Thread: the spread of agriculture and the rise of the state.

You have probably heard some variation of this argument:

“Humans are bad in some way—violent, rapacious, hierarchical, etc—because bad social structures outcompete good social structures.”

Violent societies outfight and conquer peaceful societies. Agricultural societies outbreed and swamp non-agricultural societies. Hierarchical societies mobilize more labor and resources and bludgeon egalitarian societies. It’s a sort of folk-Game Theory argument that’s quite popular in certain misanthropic circles, especially among people who enjoy feeling holier-than-thou without explicitly resorting to racist myths or social Darwinism.

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Recently, someone told me that, thanks to capitalism, the environment has been getting cleaner and healthier.

“That pollution level is expected to get significantly worse. First Street projected changes in air pollution, based on models that predict extreme heat and wildfires. The group estimated that by 2054, more than 125 million Americans each year will be exposed to at least one day of ‘red’ air quality, the level that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes as unhealthy. That’s a 50 percent jump over this year.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/climate/wildfire-smoke-health.html

I came across a first-hand account of somehow who escaped the fire in #Lahaina and she noted that many roads out of town were privately owned by sugar plantations and were chained shut.

She says people died in their cars trying to escape.

These people were murdered by #PrivateProperty.

All of those sugar plantations were enclosed by the Hawaiian monarchy and sold off to American colonists, who in turn overthrew the monarchy and cemented their control of the islands and their lands.

Dying because of a chained gate on land that was stolen from the Hawaiian people is as surely murder as if they’d been pushed into the flames.

Someone popped into my mentions yesterday and tried to argue that we can and should respond to the climate catastrophe by changing our consumption patterns—reducing, reusing, and recycling; carpooling; buying from artisans rather than big firms; etc.

Undoubtedly, many of us could improve the way we buy and use stuff and thereby nibble away at the margins of the climate problem. But no, we are not going to solve problems like “sequential heat waves that kill at least tens of thousands of people every summer” by recycling our glass bottles.

What I really want to talk about, though, is the idea that our pattern of purchases and use is somehow a neutral and organic expression of our preferences that we can just adjust on a whim. It’s not.

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#ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis #ClimateCatastrophe