It “gradualizes” the new epoch so that it is no longer a rupture due principally to the burning of fossil fuels but a creeping phenomenon due to the incremental spread of human influence over the landscape. This misconstrues the suddenness, severity, duration and irreversibility of the Anthropocene leading to a serious underestimation and mischaracterization of the kind of human response necessary to slow its onset and ameliorate its impacts.

while all actual evidence points to an extraordinary exponential impact of humans in the environment beginning in the 1950s.

Over the past 50 years, humans have changed the world’s ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other comparable period in human history. The Earth is in its sixth great extinction event, with rates of species loss growing rapidly for both terrestrial and marine ecosystems. The atmospheric concentrations of several important greenhouse gases have increased substantially, and the Earth is warming rapidly. More nitrogen is now converted from the atmosphere into reactive forms by fertilizer production and fossil fuel combustion than by all of the natural processes in terrestrial ecosystems put together.

Edited by aerdil (Sept. 3, 2015 18:12:59)

littlegreenpills posted:

the soviet union did do things like dry the aral sea up and contaminate agricultural land in uzbekhistan with heavy metals. that said restricting private ownership of motor vehicles and private commodity consumption in general probably means they came out ahead on the green front

on the other hand that stuff happened after the krushchev thaw while stalin was a huge supporter of environmental projects including a massive re-forestation project. makes u think

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plan_for_the_Transformation_of_Nature

NoFreeWill posted:

Jason W. Moore is currently the best writer on capitalism and ecology

john bellamy foster imo

c_man posted:

.custom287129{}NoFreeWill posted:Jason W. Moore is currently the best writer on capitalism and ecology
john bellamy foster imo

he's also cool but not as cool, imo. red and green make a hideous shade of brown (poop) when mixed.

littlegreenpills posted:

the soviet union did do things like dry the aral sea up and contaminate agricultural land in uzbekhistan with heavy metals. that said restricting private ownership of motor vehicles and private commodity consumption in general probably means they came out ahead on the green front

You may find this interesting:

Soviet ecology presents us with an extraordinary set of historical ironies. On the one hand, the USSR in the 1930s and ’40s violently purged many of its leading ecological thinkers and seriously degraded its environment in the quest for rapid industrial expansion. The end result has often been described as a kind of “ecocide,” symbolized by the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the assault on Lake Baikal, and the drying up of the Aral Sea, as well as extremely high levels of air and water pollution.On the other hand, the Soviet Union developed some of the world’s most dialectical contributions to ecology, revolutionizing science in fields such as climatology, while also introducing pioneering forms of conservation. Aside from its famous zapovedniki, or nature reserves for scientific research, it sought to preserve and even to expand its forests. As environmental historian Stephen Brain observes, it established “levels of protection unparalleled anywhere in the world.” Beginning in the 1960s the Soviet Union increasingly instituted environmental reforms, and in the 1980s was the site of what has been called an “ecological revolution.” A growing recognition of this more complex reality has led scholars in recent years to criticize the “ecocide” description of Soviet environmental history as too simplistic.

From the 1960s on, Soviet ecological thought grew rapidly together with the environmental movement, which was led primarily by scientists. In the 1970s and ’80s this evolved into a mass movement, leading to the emergence in the USSR of the largest conservation organization in the world. These developments resulted in substantial changes in the society. For example, between 1980 and 1990 air pollutants from stationary sources fell by over 23 percent.
More significant from today’s standpoint was the role the Soviet Union played from the late 1950s on in the development of global ecology. Soviet climatologists discovered and alerted the world to the acceleration of global climate change; developed the major early climate change models; demonstrated the extent to which the melting of polar ice could create a positive feedback, speeding up global warming; pioneered paleoclimatic analysis; constructed a new approach to global ecology as a distinct field based on the analysis of the biosphere; originated the nuclear winter theory; and probably did the most early on in exploring the natural-social dialectic underlying changes in the earth system.

http://monthlyreview.org/2015/06/01/late-soviet-ecology-and-the-planetary-crisis/

NoFreeWill posted:

there might be an inflection point sometime in the next centuries catastrophes, though, where societies that survive are ones that are both warrior societies and more ecologically sustainable ones. but those societies might look more like feudalism or nomadic raiding gangs then peaceful ecovillages.

So just to be clear, do you actually want this hypothetical hokey Mad Max future world you anachronistically insist on calling 'feudalism' coming about or....?

NoFreeWill posted:

i do buy that argument from the left that anthropocene is not a radical enough conception, ie ancient chinese rice farming changing the atmosphere is obviously the start of something, but the key factor is the population and pollution explosion of the industrial revolution. but I also think that maximizing energy use and therefore ecological destruction is, while not inherent in human social arrangements (see aboriginal cultures that still survive, somewhat), the superior arrangement for conquering the globe (see the successes of colonialism and imperialism) as we can see in a world where capitalism has filled the globe with its peoples like a plague.

theres a good economics paper on how a tribe that maximizes ecological destruction thru having lots of babies will always outcompete neighboring peaceful hippie tribes, but you don't need a paper to understand that. there might be an inflection point sometime in the next centuries catastrophes, though, where societies that survive are ones that are both warrior societies and more ecologically sustainable ones. but those societies might look more like feudalism or nomadic raiding gangs then peaceful ecovillages.

cool theory you came up with in a cloud of weed smoke. as you point out, there's a great future for weed smoke theories using "game theory" to trivialize complex socio-historical relations in bourgeois scholarship

NoFreeWill posted:

i don't enjoy smoking weed

mods???