáac Nation) belongs to the national network of the Grupo Tortuguero de las Californias (Sea Turtle Group of the Californias), for which Karen Oceguera – a marine biologist and researcher – represents more than 50 teams throughout nine Mexican states. For 12 years she has supported the process of the Comcáac turtle catchers on nesting beaches, providing training and managing permits from the environmental authority [...].

“We haven’t seen a leatherback sea turtle for years, but the turtles we do see and that have increased thanks to conservation efforts is the olive ridley sea turtle, which is the most common species in the entire northwestern region of Mexico and part of the Pacific,” explains Oceguera. [...] “According to the Mexican Official Norm [...], the species is endangered, but in international categories it is considered vulnerable, and so is no longer endangered. I believe this is thanks to the work of many community groups over many years, such as the Comcáac in this case.” [...]

“It is not anecdotal, but formal,” she adds. “According to CONANP, there were between four and seven nests per season [in the Comcáac territory] 10 years ago; now we see more than 50 or 60. This was not seen before and tells the authorities that even with the little support they can give to communities, the work is paying off.”

---

Headline, images, captions, and text by: Astrid Arellano.”Indigenous Comcaac turtle group saves sea turtles in Mexico’s Gulf of California.” Mongabay. As translated in English. 17 February 2022. Story originally published in Spanish at Mongabay’s Latam site on 19 November 2021. [Some paragraph breaks and contractions added by me.]

[pannaginip]

Located 62km north-east of the capital Manila, Daraitan village in Rizal province is home to about 5,700 residents, a majority of whom are members of the Dumagat-Remontado indigenous people who consider vast hectares of the mountain range as part of their ancestral domain.

But the village may soon disappear under the same waters that give it life, once the Philippine government finishes building the Kaliwa Dam – one of 16 flagship infrastructure projects of former president Rodrigo Duterte that is being funded by China.

The new dam is expected to provide Metro Manila with an additional 600 million litres of water daily once it is finished by end-2026. Officials said building the 60m-high reservoir is even more necessary now that the country is starting to feel the impact of the El Nino weather phenomenon.

But it was only in 2021 under Mr Duterte that construction finally broke ground, three years after Manila and Beijing signed the 12 billion peso (S$288 million) loan agreement.

Of the 119 on the list [of flagship projects of the "Build, Build, Build” infrastructure programme], Mr Duterte turned to China to finance 16 big-ticket projects in a bid to cement his legacy by the time his presidency ended in 2022. He embraced Beijing during his term and even downplayed Manila’s claims in the disputed South China Sea in favour of securing loans and grants from China.

Analysts have criticised Mr Duterte’s infrastructure programme as ambitious. Perennial domestic issues like local politics, right-of-way acquisition problems, lack of technology and red tape in bureaucracy led to severe delays in the projects.

The same issues hound the China-funded projects – which come under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to build infrastructure in developing nations – with the problems made more severe by Beijing’s high interest rates in its loan agreements and local backlash due to displacement of residents or potential environmental damage.

Critics say the BRI has been detrimental in the long run to some recipient countries, especially those that have been unable to repay their loans, like Sri Lanka and Zambia.

The Duterte government’s failure to take advantage of its BRI loans was a “missed opportunity” for the Philippines, said infrastructure governance specialist Jerik Cruz, a graduate research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The four completed China-funded projects under Mr Duterte were controversial too. But they came to fruition because they had the support of local politicians allied with Mr Duterte and therefore increased his political capital, said Dr Camba.

Tribal leaders said they were not properly consulted regarding the project that threatens their traditional way of life. Environmentalists from the Stop Kaliwa Dam Network also say the project would destroy 126 species of flora and fauna in the Sierra Madre.

The Philippines’ Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act states that the government must first secure a tribe’s free, prior and informed consent before building on its ancestral lands.

But Ms Clara Dullas, one of the leaders of the Dumagat-Remontado in Rizal, alleged that the Duterte government had either misinformed or pressured other tribe members into giving their consent.

She could not bear to hold grudges, though, noting that the Dumagat-Remontado organisations that eventually agreed to the Kaliwa Dam were each given 80 million pesos, or $1.9 million, in “disturbance” fees.

“The Kaliwa Dam is the reason why our tribe is divided now. There is a crack in our relationships even if we all come from the same family,” said Ms Dullas. “I can’t blame the others because we lack money. I believe there was bribery involved.”

The government requires them to present identification documents, and only those given passes may enter. Mr Dizon said this is to ensure that no unidentified personnel enter the area [close to the construction zone].

“We feel like we are foreigners in our own home because the Chinese and the people in our own government are now preventing us from entering the lands where we grew up,” said tribe leader Renato Ibanez, 48.

Mr Ibanez also accuses the Philippine authorities of harassing tribe members who are vocal against Kaliwa Dam. Some of them have been accused of working with communist rebels, a charge the tribe vehemently denies.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr Marcos is more aggressive in defending Manila’s overlapping claims with Beijing in the South China Sea, but still fosters economic ties with it.

Geopolitical tensions between the two nations and Mr Marcos’ stance towards Beijing are going to dictate the fate of the pending China-funded projects the President inherited from Mr Duterte, said Mr Cruz.

Tribe members said they would be more amenable if Mr Marcos would revisit Japan’s proposed Kaliwa Intake Weir project that Mr Duterte had set aside.

“We like Japan’s proposal. It would not destroy our forests. It would not affect residents here. The Philippines would not be buried in debt,” said Ms Dullas.

This was among the alternatives the Dumagat-Remontados offered during their nine-day march in February 2023, when some 300 members walked 150km from Quezon and Rizal all the way to Manila to protest against the Kaliwa Dam.

But they failed to secure an audience with Mr Marcos. They remain wary of the President’s position on the Kaliwa Dam and other controversial China-funded deals.

“As much as we want to fully pin our hopes on him, we don’t. We’ve learnt from past efforts to trick us, make us believe a project is about to end, only for it to be resurrected again years later,” said Ms Dullas.

2024 Mar. 3

#philippines #indigenous rights #dumagat-remontado #state violence #red tagging #infrastructure #environmental issues #afp-pnp

[thehopefuljournalist]

Seed networks are community organizations that have multiplied in the past decade in different Brazilian biomes to collect, trade and plant native seeds in degraded areas.

In the Chapada dos Veadeiros area, in Goiás state members of seed networks from several parts of Brazil met for almost a week in early June.

Along with environmental organizations, researchers and government officials, they participated in discussions to boost Redário, a new group seeking to strengthen these networks and meet the demands of the country’s ecological restoration sector.

“This meeting gathered members of Indigenous peoples, family farmers, urban dwellers, technicians, partners, everyone together. It creates a beautiful mosaic and there’s a feeling that what we are doing will work and will grow,” says Milene Alves, a member of the steering committee of the Xingu Seed Network and Redário’s technical staff.

Just in 2022, 64 metric tons of native seeds were sold by these networks, and similar figures are expected for 2023.

The effort to collect native seeds by traditional populations in Brazil has contributed to effective and more inclusive restoration of degraded areas, and is also crucial for the country to fulfill its pledge under international agreements to recover 30 million acres of vegetation by 2030.

Seed collection for restoration in these areas has previously only been done by companies. But now, these networks, are organized as cooperatives, associations or even companies, enable people in the territories to benefit from the activity.

Eduardo Malta, a restoration expert from the Socio-Environmental Institute and one of Redário’s leaders, advocates for community participation in trading and planting seeds. “These are the people who went to all the trouble to secure the territories and who are there now, preserving them. They have the greatest genetic diversity of species and hold all the knowledge about the ecosystem,” 

.

The Geraizeiros Collectors Network are one of the groups that makes up Redário. They were founded in 2021, and now gathers 30 collectors from eight communities in five municipalities: Montezuma, Vargem Grande, Rio Pardo de Minas, Taiobeiras and Berizal.

They collect and plant seeds to recover the vegetation of the Gerais Springs Sustainable Development Reserve, which was created in 2014 in order to stop the water scarcity as a result of eucalyptus monocultures planted by large corporations.

“The region used to be very rich in water and it is now supplied by water trucks or wells,” says Fabrícia Santarém Costa, a collector and vice president of the Geraizeiros Collectors’ Network. “Today we see that these activities only harm us, because the [eucalyptus] company left, and we are there suffering the consequences.”

Costa was 18 years old in 2018, when the small group of seed collectors was founded and financed by the Global Environmental Facility. She says that working with this cooperative changed the way she looks at life and the biome in which she was born and raised. She describes restoring the sustainable development work as "ant work", ongoing, slow. But it has already improved the water situation in the communities. In addition, seed sales complement geraizeiros’ income, enabling them to remain in their territories.

.

The Redário initiative also intends to influence public policies and regulations in the restoration sector to disseminate muvuca, the name given by the networks to the technique of sowing seeds directly into the soil rather than growing seedlings in nurseries.

Technical studies and network experiences alike show that this technique covers the area faster and with more trees. As a result, it requires less maintenance and lower costs. This system also distributes income to the local population and encourages community organizations.

“The muvuca system has great potential [for restoration], depending on what you want to achieve and local characteristics. It has to be in our range of options for meeting the targets, for achieving them at scale,” says Ministry of the Environment analyst Isis Freitas.

Article published August 3rd, 2023

#long post #climate change #climate #hope #good news #more to come #climate emergency #positive news #hopeful #climate justice #news #important #good post #links

[wachinyeya]

#nature #science #environmentalism #indigenous people #people’s climate week #climate action #indigenous #indigenous issues #environment #climate change #conservation #animals

[violetsandshrikes]

The Atlas Network describes itself as “a nonprofit that aims to secure the right to economic and personal freedom for all individuals” through its global network of think tanks. But before it was a network, it was just one think tank: the U.K.-based Institute of Economic Affairs, or IEA, founded by a man named Antony Fisher. With more than 500 member think tanks globally, the network remains robust. Atlas members are in regular contact with each other, sharing ideas, tips, and strategies. (The network has even bragged about being an early adopter of the internet.) Representatives from member think tanks meet up at annual right-wing events in the U.S. and elsewhere. Ideas are shared between member think tanks via various publications, including the quarterly Freedom’s Champion magazine, a Latin America podcast, and various books in both English and Spanish (even a cookbook!). 

This is a longer read, but I really recommend. It gives some insight into increasing aggression and villainization of climate activists, environmental activists, indigenous groups and communities, and other activism linked groups.

#i truly do hate these mfs and so glad someone has done a write up. #environmentalism #katie rambles

[justalittlesolarpunk]

this is 2 questions, but they're both a little depressing, sorry

any tips for just keeping up hope? things just seem so awful as of late. ik bad things happen all the time, but it just seems like things are genocide on top of environmental collapse on top of genocide. how can you stay hopeful?

and any tips for enacting change as a minor? i don't have any income to spend on supporting causes, i'm not allowed to go to protests or rallies or anything of the like, i can't vote. i feel so useless. i know there has to be something i can be doing! i just don't know what.

again, sorry if this is. not the sort of thing you'd like to answer, i'd understand completely. feel free to like. ignore this i suppose

your blog seems lovely, it's nice to see someone determined to fight for a better world. i hope you have a wonderful day.

Hi. Thanks for getting in touch, and please don’t apologise for your questions. I’m sorry to hear you’ve been struggling, and I want to start by saying that what you’re feeling is a normal, healthy result of being a caring human being in a world full of cruelty and suffering. This is a really difficult time for the planet and its people and so I’d start by saying you’re allowed to feel dispirited and hopeless, especially as a minor looking around and seeing this is the world you’re growing up in.

This will probably be quite a long answer so I apologise for that, but you’ve caught me on my favourite topic - hope. To begin with, I have a little mantra that I repeat to myself which is that while despair as an emotional response is valid and to be expected, despair as an ideological orientation is not acceptable. What this means is that I allow myself and others slack and compassion at times when the feeling that everything is just too fucked to fix takes over. But I don’t permit myself to stop that from making me act. I take inspiration from people who have survived and are surviving incredible adversity - from the indigenous people who chose to keep living, to keep preserving their language and religion and culture, to keep fighting for their land and bringing children into the world even after everything they recognised about it was gone. We aren’t the first culture to face an apocalypse. Similarly I think of the low-lying islanders and other people in the Global South or the Arctic Circle seeing their means of subsistence or their homes being destroyed by climate change. I know this doesn’t sound at all hopeful on the surface, but I remind myself that these people don’t have the luxury of nihilism or despair. They have to keep trying, again and again, rebuilding the dams and re-roofing their houses and planting again the crops that they lost to extreme weather. If they give up, they die. They don’t need my tears and they don’t want my pity. And so reminding myself of the solidarity I owe them sort of resets my brain into getting-stuck-in-mode.

One of the most important things I have done and would recommend others to do to keep the despondency at bay is to act, to get up each morning and make the choice to do good, even if it’s just being kind and friendly to the people I see that day, or signing an online petition, or planting something in the ground. Sure, these actions won’t change the world on their own, but they contribute. And more importantly, they change you.

The second biggest thing is to control your media diet. That means getting serious about reining in your doomscrolling. The news and social media are full of appalling images right now and I’m not saying you should look away, or pretend it isn’t happening, but you have to remember that you becoming emotionally numbed out and vicariously traumatised doesn’t help the victims of war or environmental disaster. So balance out the negative news by actively seeking out things that are going well in the world. Remember that every day countless people get up determined to make things better. Visit Positive News, The Good News Network, The BBC’s Uplifting Stories Page, and similar sites. Follow Sam Bentley and Zahra Biabani. Read Rutger Bregman and Hans Rosling and Jon Alexander. Remind yourself that the good things happening in the world aren’t cancelled out by the bad ones any more than they cancel out the bad. Look for signs of care in the world around you: see how the old friends at the train station hug tightly when they’re reunited, or how the schoolboy helps his friend with his jacket, or the crowd parts to let the old woman through. These things seem small but they are the groundwork for everything we can achieve together.

I have hope because even in the midst of appalling scenes in the Middle East, aid workers are going in with food and medicine, risking their own lives, journalists are drawing attention to the situation, Israelis (even some with families held hostage) are calling for an end to the bombing, groups of Palestinian and Israeli communities have been working together for decades and will be the first to pick up the pieces when the dust settles, and because thousands are marching for justice and peace all over the world. Sometimes the moments that reveal the worst of humanity show us its best too. ‘Look for the helpers’ is a cliche but it’s genuinely useful.

Hope is also something you work at, a skill to be cultivated like any other, and I have found the writings of Rebecca Solnit hugely helpful in cultivating my own practice of hope. In terms of the environment, solarpunk shares origins with hopepunk, a genre that is all about triumphing (or even just trying your damn hardest) in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. You don’t have to become a perfect optimist overnight, you don’t even have to be an optimist at all, you can just hope out of spite. Because the last thing that the corrupt politicians and the war criminals and the fossil fuel billionaires and the media commentators want you to think is that things don’t have to be this way and can get better.

Watch the Earthshot Prize Awards Ceremony even though it’s weird and corporate. Get newsletters from MSF or the UN agencies doing good work on the ground. Watch the birds out of your window. Revisit those good news websites regularly to check out the latest stories. Listen to podcasts that imagine a better future (I am working on a resources masterpost so check back in for that). Bake a cake for someone you know who is having a hard time - maybe that someone is you. That’s ok too. We cannot change the world alone but we can hold and soothe some of the pain in it. And take care of yourself - remember that, as Audre Lorde said, self-care is an act of political warfare. Make joy your resistance whenever you can.

This kind of ties in to your second question - how to make change as a minor. I know you don’t have a lot of power but you can still make a difference. See if you can make an environment society or a group of socially conscious students at your school. Talk to your friends about climate change and social justice issues (studies say this is the single action you can take as an individual that has the greatest likelihood of contributing to systemic change - ahead even of giving up flights or going vegan). Talk to your parents if they’re receptive. Talk to siblings and cousins and the guy behind the supermarket counter. Surround yourself with people who want to make things better, if you can. You’d be surprised how much change you can make even just by asking people or institutions to do better - can your school improve its sustainability, for instance? Write to elected officials even though you can’t vote (they don’t need to know that! You don’t need to tell them your age!) and sign petitions if you can’t go to protests. Sneak out to a protest if you feel like rebelling (though make sure a trusted friend knows where you are and follow safety guidelines available online).

Give yourself some grace to mess up and fall short and fail. It’s beyond unfair you have to be worrying about any of these things, but you are, and that’s because you have a big heart. Take some time to cry in your bed if you need it - I know I have over these past few weeks. Then when you’re ready, get up, wipe your eyes, roll up your sleeves and get to work.

#solarpunk #hopepunk #ask #environmentalism #social justice #cottagepunk #optimism #community #climate justice #bright future #you want to help and that itself is powerful #you can’t fix everything #but the trying is the work

[chuthulhu-reads]

[ID: a page from Trigun Maximum. The first panel shows a young Knives standing with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a bag over his shoulder, in a pose strikingly similar to one we've seen Vash in many times. He's looking up at a many-tentacled sand worm looming over him. The second panel shows the young Knives looking up with a calm expression. The third panel shows the present-day Knives, heavily fused into the plants and so with a distant, dazed expression, saying, "I was surprised by your extraordinary intelligence. You have vast knowledge of this planet's history across your species' network of memories. Perhaps you can even forsee my future?" The fourth panel shows Zazie in their second form smiling and saying, "Don't be silly. This is the first time we have ever encountered a species like yours. Humans are much more akin to other lifeforms we've observed." The last panel shows Zazie casually sitting on some rubble in the foreground, looking at Knives' face poking out of the mass of fused plant matter. Zazie continues, "You're a completely autonomous being that creates matter. Therefore, we believe you're a much better candidate for co-existence." End ID.]

I fucking LOVE the reveal that Zazie is Bugs, and not just any bugs, but the indigenous species of this planet that humans crashed and can barely survive on. The bugs are absolutely fine here, they're just being picky about which random species they let share their house, and who can blame them? I'm wondering about the other species they've "observed". Were there other species on this planet that have died off? Have other species crash-landed here before and failed to survive for as long as humans and plants together? Are the bugs spacefaring? They seem planetbound and content with it, just wanting to be sure that anyone else who settles up in their neighbourhood can co-exist with them. Plants could terraform the planet; do the bugs want that, or do they have some other utility for them? Zazie says "we will use your powers for our purposes" while attempting to control Knives but their monologue gets cut off by Legato intervening so we never really find out what those purposes are. What are they hoping to create with the powers of the plants? It'd be nice to think they want plants around because they're very chill and passive and, if networked properly, can sustain each other pretty well without taking much of Gunsmoke's existing resources. Maybe they just want environmentally-friendly buddies to hang with.

#Trigun #I am super jazzed about Stampede expanding on Zazie #and making them more inhuman #TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT FOR YOUR PLANET UNSETTLING BUG PERSON #hey symbiosis between plants and bugs that's a tale as old as time right #it could work

[ivettel]

No, nobody’s contacted me [to help them]. I do a lot of reading on the subject because I find it—fascinating might be the wrong word. But there’s a lot going on, and we live in a time and age where we are so much aware of a lot of things. I think what happens in Alberta is a crime because you chop down a lot of trees and you basically destroy the place just to extract oil. The manner of doing it with the tar sands and mining is horrible for nature, and Canada’s greenhouse gases have gone up since they started doing it. The site has only been—as far as I read—found 20 years ago. The Prime Minister [Trudeau] said that no other country would find these resources and not dig them up.[1] I think in principle, every country and every person has their opinions and their stance. My personal opinion is that I disagree. As I said, there’s so much science around the topic that fossil fuels are going to end. Living in a time that we do now, these things shouldn’t be allowed anymore, and they shouldn’t happen.

Sebastian Vettel speaks about his Canada's Climate Crimes T-shirt during the 2022 Canadian GP Press Conference.

Learn more about the tar sands and their effects on the lives of Indigenous Peoples here: [2], [3], [4].

Follow the Indigenous Environmental Network on Twitter here!

#sebastian vettel #canadian gp 2022 #f1 #f1edit #sebastianvetteledit #.mine #aston martin seb #when i looked for the quote i kept searching for harper because. obviously. but no it was justin trudeau who said it #😵‍💫

[reasonsforhope]

"In a bid to slow deforestation in the Amazon, Brazil announced Tuesday [September 5, 2023,] that it will provide financial support to municipalities that have reduced deforestation rates the most.

During the country´s Amazon Day, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also signed the creation of two Indigenous territories that total 207,000 hectares (511,000 acres) — over two times the size of New York City — and of a network of conservation areas next to the Yanonami Indigenous Territory to act as a buffer against invaders, mostly illegal gold miners.

“The Amazon is in a hurry to survive the devastation caused by those few people who refuse to see the future, who in a few years cut down, burned, and polluted what nature took millennia to create,” Lula said during a ceremony in Brasilia. “The Amazon is in a hurry to continue doing what it has always done, to be essential for life on Earth.”

The new program will invest up to $120 million in technical assistance. The money will be allocated based on the municipality´s performance in reducing deforestation and fires, as measured by official satellite monitoring. A list of municipalities eligible for the funds will be published annually.

The resources must be invested in land titling, monitoring and control of deforestation and fires, and sustainable production.

The money will come from the Amazon Fund, which has received more than $1.2 billion, mostly from Norway, to help pay for sustainable development of the region. In February, the United States committed to a $50 million donation to the initiative. Two months later, President Joe Biden announced he would ask Congress for an additional $500 million, to be disbursed over five years.

The most critical municipalities are located along the arc of deforestation, a vast region along the southern part of the Amazon. This region is a stronghold of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who favored agribusiness over forest preservation and lost the reelection last year.

“We believe that it’s not enough to just put up a sign saying ‘it’s forbidden to do this or that. We need to be persuasive.” Lula said, in a reference to his relationship with Amazon mayors and state governors.

Lula has promised zero net deforestation by 2030, although his term ends two years earlier. In the first seven months of his third term, there was a 42% drop in deforestation.

[Note: For context, Lula's third term as president started January 1, 2023. It was not continuous with his first two terms, when he was president from 2003 to 2010. Lula's third term has been a historic and desperately needed reversal of the anti-environmental, etc. policies of Bolsonaro, whose term ended at the end of 2022.]

Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, with almost 3% of global emissions, according to Climate Watch, an online platform managed by World Resources Institute. Almost half of these emissions come from deforestation. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, Brazil committed to reducing carbon emissions by 37% by 2025 and 43% by 2030."

-via AP, September 5, 2023

#brazil #deforestation #lula da silva #amazon #amazon rainforest #environmentalism #fossil fuels #environment #environmental justice #land back #illegal miners #yanonami #indigenous #first nations #greenhouse gasses #conservation #good news #hope

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter 4. Environment

What about global environmental problems, like climate change?

Anarchists do not yet have experience dealing with global problems because our successes so far have only been local and temporary. Stateless, anarchic societies once covered the world, but this was long before the existence of global environmental problems like those created by capitalism. Today, members of many of these indigenous societies are at the forefront of global resistance to the ecological destruction caused by governments and corporations.

Anarchists also coordinate resistance globally. They organize international protests against major polluters and their state backers, such as the mobilizations during the G8 summits that have convened hundreds of thousands of people from dozens of countries to demonstrate against the states most responsible for global warming and other problems. In response to the global activity of transnational corporations, ecologically-minded anarchists share information globally. In this manner, activists around the world can coordinate simultaneous actions against corporations, targeting a polluting factory or mine on one continent, retail stores on another continent, and an international headquarters or shareholders’ meeting on another continent.

For example, major protests, boycotts, and acts of sabotage against Shell Oil were coordinated among people in Nigeria, Europe, and the North America throughout the 1980s and ’90s. In 1986, autonomists in Denmark carried out multiple simultaneous fire bombings of Shell stations across the country during a worldwide boycott to punish Shell for supporting the government responsible for apartheid in South Africa. In the Netherlands, the clandestine anti-authoritarian group RARA (Revolutionary Anti-Racist Action) carried out a campaign of nonlethal bombings against Shell Oil, playing a crucial role in forcing Shell to pull out of South Africa. In 1995, when Shell wanted to dump an old oil rig in the North Sea, it was forced to abandon its plans by protests in Denmark and the UK, an occupation of the oil rig by Greenpeace activists, and a fire bombing and a shooting attack against Shell stations in two different cities in Germany as well as a boycott that lowered sales by ten percent in that country.[67] Efforts such as these prefigure the decentralized global networks that could protect the environment in an anarchist future. If we succeed in abolishing capitalism and the state, we will have removed the greatest systemic ravagers of the environment as well as the structural barriers that currently impede popular action in defense of nature.

There are historical examples of stateless societies responding to large scale, collective environmental problems through decentralized networks. Though the problems were not global, the relative distances they faced — with information traveling at a pedestrian’s pace — were perhaps greater than the distances that mark today’s world, in which people can communicate instantaneously even if they live on opposite sides of the planet.

Tonga is a Pacific archipelago settled by Polynesian peoples. Before colonization, it had a centralized political system with a hereditary leader, but the system was far less centralized than a state, and the leader’s coercive powers were limited. For 3,200 years, the people of Tonga were able to maintain sustainable practices over an archipelago of 288 square miles with tens of thousands of inhabitants.[68] There was no communications technology, so information travelled slowly. Tonga is too large for a single farmer to have knowledge of all the islands or even all of any of its large islands. The leader was traditionally able to guide and ensure sustainable practices not through recourse to force, but because he had access to information from the entire territory, just as a federation or general assembly would if the islanders organized themselves in that way. It was up to the individuals who made up the society to implement particular practices and support the idea of sustainability.

The fact that a large population can protect the environment in a diffuse or decentralized manner, without leadership, is amply demonstrated by the aforementioned New Guinea highlanders. Agriculture usually leads to deforestation as land is cleared for fields, and deforestation can kill the soil. Many societies respond by clearing more land to compensate for lower soil productivity, thus aggravating the problem. Numerous civilizations have collapsed because they destroyed their soil through deforestation. The danger of soil erosion is accentuated in mountainous terrain, such as the New Guinea highlands, where heavy rains can wash away denuded soil en masse. A more intelligent practice, which the farmers in New Guinea perfected, is silvaculture: integrating trees with the other crops, combining orchard, field, and forest to protect the soil and create symbiotic chemical cycles between the various cultivated plants.

The people of the highlands developed special anti-erosion techniques to keep from losing the soil of their steep mountain valleys. Any particular farmer might have gained a quick advantage by taking shortcuts that would eventually cause erosion and rob future generations of healthy soil, yet sustainable techniques were used universally at the time of colonization. Anti-erosion techniques were spread and reinforced using exclusively collective and decentralized means. The highlanders did not need experts to come up with these environmental and gardening technologies and they did not need bureaucrats to ensure that everyone was using them. Instead, they relied on a culture that valued experimentation, individual freedom, social responsibility, collective stewardship of the land, and free communication. Effective innovations developed in one area spread quickly and freely from valley to valley. Lacking telephones, radio, or internet, and separated by steep mountains, each valley community was like a country unto itself. Hundreds of languages are spoken within the New Guinea highlands, changing from one community to the next. Within this miniature world, no one community could make sure that other communities were not destroying their environment — yet their decentralized approach to protecting the environment worked. Over thousands of years, they protected their soil and supported a population of millions of people living at such a high population density that the first Europeans to fly overhead saw a country they likened to the Netherlands.

Water management in that lowland northern country in the 12th and 13th centuries provides another example of bottom-up solutions to environmental problems. Since much of the Netherlands is below sea level and nearly all of it is in danger of flooding, farmers had to work constantly to maintain and improve the water management system. The protections against flooding were a common infrastructure that benefited everybody, yet they also required everyone to invest in the good of the collective to maintain them: an individual farmer stood to gain by shirking water management duties, but the entire society would lose if there were a flood. This example is especially significant because Dutch society lacked the anarchistic values common in indigenous societies. The area had long been converted to Christianity and indoctrinated in its ecocidal, hierarchical values; for hundreds of years it had been under the control of a state, though the empire had fallen apart and in the 12th and 13th centuries the Netherlands were effectively stateless. Central authority in the form of church officials, feudal lords, and guilds remained strong in Holland and Zeeland, where capitalism would eventually originate, but in northern regions such as Friesland society was largely decentralized and horizontal.

At that time, contact between towns dozens of miles apart — several days’ travel — could be more challenging than global communication in the present day. Despite this difficulty, farming communities, towns, and villages managed to build and maintain extensive infrastructure to reclaim land from the sea and protect against flooding amid fluctuating sea levels. Neighborhood councils, by organizing cooperative work bands or dividing duties between communities, built and maintained the dykes, canals, sluices, and drainage systems necessary to protect the entire society; it was “a joint approach from the bottom-up, from the local communities, that found their protection through organizing themselves in such a way.”[69] Spontaneous horizontal organizing even played a major role in the feudal areas such as Holland and Zeeland, and it is doubtful that the weak authorities who did exist in those parts could have managed the necessary water works by themselves, given their limited power. Though the authorities always take credit for the creativity of the masses, spontaneous self-organization persists even in the shadow of the state.

#environmentalism #environment #solarpunk #anti colonialism #anarchism #daily posts #communism #anti capitalist #anti capitalism #late stage capitalism #anarchy #anarchists #libraries #leftism #social issues #economy #economics #climate change #anarchy works

[rockislandadultreads]

One with Nature: Connecting with the Natural World

Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones

Today many of us live indoor lives, disconnected from the natural world as never before. And yet nature remains deeply ingrained in our language, culture and consciousness. For centuries, we have acted on an intuitive sense that we need communion with the wild to feel well. Now, in the moment of our great migration away from the rest of nature, more and more scientific evidence is emerging to confirm its place at the heart of our psychological wellbeing. So what happens, asks acclaimed journalist Lucy Jones, as we lose our bond with the natural world--might we also be losing part of ourselves? Delicately observed and rigorously researched, Losing Eden is an enthralling journey through this new research, exploring how and why connecting with the living world can so drastically affect our health. Travelling from forest schools in East London, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, via Poland's primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth. Urgent and uplifting, Losing Eden is a rallying cry for a wilder way of life - for finding asylum in the soil and joy in the trees - which might just help us to save the living planet, as well as ourselves, from a future of ecological grief.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest--a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery. Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she's been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls of James Cameron's Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide. Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Celebrities drive hybrids, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, and supermarkets carry no end of so-called “green” products. And yet the environmental crisis is only getting worse. In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, the eminent scientist James Lovelock argues that the earth is lurching ever closer to a permanent “hot state” – and much more quickly than most specialists think. There is nothing humans can do to reverse the process; the planet is simply too overpopulated to halt its own destruction by greenhouse gases.In order to survive, mankind must start preparing now for life on a radically changed planet. The meliorist approach outlined in the Kyoto Treaty must be abandoned in favor of nuclear energy and aggressive agricultural development on the small areas of earth that will remain arable. A reluctant jeremiad from one of the environmental movement’s elder statesmen, The Vanishing Face of Gaia offers an essential wake-up call for the human race.

#nonfiction #non-fiction #non-fiction books #history #Environment #biology #botany #nature #natural science #sustainability #science #ecology #to read #tbr #booklr #book blog #reading recommendations #Book Recommendations #book recs #library books #informed reading #reading for a better world

[fatehbaz]

Avocado orchards had carpeted the gently undulating hills around the sacred lake of Pátzcuaro with stodgy green bushes. Here, before the cataclysmic arrival of the first envoys dispatched by Hernando Cortes from the Aztec capital over the mountains to the East, [...] the Purépecha had sown maize, amaranth, zucchini, cacao, cotton, tomato, beans, a dozen types of chili, and much more.

Now the monotonous “green gold” of the avocado boom had colonized the entire Mexican state of Michoacán. [...] [I]t was shocking to think that the cause of the disaster was America’s great patriotic party: the National Football League’s Super Bowl. A flurry of advertising creativity on behalf of the Mexican avocado was unleashed every year during the multi-million-dollar sports broadcast. [...] “Is your life just terrible?” asks the comic actor Chris Elliott, star of Scary Movie 2 and Scary Movie 4, in the 2019 spot. “You deserve more! Spread an avocado on top of everything!” [...] A few days before the Super Bowl, the domestic diva Martha Stewart [...] had released on social networks her latest recipe for guacamole [...]. Guacamole was now an obligatory snack for the 100 million or so Americans who watched the Super Bowl. In February of 2017, 278 million avocados -- most of them from Michoacán -- had been sold during the days before the game in [the US] [...].

---

The avocado had become the star product of Mexican food production in the age of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) [...] since NAFTA was signed in 1994 [...]. [Mexican] farmers produced 16 times more than the formerly dominant Californian growers. [...] Moreover, the avocado was now classified as a “superfood” [...].

It had not always been like this. In the 1950s, the avocado was known unsentimentally as the crocodile pear [...]. Imports from Mexico were banned until 1997 [...] . When complete liberalization was announced in 2007, Michoacán had become an unbeatable competitor for the Californian avocado growers. The Mexican producers specialized, like their Californian rivals, in the Hass variety of avocado, more meaty than those that the Purépecha had [...] consumed over the millennia, and with a tough skin that protected the pears during long hauls in chilled container trucks to El Paso or Tijuana and then beyond to the big US consumer markets. [...] [T]he Hass avocado was perfectly suited to the global market [...]. Michoacán, whose crystalline lakes had earned it the name of the “land of fish” in the indigenous language of Tarasco, would never be the same.

By 2020, 80 percent of the avocados consumed in the United States came from Michoacán [...].

---

Now in the 21st century, on the outskirts of Uruapan, the frenetic capital del aguacate, the new economy of agribusiness took shape [...]. Further west on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, the monoculture had not yet colonized the entire landscape, but the advance of the avocado seemed unstoppable. [...] “Practically everybody here wants an avocado orchard [...],” explained [FFB], a resident of the Purépecha indigenous community of Jarácuaro on the shores of the lake. [...] [H]e was horrified by the extent of environmental destruction. “They pump water from the lake to water the avocado orchards [...]. It’s pillage. [...]”

The falling water level, together with the introduction of the rapacious predator tilapia, had wiped out almost all the [...] [native] fish species. Of the cornucopia of marine life that had fed the Purépecha cities, only the diminutive silvery charal remained. The same occurred at other great freshwater deposits in Michoaczán. [...] The Purépecha communities on the shores of the lake, a landscape of stunning beauty where dense pine and ilex oak forests met white nymphaea lilies floating on turquoise water, were girding themselves for the arrival of the aguacateros, avocado producers [...].

---

“They put a gun to your head and tell you to sign the deed before the notary. That’s how the transfer of land is agreed upon,” explained [GV], a sociologist at the University of San Nicolas de Hidalgo in Morelia [...].

Meanwhile, large exporters and avocado brokers -- some of them international brands like Del Monte -- were profiting by purchasing from producers at dirt-cheap prices and reselling to the US supermarket chains at very attractive ones. “They pay a dollar per kilo of avocado here and sell it for eight at a Minnesota W*lmart,” said [GV].

In order not to squander such a reliable source of profits, “transnational corporations, just like the Canadian mining companies in Zacatecas, pay the extortion money [...],” he continued.

---

Text by: Andy Robinson. Gold, Oil, and Avocados: A Recent History of Latin America in Sixteen Commodities. 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me.]