That is really some use of the English language.
Elsewhere in the series:
destructive potential of rampant uranium extraction on the Navajo Nation, I question how the longer historical trajectory of nuclear stockpiling, settler colonial extraction, and green energy initiatives converge in renewed calls for domestic uranium production today.
Squeak.
The joke I really want to make is to write Squa-eak! and have it evoke Wayne's World "Shwing!" But not the boner sproing "Shwing" of the original sketches, but the "Scha-wing!" it eventually morphed to, emphasized like "And how!" I'm picturing little metal mice solemnly saying "Ska-week!" to a photo of little mouse Claudia Schiffer.
inhabitants of South Lebanon rely on risk-averse agricultural processes--resistant ecologies--that require minimal investment, domestic labor, no extra infrastructure, and fast turnover. Unlike citrus, grapes, and olives, tobacco fits the time-space and political economy of war
That is such a strange article. It's partly anthrobabble and partly written in this strange childish language, and it doesn't seem to follow any of the rules which I have come to expect from (norm)al discourse. It doesn't even seem to feel the need to back up its basic thesis. "Working with rats means people have to work in teams of two, which helps them bond" - sounds plausible, but she makes this (ass)ertion and then just leaves it as that.
residents in the southern port of Pusan associated the collapse of the sardines with the collapse of the empire. These small pelagic fish came to be known as ilmangch'i (일망치), or "Japan's ruin."
I think the Allies have a better claim than the sardines.
"Altering the choreography of demining" like a mashup of The Hurt Locker and Ratatouille.
My mashup of Ratatouille with The Forty-Year-Old Virgin was rejected because we couldn't figure out how to keep a hat on during sex.
@5 I prefer "argument by incantation" from this New Yorker Review, excerpted in relevant part:
The more Gubar doesn't know, the bolder she becomes in her interpretations. Looking at Giotto's "Betrayal of Christ" (circa 1305), probably the most famous painting of the Judas kiss, she decides that this Judas is overweight--a telling fact, she believes. "The plump face of Judas, as well as his corpulent frame beneath the enveloping robe, warns that the kiss might be an incorporating bite." It's not enough that he betrays Jesus; he wants to eat him. Neo-Freudianism is what pushes Gubar down that rabbit hole, but normally the source of her caprices is just postmodern politics:A male Eve, Judas--rejecting or accepting, promoting or curtailing Jesus' potency--inhabits a decidedly queer place in the Western imaginary. To the extent that Judas stands for the poser or passer--a person who is not what he seems to be--he reflects anxieties about all sorts of banned or ostracized groups, not just Jews. An apostle in an all-male circle, associated with anality and with the disclosure of secrets, Judas retains his masculinity. . . . At other times and in diverse contexts, though, Judas represents a range of quite various and variously stigmatized populations--criminals, heretics, foreigners, Africans, dissidents, the disabled, the suicidal, the insane, the incurably ill, the agnostic. Members of these groups, too, have been faulted for posing or passing as (alien) insiders. Potentially convertible, all such outcasts might be thought to be using camouflaging techniques to infiltrate, hide out, assimilate, and thereby turn a treacherous trick.Really? The incurably ill are turning tricks? Good for them! This is shocking nonsense--argument by incantation--but its import is clear: Judas represents all the oppressed, and Gubar is there to defend them.
How can you even tell he's fat from that picture?
The OP link has the feel of an abridgment of a longer article that fleshes out the argument more. I wonder if that's what this series basically is. Not necessarily intentionally on the part of the organizers; just that the scholars participating are likely to take something they've already got written and trim it down to meet the wordcount limits.
The author's university bio says among other things "I have a keen interest in interdisciplinary and engaged research that integrates theoretical rigor with public-facing works." So you'd think there would be a keen interest in making the trimmed-down-for-publication version more comprehensible; it's not just "I already have a book/dissertation and I have this random opportunity to get some of it in front of eyeballs outside the academy."
9/10: if only there was some unit of measurement to determine the pleasure of such a film.
11: I have no interest in defending that particular reading of Giotto and I tend to like Joan Acocella's writing, but I have to say that snark against critical theory with "postmodern politics" is an awfully easy genre to indulge in, and especially in the context of queer theory it takes some willed ignorance not to acknowledge that the incurably ill are turning tricks all the time.
Maybe nope is from a county with social welfare programs?
@16 Better critical theory would make a harder target.
I haven't read the link yet, and don't know Haraway's work in general, but nothing has ever explained conventional agriculture to me better than this conversation between Haraway and Tsing:
https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/
4: is this really true? most tobacco comes from absolutely enormous capital intensive plantations, while on the other hand, the Royal Navy's demand for citrus in the Napoleonic Wars completely reshaped places like Sicily as plantation economies before California came in and completely mullered them.
@19 What about conventional agriculture is explained by that exchange? It is hilarious, though perhaps unintentionally so. The term "astute peoples of the circumpolar north" approaches a kenning:
Our oar-steed's panicked flight/provoked by the glinting walrus-bane/of the astute peoples of the circumpolar north.
20: It probably is true in that tree crops have a level of fixed investment (the trees) that field crops don't, which makes them somewhat more resilient to breakdowns of societal order. Lots of complicating factors in specific cases though.
"Them" being the field crops, that is.
For me, the need for simplification and standardization, because it treats labor as interchangeable.
21: The context of the "astute peoples" remark is also weird:
For example, the astute peoples of the circumpolar north have developed Indigenous vocabularies and both analytical and experiential ways of talking about the changes in the ice, the changes in the waters, the changes in the position of stars in the sky because of the way sea ice and fog will refract differently and so on. These people, who live on the land might react to the notion of climate change as another southern importation that tends, yet once again, to make it almost impossible to propose local terms for analytical work.
To be fair, she's just speculating here rather than making an empirical claim or presenting any evidence, but to the extent there is a coherent idea here it's just wrong. Circumpolar peoples are very aware of climate change and comfortable with the analytical concept! It fits well with their own experiential concepts! This is a whole big well-studied thing!
25: Yeah, that bit really stopped me short, especially the "might" that shows that she absolutely, 100% has not "done the work" to find out. Either she hasn't asked these astute peoples, she hasn't lifted a finger to learn what they already say, or she doesn't give a shit because all she cares about is this superior pose where it's not tolerable for "southern" people to not learn indigenous idioms.
Beyond that, it all looks a whole lot to me like "noble savage" in another guise: other than Enlightenment Europeans (and, I dunno, maybe Chinese?), no humans have radically altered their environments, caused extinctions, etc. That's just pure, unadulterated bullshit leavened with just enough special pleading to create exceptions when necessary.
Also "machine labor slavery" and the "forced labor" of animals and microbes. Sorry, I'm off this crazy train.
PS - OK, "Making Kin in the Chthulucene" can stay.
The forced labor of animals describes bringing bees into California orchards perfectly. Here is the annual bee transport map for the U.S.:
http://www.frasiertransport.net/honey-bees-1
Speaking of "forced labor" of animals at least has justification from certain ethical perspectives, but the article also talks about forced labor of plants, which seems like gibberish from any ethical perspective. What to a plant is "labor"?
A description of the trucking process: https://www.freightwaves.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-honeybee-trucker
How is that not forced onto bees for their labor?
It is similar for harvested ladybugs. Anything (insects, rodents, herps) that can't be forced to labor for the crop is eliminated. You can't imagine how sterile a "clean" orchard is, including the soil.
Either she hasn't asked these astute peoples, she hasn't lifted a finger to learn what they already say, or she doesn't give a shit because all she cares about is this superior pose where it's not tolerable for "southern" people to not learn indigenous idioms.
Right, and it's not like this is an obscure topic or it's hard to find indigenous perspectives. Here's the Inuit Circumpolar Council's page on climate change. They are aware of it! They advocate for incorporating traditional knowledge and indigenous perspectives and leadership, of course, but there's no objection to the concept.
Sorry, didn't realize my name was being dropped from those.
Cover crops are planted, grown for a couple months while they fix nitrogen, then disced back in before they can finish their lifespan or reproduce. Bulbs and roses are forced into bloom out of schedule for sale in February. Rootstock cannot bear its own fruit but has a graft imposed on it. Orchards don't live out their lives but only the first twenty most productive years.
@31 ... and? Rocks are crushed and blended into concrete. Streams are forced from their beds into unnatural flood control channels. Clay is burned into pottery. Helium is confined in balloons for the amusement of sticky fingered brats at birthday parties.
If I recall correctly, as early as the 1st century there was a version of the Judas story where he dies by eating himself to death, and that this story is partially reflected in Luke's account in Acts?
Maybe I will look this up instead of just trying to remember... Ah great, here we go, from Wikipedia:
"The early Church Father Papias of Hierapolis (c. 60-130 AD) recorded in his Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord, which was probably written during the first decade of the second century AD, that Judas was afflicted by God's wrath; his body became so enormously bloated that he could not pass through a street with buildings on either side. His face became so swollen that a doctor could not even identify the location of his eyes using an optical instrument. Judas's genitals became enormously swollen and oozed with pus and worms. Finally, he killed himself on his own land by pouring out his innards onto the ground, which stank so horribly that, even in Papias' own time a century later, people still could not pass the site without holding their noses. This story was well known among Christians in antiquity and was often told in competition with the two conflicting stories from the New Testament."
The version in Acts has that he "[fell] headlong... burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out." And one can imagine there's some overlap here between becoming enormously bloated and your guts exploding, so the both might be coming out of the same bloating Judas stories.
Anyway, if Judas is fat in the painting these kinds of traditions are probably why...
There's a developing body of work on giving rivers the rights to be free from that kind of interference.
Judas, unlike Peter, James, and John, is made up whole cloth and wasn't based on a real person. For example, Paul seems not to have heard of the Judas parts of the passion story, so the idea of Judas probably wasn't in wide circulations for at least a decade or two after Jesus's death.
Those seem more like descriptions of some disease or curse than of the sequelae of being fat.
Yes, you're right, it's about swelling not about being fat. But at any rate, if he's swollen-looking in the painting that'd be my first guess as to what's going on here...
Probably there's consensus here that neonicotinoids are a nightmare-- if that extermination stopped, maybe a less forced mutually beneficial arrangement like the one gardeners enjoy would be possible?
Or we could helpfully philosophize about the ethics of canals, Grand Canal, Suez, Panama canal, was the greater violence to the workers or to the landscape?
@34
"There's a developing body of work on giving rivers the rights to be free from that kind of interference."
What does this statement even mean? Rivers are not sentient - any grant of rights to a "river" is in practice a grant of rights to one group of people (the Seeress of Rivers, perhap?) and a derogation of the rights of another group of people. Similar to corporate personhood.
if he's swollen-looking in the painting
Looking at the painting might help! Only his face is visible and he's puckering up, so highly debatable.
Looks neither swollen nor fat to me!
35 is super-interesting. I just started a book about Paul by Jacob Taubes, I'll now pay attention to what Paul didn't know.
It's pretty hard to tell what Paul did and didn't know just because the Epistles are such a different literary form from the Gospels. Any elements of the narrative that make their way in are largely incidental. It's frustrating!
Is it plausible that the character of Judas evolved in Greek-speaker retellings with some component of animus toward Jews?
45: Hm, interesting question. I think it's hard to say; he's not particularly Jewish-coded in the narratives, at least compared to everyone else, but then there is the name. It might help if we knew what "Iscariot" meant or where it came from (we don't).
The betrayal by Judas doesn't particularly connect narratively to the more obvious anti-Jewish content like the confrontations with Pharisees and the crowd in front of Pilate, but maybe it's a separate tradition that developed in parallel for the same reasons?
39: It's not the river. Fish are sentient. We're sissies allowed to catch them with hooks regardless because they are assholes.
There's a developing body of work on giving rivers the rights to be free from that kind of interference.
Isn't this the thing where maybe Ecuador successfully sued Exxon or something like that? I am sure I have every noun in that sentence wrong, but you all are a smart bunch.
Oh! And there was a Minnesota tribe or something that's suing because under some 1800s contract, they're supposed to be able to fish out of some body of water, and they're suing on behalf of the body of water, in some sort of sympathetic hail mary?
I am basically fine endowing nature with rights. I'm uncomfortable with the boundlessness of property rights as they currently exist. The tragedy of the commons wrecks nature. Not just nature insofar as it benefits the rest of us, but the nature itself.
@50.4
But nature is not being endowed with rights, at least because nature is not capable of exercising such rights. Certain people are being granted rights. Who decides the recipients and boundaries of that property right? What happens if the recipients disagree about the exercise of such rights?
Who gets to be the Lorax who speaks for the trees?
My understanding was, perhaps paradoxically, that the more strongly anti-Jewish content in the New Testament tended to come from Jewish authors and not gentiles. In particular all the deicide blood libel stuff comes from Matthew, which is also the most Jewish of the synoptics (for example, many experts think the author kept kosher). Basically the people in largely gentile communities didn't have tensions with Jews because they didn't interact with them, while the people in communities that were ethnically Jewish and religiously mixed between Christianity and Judaism were much more focused on that fault line. For example, it's usually thought that the group that the Gospel of John comes from had a formative traumatic experience of being kicked out of their synagogue.
In the context of Matthew wikipedia says:
"Matthew's prime concern was that the Jewish tradition should not be lost in a church that was increasingly becoming gentile. This concern lies behind the frequent citations of Jewish scripture, the evocation of Jesus as the new Moses along with other events from Jewish history, and the concern to present Jesus as fulfilling, not destroying, the Law. Matthew must have been aware of the tendency to distort Paul's teaching of the law no longer having power over the New Testament Christian into antinomianism, and addressed Christ's fulfilling of what the Israelites expected from the "Law and the Prophets" in an eschatological sense, in that he was all that the Old Testament had predicted in the Messiah."
"The gospel has been interpreted as reflecting the struggles and conflicts between the evangelist's community and the other Jews, particularly with its sharp criticism of the scribes and Pharisees. It tells how Israel's Messiah, rejected and executed in Israel, pronounces judgment on Israel and its leaders and becomes the salvation of the gentiles. Prior to the crucifixion of Jesus, the Jews are referred to as Israelites--the honorific title of God's chosen people. After it, they are called Ioudaios (Jews), a sign that--due to their rejection of the Christ--the "Kingdom of Heaven" has been taken away from them and given instead to the church."
Is Feinstein sentient? What's the test for this? Are there degrees of sentience, maybe not being boring is evidence of something?
I heard that the real Israelite people are in Utah now, but I've never been to Utah (beyond standing one one corner of it), so I don't know.
After it, they are called Ioudaios (Jews)
It is really a very obvious switch, in retrospect, after it is pointed out. I wonder if that's not why you hear, among respectable gentiles, things like "Jewish people" instead of "the Jews." I recall a Seinfeld bit.
51: Idk! But people speak for libraries and schools and entities which aren't sentient all the time. Surely we can navigate that.
Nature is being endowed with rights.
"In 2017, New Zealand passed a groundbreaking law granting personhood status to the Whanganui River. The law declares that the river is a living whole, from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements."
The Karuk recently gave similar rights to the Klamath River.
@57 No. Nature is not being endowed with rights. From your link:
So what has personhood, or Te Awa Tupua, meant in practical terms? Albert points to one example.
After the law passed, he says, the local council assumed it was business as usual when they tried to build a bridge across the river for cyclists and pedestrians. They hadn't considered they now needed to consult first with the tribe and the community.
As a result the bridge structure ended up sitting in a field during two years of delays before it was finally dropped into place and opened in 2020. Albert says the hapū -- the affected tribal clan -- and the community pushed for improvements like protected fishing areas, speed limits on nearby roads and the addition of restrooms.
Nature didn't get rights. If it was the river that was granted personhood, why does the local counsel have to consult with the tribe and the community? As opposed to, I don't know, holding a seance on banks of the river? What happened is that NIMBYs got another chokepoint. And the question remains -- who represents "the tribe" and "the community"?
@56 Why focus on schools and libraries?
Some argue that privately held corporations are endowed with free speech rights, and religious beliefs.
How exactly do you think organizations interact in general? Does the local library have a seance with the elementary school when the boards are interested in collaborating? Why can't a river have a board of trustees endowed with power of protection?
And actually, the acquifer near here does literally have a board of trustees with legal power, to keep the water level from dropping too low and endangering a few species.
@60
A river district can have a board of trustees! Duly empowered by the authorized governmental authority that created the river district to take certain specific actions for certain specific purposes.
Do you see how that is different from saying that the river has "rights"? Particularly when we start defining the "rights" of a river by analogy to inalienable human rights, such as claiming that a river has the "right" to be "free of ... interference." Or claiming that a corporation has the "right" to donate money to a political campaign. Or claiming that a corporation has "religious beliefs."
Talking about how a "thing" has "rights" is a kind of distraction. A sales pitch. A confidence game. Some human being, somewhere, is being granted power. And as with any grant of governmental power, questions of scope, legitimacy, transparency, and democratic accountability should be front and center.
I don't really care if it's called a board or rights, if it means there is something legally enforceable. Whatever is an effective mechanism.
I don't see how it's that different from people having rights, it's not like I can somehow enforce my own rights. If someone infringes on my rights I'm dependent on some organization stepping in and suing on my behalf, so I don't see why that's fundamentally different from a river.
Like a river, I sometimes damage cars and an often near Omaha.
nope isn't wrong to be concerned. There's some movement to make the Great Salt Lake count as a person for the purposes of claiming "first in time, first in right" water rights. This would mean the lake gets first dibs on the water, superceding the farmers who have the current rights. But it's only a live option because the governor has an alfalfa farm in the desert, so actually buying people out of water rights and not being beholden to 1857 or whatever isn't politically feasible. Developers will use it to divert the water and then find a way to screw the farmers, I'm sure.
@62
"if it means there is something legally enforceable." Something legally enforceable to do what? To force the local government to impose speed limits, establish "protected fishing areas", and add restrooms somewhere? As in the example of the river granted personhood?
"Whatever is an effective mechanism." An effective mechanism to do what? Immanentize the eschaton?
Rights in the sense of human rights (e.g., free speech, religious belief, "free from interference"), the kind of rights that follow from personhood, are abstract (i.e. general and open to interpretation), permanent, and precede and are independent of statute. That is broad grant of substantial power to some human (because as a practical matter that power ain't being granted to "Nature"). And I want to know who. And why such a broad grant of power is necessary.
@63
There are two big differences. First, unlike a river, you are entirely capable of suing on your own behalf (people do all the time). Second, unlike a river, you are capable of articulating what you consider to be your rights, when you believe these rights have been violated, what constitutes the violation, and the remedy that you seek.
To return to the example of the river granted personhood, what rights of the river were violated such that speed limits, protected fishing areas, and restrooms were suitable remedies?
65 The state of Montana entered into a compact with CSKT -- the prior inhabitants of the valley from which I am typing these words -- which gave the tribe an instream flow right in the river running through town, senior to everyone else. There are some limits on who they are allowed to cut off, but this was a recognition that their treaty right to continue to fish included an implied right to have enough water for fish to live. At no point does this river pass through the CSKT reservation.
50 years ago, our legislature gave fish and game instream flow rights in a number of streams. There would be constitutional problems with having those be senior to any rights that existed at the time, and I think the same would apply to granting the GSL some kind of senior water rights. Having the rights become defined as a part of an Indigenous tribe's prior existing rights avoids the takings issue that just giving the water to the lake would cause.
66 I agree to you that things like this New Zealand law -- they agreed to adopt the law as part of a settlement -- is purely symbolic. Symbols are important, and no one actually involved is under the impression that the powers granted under the law are not to be wielded by particular humans -- the same humans, it turns out, who negotiated for the promulgation of the law.
It is a fact that the legal heritage of the Anglosphere includes a lot of instances where particular humans were not considered 'persons' with 'rights' under the law. Entertaining some symbolism isn't the worst retribution for this sad history.
@67 Okay. But the "CSKT-MT Compact is a water rights agreement between the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) of the Flathead Indian Reservation, the State of Montana, and the United States." It perhaps recognizes that CSKT has a right to use the Flathead River. It does not appear to recognize the personhood of the Flathead River. And a consequent right to be used by CSKT.
There is a difference. Assigning personhood, and therefore rights, to a thing matters. For example, inspired by 68.2:
Two bills would increase the sentence for battery of a pregnant woman resulting the miscarriage of her fetus.
The first bill includes the preamble "whereas violence against pregnant women is uniquely abhorrent ..."
The second bill includes the preamble "whereas a fetus is a person and possesses a right to life ..."
The bills are otherwise identical in content. Do you see a difference in passing the second bill, rather than the first?
It's almost like we have an analogy ban for a reason. At any rate, assigning personhood rights to fetuses is bad, but that doesn't tell you anything about rivers! Rivers don't flow within a single person!
Assigning fetuses to rivers would please very few.
I'm finding this whole discussion really disrespectful.
69 Right. I was responding in 67 to Cala's comment about the Great Salt Lake. There, the idea seems to be that personhood will allow the creation of a water right. I think this isn't so for various reasons, both having to do with basic concepts of western water law, and with takings law. If you want to make a particular water level in the Lake senior to existing uses, the device that fits the constitution and water law to to have that right be held by Indigenous people. Not by the Lake -- who knows, maybe the Lake wants to be half its size. Or maybe it wants to engulf Ogden.
I totally get what you are saying nope, and I am not arguing with you. Personhood bills were a pre-Dobbs magic bullet, a way to allow states to 'one weird trick' their way out of Roe. With Roe gone, no one even needs to do the trick.
Personhood for natural features that exist so far isn't -- as you point out -- even one weird trick. It's a tribal right to co-manage with a fancy name.
69.1 -- A right to use the Flathead River is one thing, but rights in the Clark Fork are something else entirely. In the compact, CSKT gave up its claims to rights in the Missouri and its sources. Look at a map.
I recently turned down several requests to represent people hoping to defeat the CSKT compact at the Montana Water Court. Strangely, even after approval by the Montana legislature, Congress, and the CSKT tribal council, the thing still has to be approved by the water court. I'm certain it'll get approved, but I hear that some lawyer has convinced a bunch of white supremacists that he's got one weird trick that'll blow the whole thing wide open. Forcing water court rejection.
If it doesn't end up turning on the Hudson Bay Company's original charter, I'm going to be disappointed.
@73 Apologies.
W.r.t. analogies bans: An radio interviewer once said that when interviewing believers in UFOs about UFOs, he didn't start off asking them to justify why they believed in UFOs. Because the UFO believers had all sorts of justifications prepared for why the evidence for UFOs was strong. Instead, he asked them about bigfoot. But they typically believed bigfoot was a ridiculous myth and the evidence for bigfoot was bullshit. Once that was established, he would point out that the evidence for bigfoot wasn't that different from the evidence for UFOs.
Radio doesn't respect the traditional ways.
Rivers are not sentient - any grant of rights to a "river" is in practice a grant of rights to one group of people (the Seeress of Rivers, perhap?) and a derogation of the rights of another group of people. Similar to corporate personhood.
There is a lot of misunderstanding out there about the point of corporate personhood, so it is worth remembering that the reason it exists, and the reason it was created, is that a corporate person can be sued. Not "so that a corporate person can sue", as 66 says. You can enter into a contract with a person called Microsoft that is legally different from a contract with a person called Bill Gates, and if Microsoft fails to meet its obligations, you can sue it. It does not reduce my rights, or Bill Gates' rights, to give Microsoft this kind of personhood, and it turns out to be really helpful if you want to run a modern economy.
Personhood as a way of protecting a watercourse seems to be based on a misunderstanding. You can give something like a river all sorts of legal protections without giving it personhood, because the state will act to enforce those protections. It is illegal to dump waste into a river, not because the river is a person, but because there is a law that says so. And if a river has personhood, it seems to me that I should be able to enter into a binding contract with that river - that's what personhood means - and to enforce that contract in court if the river fails to comply. Could the river be sued for flooding, for example? Or for failing in its obligation to provide X acre-feet of water to irrigate my field?
You just go ahead and try.
I should be able to enter into a binding contract with that river - that's what personhood means
Now you tell me.
"Some say love, it is a river. That has a corporate deed. "
78: one could bring a suit on behalf of it is my understanding. Anyhow the GSL had its chance to cover Ogden and it clearly gave it up a few million years ago.
82: but could you bring a suit against it? That's my point. Corporate persons can enter into enforceable agreements, and can be sued for non-compliance.
Are you feeling lucky? That's my question.
"if it means there is something legally enforceable." Something legally enforceable to do what? To force the local government to impose speed limits, establish "protected fishing areas", and add restrooms somewhere? As in the example of the river granted personhood?
There are definitely ecologists and professional people who can say, to the best of our ability, how to measure the health of a river and best practices for a river. These do not necessarily align with what any group of other people may want from the river. But I would like to see the ecological health of a river have a board of trustees with legal power to enter dispute resolution and fight against the destruction of the river.
Fishing areas and restrooms are for the benefit of people, not the health of the river. I'd like to live in a world where everyone has a legal obligation not to destroy the ecological health of that world.
I think the real reason not to grant rivers personhood is that the river-spirit is already a person capable of entering a binding contract, and it would be very difficult to determine a proper boundary between the responsibilities of the Spirit of the Tyne with regard to (say) not flooding things, and the responsibilities of the Tyne itself. Piercing the corporate veil is tricky enough. Piercing the numinous veil would be legally very challenging.
But I would like to see the ecological health of a river have a board of trustees with legal power to enter dispute resolution and fight against the destruction of the river.
These organisations already exist. https://www.camconservancy.org/ They have legal authority over aspects of the river, a legal purpose, and the ability to make contracts.
Fishing areas and restrooms are for the benefit of people, not the health of the river.
Well, I'd prefer not to be pooped in and both help cut down on that.
YOU CANNOT POOP IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE.
A fish could, if it swam at exactly the pace of the river.
87: I know. There's one near me, which I mentioned in 60.
To me, calling it "rights of a river" or "conservancy board" is indistinguishable. Somehow the board was granted legal power to protect the river. This means that we think the river has inherent value worth protecting. Isn't that what rights are? That each person is intrinsically worth protecting from the savages of other people?
We don't have rights to protect us from hurricanes or illnesses. We have rights to protect us from others.
@92
Consider comment 69. You can have two theoretical frameworks that, in a particular instance, yield similar results. But the two theoretical frameworks may be very different and yield very different results in other instances. Therefore it is entirely rational to prefer one framework over the other. Even though they yield the same results in a particular instance.
Here there are two possible theoretical frameworks:
1) The river is a part of the community commons. Management of the commons is traditionally a government function. The government, transparently and in response to community pressure, has delegated governmental authority to a quasi-public entity to manage the river. The authority of the quasi-public entity is clearly defined and can be modified or withdrawn by the government, according to a predefined procedure.
2) The river is endowed with certain constitutional rights that arise from the personhood of the river. Some randos are suing to enjoin actions allegedly violating these rights. A judge will decide whether the rights of the river are violated, and the appropriate remedy. Should the judge favor the randos, it will be damn near impossible, as a practical matter, for the government to modify the resulting decision.
In a particular instance, these two frameworks may yield the same result (e.g., restrictions on water usage, fishing rights, restrooms & speed limits, etc.). But I find framework #1 vastly preferable, overall.
93(1) - But governments are responsible to the people not the river/land. There is nothing saying a government has a responsibility to ensure the river itself ensures. Just that the humans using the river are able to continue using the river. For example, it clogs up with an invasive plant species (bad for the river) but the invasive has pretty flower that birds love (visitors and some environmentalists are happy). There's nothing saying the government has to manage the invasive.
2) That's how government works now.
The rights-holding issue is tied into a lot of Indigenous management up here. Similar to holding a place for a species/ecosystem at the decision making table.
I don't have time to get into this today, but I'm generally with nope on this one -- rights held by entities not capable of making decisions about their own interests are a problem.
I feel that it violates the law against perpetuities.
Cala ex rel. Great Salt Lake v. Every Golf Course in the Valley?
Don't worry, we'll wind up the riverbudsman's office 21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III.
@94(1) Yes. Popular sovereignty is funny that way.
@94(2) That is a failure mode to be avoided. Otherwise you end up with a judge in Texas enjoining the sale of mifepristone on spurious grounds. While other judges find that corporations have a constitutional right to corrupt our elections that cannot be infringed.
@94(3) No place is being held "for a species/ecosystem at the decision making table." A place is being held for certain people who claim to represent the species/ecosystem. And the verbiage about "holding places" is just a distraction from the actual question: Do those certain people have any democratic legitimacy or accountability?
I think it's a mistake to treat rivers in the American West and rivers in the UK or NZ as the same sorts of things. Water rights are just so much more complicated, fucked up, and controversial in the American West than they are in places that actually have water.
100: There is a literal empty chair yes. The species or ecosystem may also get a champion to argue from their (supposed) point of view.
But also this is being done within a quasi-Indigenous context (or nation-nation(s) at least) so some of your concerns about what's democratic are kind of misplaced. At least in the Canadian context, sometimes.
Someone else can probably tease out what contexts we're using the term rights and whether that should be Rights and what document(s) confer which ones.
Probably no need for this correction, but
the article also talks about forced labor of plants
that's what I meant to say in 26. Obviously I'm aware that Eurasian farming* has literally always involved the forced labor of animals. I haven't the faintest idea why modern farmers doing it with bees is supposed to be different or worse than what started happening in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago. I guess because you can call it capitalist, it must be worse. But anyway, I don't think raising the issue of animals on farms or plantations is silly. Microbes and plants, yes.
*I know American indigenous didn't have draft animals per se, but I don't know if they used animals in farming at all. Not really relevant AFAIC
As for giving rivers rights, AWB notes in their professional work that the entire framework of "rights" as the way to secure self-determination is foolish, and that Bentham saw this 200-some years ago. I'm not smart enough to follow the entire argument, but I think "giving rivers the kinds of rights that humans have is the best way to protect them" is the reductio ad absurdam in Bentham's favor.
The Inca trained capybara to harvest potatoes and run errands.
The archeological record hasn't caught up to my theory yet though.
"For example, it clogs up with an invasive plant species (bad for the river)"
Well, is it, though? It changes the river, and may reduce its flow rate, but why is that bad? It may displace native plants or animals, and that's bad for them, but is it bad for the river? Is the river better in winter because it has more flow and fewer plants? Does the river dread spring?
I wonder if that's not why you hear, among respectable gentiles, things like "Jewish people" instead of "the Jews."
I've surely told how my Catholic classmate in college scolded another classmate for referring to a third classmate as "Jewish" (in a completely benign context, like whether he'd be doing something for Xmas or something). She'd internalized that it was somehow a slur to just state it as a simple fact, that you were supposed to circumlocute.
I know American indigenous didn't have draft animals per se, but I don't know if they used animals in farming at all.
Not really. They had dogs, which were used mostly for hunting, and turkeys, which were raised for their own products (meat, eggs, feathers) but didn't play any particular role in farming as far as we know. Maybe they ate bugs in the fields. In general farming, like most activities, was 100% human labor.
Wait for the archeologists to catch up.
111: OK, that's what I thought. Thanks.
Although, come to think of it, by the logic of 29 & 31 that says bees trucked to orchards are slaves and cover crops plowed under are massacre victims, the fish that the Patuxet placed in their corn plantings were under parasitic attack. It's all man's inhumanity to inhuman things, all the way down.
Wait for the archeologists to catch up.
It's hard to compete with a process of pure reason.
Small bones don't fossilize well, let alone seed potatoes.
Anyway, I do want to underline the bit from way upthread that Gubar spun this whole spiel based on A. a tendentious opinion about a painting of a personage who B. she doesn't seem to know very much about. I'll just flout the analogy ban and say it would be like someone writing a critical essay about the figure of Sharon Tate in the Tarantino movie without ever knowing that Tate was a real person who was really murdered by the Manson Family. Just pure Frankfurtian bullshit--Gubar doesn't know and she doesn't care that she doesn't know, because she wants to make an argument and facts would only get in the way.
@113 TO SERVE BEES.
117: The ones in the Amazon are, but the smaller mountain capybara served the Inca.
@104 And the empty chair is there to ensure that you never forgot that there is someone else whose consent is required?
119: More commonly known as guinea pigs.
You'd tell a Canadian farmer to sell rape oil.
I suppose here's what I think: Sure, in 2023 American legal framework, "rights" doesn't offer anything that a conservancy or whatever does.
But I also don't think it's crazy to believe that a river has inherent worth, and that if we weren't so closely embedded in the current multiverse or whatever, a conservancy would seem like a convoluted way to protect something and "river rights" would seem natural.
Also: people have rights, even when they're unconscious or lack the ability to make decisions.
Here's what's actually going on: I sort of fundamentally loathe the idea that we are allowed to own land. Like on a deep, hippie level. I am fine with owning a house on land, and that you should have a right to privacy and so on, but somehow owning a bit of the earth irritates me on a certain level.
The world should all be collective. I probably dropped acid one too many times as a youth, but there you have it. Om.
Would they like some small acid?
Bud Light. They all love Bud Light.
125: Have you heard the good news from Mr. Henry George?
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There's a row of trees overhanging Broadway from a park between 212th and 214th St that I'm very fond of -- big old trees whose branches overhang the street on a graceful arch. I was never sure what kind of trees they were, but for professional reasons I recently learned about an interactive map that lets you look up any tree in NYC.
Turns out they're Japanese Zelkovas, which I'd never heard of before. Common name in Japanese, keyaki. Lurid, you're beautiful! I never realized!
|>
Zelkova are the typical substitute/replacement for American elms (because they have a similar shape but are Dutch-resistant). But now you know why elms were so beloved.
Because they can't stand up to the Dutch?
I am sad about Dutch Elm Disease now. This row of trees really is my favorite; people must have been devastated when the elms died.
129: I'm inferring that's the thing Unfogged was talking about semi-recently that I didn't retain much of?
136: Yes, land value tax. In its strong form it could be labeled communizing land, as it calls for taxing (nearly) 100% of the value owners get every year that's from the land as opposed to what's built atop the land. The argument is that owners do nothing to enhance land value, that's the bounty of nature plus the value of the community and economy all around you, and therefore have no right to that value. So the tax requires them to use the land to its full value, or sell to someone who can.
(In practice it would likely mean more tax in urban areas, less in rural.)
Yay! I took a selfie next to a keyaki in Saitama and I assure you that it upstaged me.
Wait no, lourdes took the picture. You can't really take a selfie with a tree, unless it has an especially attractive branch nearby.
You don't know how long my arms are.
OT: Someone made a new covid that can make your eyes itch and I've been blithely going along assuming I have allergies because my eyes itch.
125: Most trailer park residents don't own the land underneath them. Every so often, a trailer park gets sold, and the residents have to either move or abandon their homes. Since the former is usually functionally impossible (mobile home means mobile *once*), they wind up with the latter. Doesn't sound like the best argument for not owning the land underneath you.
I sort of fundamentally loathe the idea that we are allowed to own land. Like on a deep, hippie level.
In the famously crunchy hippie stronghold of colonial Hong Kong, no one owned land - pretty much the entire colony was owned by the government, which leased it out. (Exception: the bit of land under the Cathedral.)
I have to say that snark against critical theory with "postmodern politics" is an awfully easy genre to indulge in
It is indeed very easy to make fun of bullshit artists, especially when they lack the intelligence and cunning required to make their bullshit non-obvious, but that doesn't mean one should not do so.
These people are on the same side of the fence as Trump, except Trump is more intelligent than they are. They do not make statements because they believe their statements to be true - or even because they want other people to believe their statements are true. They make certain noises in response to certain prompts because they have been trained to do so, like ChatGPT. They need to be rigorously mocked.
143: Right! To me, that's a good example of how the people owning land can be such assholes to other people! Maybe them owning the land is part of the problem, and not the residents of the trailer park.
125: I sort of fundamentally loathe the idea that we are allowed to own land. Like on a deep, hippie level. I am fine with owning a house on land
My somewhat similar take which is at some level mostly semantic (but semantics can matter!) is that land ownership be replaced by the notion of stewardship. All the legal rights etc. can even start by being identical but you have a term that incorporates the notions of broader responsibility and inherent transiency.
And at some point I decided that the same notion should be applied to ownership of anything physical not just land. We are stewards of these configurations of stuff and have a broader community responsibility for their use and ultimate disposal.
And even more recently as I get closer to the inevitable end of things*, I have found myself extending the concept to ourselves. "You are the result of a multi-billion year individually vastly improbable winning streak on the part of your ancestors, please use it wisely."
I am not a crank. Please subscribe to my newsletter.
*On that front, a favorite interaction of mine from several years back: I lead nature hikes for kids at the local Audubon reserve, I generally use a walking stick but don't let the kids use them as they end up sword-fighting and whatnot.
Rambunctious Kid: "Why do you get to use a stick and we don't."
Me: "Because I'm old.
RK: "How old are you."
Me: "65."
RK; " Oh my God! That's so close to a hundred!"
I am on board with JPS's stewardship mumbo-jumbo!
Ownership is individual, lots of the rules that govern our society apply to individuals. Shared ownership is tricky, definitely failed for the first pilgrims and for the soviets, but there are ways to make it work-- Milpa system in Mexico. We're social creatures, we don't exist in isolation, having rules other than transactional ones that are an assumed shared baseline makes cooperation a lot easier. IMO just a few of those is good, but nobody asked and I don't see a place to set that in the configuration system.
I agree that stewardship is a useful perspective, also agree that stewardship of one's own life is a good perspective-- basically any perspective different from the selfish one is helpful to be able to try on.
Somali proverb: "Me and my nation against the world. Me and my clan against my nation. Me and my family against the clan. Me and my brother against the family."
I'm not sure how to square the idea of transitioning away from people owning land with the (true) observation that people tend to be much more willing to invest in caring for the land if they actually own it securely, vs renting it or stewarding it or whatever. If you've got no reason to expect you'll still have this bit of land to yourself next year, why not just strip-mine it or farm it to exhaustion?
Yup, the tragedy of the commons is very real.
Tragedy of the commons is more about a shared resource with lots of people exploiting it (as was absolutely not the case with actual historical commons, whose use was heavily regulated!) - this is more like the tragedy of the rental? One of the reasons behind the Irish Famine - the tenant farmers had no security of tenure, and no right to compensation for improvements to the land they made, so basically why bother investing at all. If you put time and effort into making your land more productive, you'd get evicted so the landlord could rent the land out to someone else for more money.
Also, NMM to Starship 24 and Booster 7.
Yes, but part of the "tragedy of the rental" - like with the trailer homes above - is that some other asshole does actually own the land.
I'm not sure how to square the idea of transitioning away from people owning land with the (true) observation that people tend to be much more willing to invest in caring for the land if they actually own it securely, vs renting it or stewarding it or whatever. If you've got no reason to expect you'll still have this bit of land to yourself next year, why not just strip-mine it or farm it to exhaustion?
You would have reason to expect that you'd still have this bit of land to work with in years to come. We're allowed to plan and create contracts and invest. You just don't get to cosplay that you're a king with absolute dominion over the land who gets to shoot little teenagers who ring your doorbell.
(obviously that last struck clause is completely gratuitous and unrelated. It just taps into some of my anger.)
152: IIRC there were different rules in Ulster so even though land was still held by landlords, there were more incentive to improve.
There's a similar phenomenon in NYC where wealthy long-term renters are more common, and I remember someone we knew was doing *secret* reno that they wanted to hide from the landlord so that they wouldn't raise the rent over the renovation that the tenant was paying for.
On paper, the Land Act of 1870 gave all Irish tenants the right to compensation for making improvements, and its follow-up of 1881 let judges impose a fair rent.
150: If you've got no reason to expect you'll still have this bit of land to yourself next year, why not just strip-mine it or farm it to exhaustion?
Yes, this is why my proposal is such a weak namby-pamby one. No sudden changes on those expectations. If anything, start making real changes with regard to inheritance.
150: If you've got no reason to expect you'll still have this bit of land to yourself next year, why not just strip-mine it or farm it to exhaustion?
Yes, this is why my proposal is such a weak namby-pamby one. No sudden changes on those expectations. If anything, start making real changes with regard to inheritance.
I may have posted here before about my personal belated Aha! moment on the vagueness (at least compared to my expectations) of what rights property ownership entails. Context was a dispute with a neighbor over the rights and obligations around aa right-of way for "ingress and egress." Basically I discovered all rights other than anything that hindered ingress and egress were retained by the property owner. Simple right, so just go look up the enumeration of those rights and ...
The historical context of all this is interesting. Fee-simple ownership was a relatively recent development out of the bewilderingly complex array of land tenure types under feudalism, and there are still weird vestiges of other types of tenure surviving here and there in the modern system.
I can't seem to find it, but there was a weird story a couple years back where the Church of England decided to go back and figure out who owned land that was under an arrangement where you were supposed to pay the church for living there and sending random people big bills. I'm not sure if the deal was that the church owned the land or just that the land came with an obligation to fund the local parish.
But anyway there's still lots of leasehold nonsense in the UK. I'd never heard of them in the US, but apparently they're legal for residential properties in NY, FL, and HI!
Has anybody else ever found themselves at an Earth Day celebration and a bunch of people were holding hands chanting, "The Earth is our Mother / We must protect her"?