Re: <nettime> Bioregionalism

Very much in agreement with all that Brian says.

Le 21 juil. 2023 à 02:24, Brian Holmes <[email protected]> a écrit :

I don't think it's going to turn out for the better this time, but I just can't derive any satisfaction from the "civilizations fall" story, true as it may be. One can fall gracefully or murderously, and these are issues that can engage us in our own lifetimes. Bioregionalism matters because it's a turn away from the worst of contemporary civilization.

This satisfaction that certain people derive from "civilizations fall" is really preoccupying.

This can be seen in the "collapsology" movement in France. The term comes from the book Comment tout peut s’effondrer. Petit manuel de collapsologie à l’usage des générations présentes, by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, which is praiseworthy for its careful, scientific analysis. What I find profoundly disturbing are how proponents of the movement, (and others, like the survivalists) appear to promote with religious fervour the desire for everything to fall apart, humankind's damnation, getting our just deserts.

As creatures, our presence is everywhere, and has been wherever feet have taken human wonderers, along the great arc that goes from the Cape of Good Hope to Tierra del Fuego. Even the Amazon basin, with its seemingly virgin forests that symbolise the wilderness, has been transformed over millennia by its Amerindian inhabitants -- with undoubted effects upon its non-human inhabitants. The archeologist Stéphen Rostain has uncovered many agro-ecological traces showing how "under its savage exterior, the Amazon is in fact a 'domesticated' land."

Elephants also, as a kindred species at the top of the food chain, are particularly disruptive gardeners. Dame Daphne Sheldrick (in Love, Life and Elephants) describes how herds in Kenya hungrily ripped up entire forests, transforming the area into savannah grasslands, with a transmutative effect on local species and biodiversity.

Le 21 juil. 2023 à 12:52, mp via Nettime-tmp <[email protected]> a écrit :

Though it is of course relevant to look at why grains are so intertwined with the problems we are surrounded by: countable, relatively non-perishable and therefore easily taxable and "hordable" and thus laying the foundations for class society and enslavement culture. Money on that view is merely virtual grain. Additionally, in the amounts and the highly bred versions now produced and eaten, severely damaging to health.

I am curious about this determinism that "mp" postulates – that the worm was in the fruit, so to speak, the moment some human, ten thousand years ago, had the brainwave of planting a wheat field.

That from that moment on, with the concepts and practises that were their logical consequence, we were set onto the tragic path that has led us inevitably to the Capitalocene.

I do not think that it is correct to equate a small wheat field in ancient Irak to a mega-farm in the American Midwest. The ancient idea of abundance, of the breadbasket, has both a social and aesthetic value that are profoundly anchored in the collective psyche, and positive vision of the rural landscape.

Joe.