The word “ecology” (originally œcology) was first coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s leading German follower, based on the Greek word oikos, or household. Ironically, the word “economy,” to which ecology is often nowadays counterposed, was derived much earlier from the same Greek root—in this instance oikonomia, or household management. The close family relationship between these two concepts was fully intended by Haeckel, who defined ecology as the study of Darwin’s “economy of nature.”
[...] contrary to the myth that the original colonial invaders of the Americas found only small wandering bands of Neolithic hunter-gatherers and mysteriously collapsed empires, the Western Hemisphere was densely populated. An estimated 100 million people lived in the Americas at the time of the European invasion, existing in a range of sophisticated and highly developed societies.
The authors of an article in Psychological Inquiry made this observation:
Substantial evidence suggests that when the values and goals necessary for the smooth functioning of ACC American corporate capitalism become increasingly central to individuals and to institutions, the result is a corresponding conflict with three other aims: concern for the broader community and the world; close, intimate relationships; and feeling worthy and autonomous.
In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things.
A study at Stanford University even shows that although there have been significant gains by women in math and science, scientists are still pictured as overwhelmingly male and white—that is, children tend to depict scientists as male and white, even though the number of female and nonwhite scientists has been steadily increasing. And findings of research on the development of gender stereotypes in children indicates continuing challenges: “Many children assimilate the idea that brilliance is a male quality at a young age. This stereotype begins to shape children’s interests as soon as it is acquired and is thus likely to narrow the range of careers they will one day contemplate.
Studies of genetically identical mice in different environments have shown some surprising results. One group was observed over a three-month period in an intricate environment of great diversity, while another group of control mice were kept in plain cages. Even though the mice were all genetically identical and behaved similarly at the beginning of the experiment, their exploratory behavior was markedly different by the end. Mice that moved around a lot and explored grew new nerve cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain influenced by environmental complexity. In other words, the brain structure of genetically identical mice changed as a result of their life activity.
The advantage of more reliable and greater food supplies came with disadvantages. Skeletal remains indicate that people in agricultural societies were not as well nourished as hunter-gatherers, who ate a much wider variety of foods; their height and life expectancy declined and they had to work significantly more hours per week in the fields than they ever had collecting roots, seeds, berries, and nuts. In addition to the declines in height and general nutrition and the negative impact on women with the rise of social hierarchies, there was another drawback to those societies that developed to rely exclusively on farming.
Agricultural productivity (output per farmer and per area of land) did not increase much because the technologies used remained mostly unchanged. Therefore, as populations of non-farming classes grew relative to the number of farmers and elites desired greater quantities of wealth, there was a need to expand the area under production or to conquer other peoples in order to extract greater quantities of surplus (tribute). This more socially privileged stratum of people developed into a social class when it begins to identify its own interests (in acquiring more wealth and status) as if they were the interests of the entire community. At that point, the interests of this proto-ruling elite diverge from the those of everyone else, as they attempt to force increases in productivity by those laboring directly on the land, an increase in land area (through conquest), and a larger and docile labor force (slavery, kidnapping).
While the wealthy have more control over their lives and live far more easily, such an existence that emphasizes and rewards greed corrupts their humanity, leading to antisocial attitudes and behavior. A 2012 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is titled: Higher Social Class Predicts Increased, Unethical Behavior.
The authors found greed propels this behavior and that “relative to lower-class individuals, individuals from upper-class backgrounds behaved more unethically in both naturalistic and laboratory settings.” One of the authors, Dacher Keltner, commented: “As you move up the class ladder, you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift,and to be tight-fisted in giving to others."
No group is innately intellectually or morally superior to another. We are not compelled by our biology to act in antisocial ways—to be greedy, selfish, and competitive, for men to dominate women, for whites to discriminate against people of color. Rather than being written in our genes, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and oppression are the creation of unequal societies. The future is therefore open to the creation of a genuinely equal society.
This proves what many of us have suspected all along: boys are genetically inferior when it comes to reading, at least careful reading. Their brains are not wired for words. So stop trying to make excuses for things like guys failing to understand mortgage contracts or IPCC reports on climate science. This is not a social failing; it’s because of evolutionary inheritance. Back in the cave age, males who got absorbed in reading were eaten by sabretooths or something. Pretending that biological differences don’t exist is just Political Correctness, and we know how horrible that is.
They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.
Alienation from our own labor is not only or even primarily a psychological condition, but a feature integral to capitalist social relations, one that profoundly damages us. The repetitive, often pointless monotony of most work, the jobs in which people spend a large part of their waking hours, “is a [...] stifling of one’s urge to self-fulfillment in the most important segment of one’s life, the spending of vital energies at tasks one would never dream of freely choosing.”
The existence of racism means that people are viewed through a distorted lens, leading to mistaken assumptions regarding cause and effect. For example, assuming that race is a biological reality encourages scientists to search for genetic explanations for the high incidence of diseases such as asthma or hypertension among the African American population. However, the cause for the high incidence of these diseases is racism and the resulting stresses and environmental contamination in African American communities. It is a similar issue for the supposed differences in intellectual abilities between supposed races.
A stark choice faces humanity: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.
As soon as you monetize something in nature, nature always loses.
The very idea of testing for racial difference is itself racist.
The research by the remarkable plant geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902–1992), showing that corn genes or parts of genes could change location on chromosomes during cell division, was largely ignored. For many years the phenomenon of “jumping genes” was mainly considered an eccentric curiosity or oddity. The findings that some 50 percent of the human genome and as much as 80 percent of the corn genome are composed of what are now called “transposable elements” indicate the significance of McClintock’s research, for which she was belatedly awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983.
The work of the English chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) provided critical evidence for ferreting out the structure of DNA. James Watson and Francis Crick essentially appropriated Franklin’s work and originally did not even acknowledge the significance of her contribution to “their” discovery. Crick has since died, but Watson, who as a world-famous geneticist really should know better, has become infamous and a pariah within the scientific community for his openly espoused racist and sexist bigotry.
Ada Lovelace is recognized by many as the world’s first computer programmer. But Lovelace’s notes on Babbage’s analytical engine gained little attention when they were originally published in 1843 (under her initials A.A.L.). It wasn’t until they were republished in B.V. Bowden’s 1953 Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines that her work found a much wider audience.
All six primary programmers for the first modern computer, ENIAC, were women—Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They are most often referred to as “computers” and “the ENIAC Girls.” They too, received little attention at the time they worked; programming was undervalued precisely because it was done almost entirely by women. These women weren’t even invited to the dinner following the announcement that the machine worked in 1946.
When asked whether class war existed, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Our genus (Homo) had many branches, including us (Homo sapiens) and a number of species now extinct, such as Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo floresiensis, and the latest member, Homo naledi, whose remains were found in a cave in South Africa in 2013 and first described in 2015.
Capitalism: A system that does not meet the basic needs of the mass of humanity, a system that continues to harm so many people, a system in which countries use force to promote their perceived geopolitical and economic interests, unable to stop itself from destroying the biosphere it depends on, is a system that desperately needs to be superseded by a different system: one that has completely different goals, logic, and ways of operating, a society based on substantive human equality and that regenerates and then maintains a healthy ecosystem.
Describing a meeting "typical of those which happen every day in the City of London" A group of Indonesian businessmen organized a lunch to raise £300 million to finance the clearing of a rain forest and the construction of a pulp paper plant. What struck me was how financial rationalism often overcomes common sense; that profit itself is a good thing whatever the activity, whenever the occasion. What happened to the Indonesian rain forest was dependent upon financial decisions made over lunch that day. The financial benefits would come to the institutions in London, Paris, or New York. Very little, if any, would go to the local people…. The rain forest may be geographically located in the Far East, but financially it might as well be located in London’s Square Mile.
Capitalists cannot take into account the consequences of their actions (the “externalities”) in their pursuit of profits. As long as there is no interference with the accumulation of capital, emitted pollutants (and how they behave according to scientific laws) are viewed by capital as irrelevant to the operation of companies. Actually, they are not considered at all unless strong government regulations exist and are enforced.
The quintessentially human-created environment of the city, with acres of asphalt, canyons of steel, brick, and concrete, thousands of car engines, the screaming sirens and honking horns, and millions of humans, is also natural, constructed by a natural species. Cities are also places where wildlife exists, and are ecosystems in their own right.
In its history, the EPA has mandated safety testing for only a small percentage of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available for use today. And once chemicals are in use, the burden on the EPA is so high that it has succeeded in banning or restricting only five substances, and often only in specific applications: polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, hexavalent chromium, asbestos, and chlorofluorocarbons.
In Moscow, there is a population of feral dogs who know how to use the subway.
The first law of hydrodynamics is that water flows toward money.
When the sportswear company Puma decided to “go green” and put together an environmental profit and loss account in 2011, it quickly found that, if implemented, the corporation would have to dissolve itself.
Gender violence is more of a threat to women’s health than the sum of all traffic accidents and malaria.
A 2015 UN-sponsored study estimated the annual unpaid costs of global industrial agriculture at over $3 trillion—significantly more than the economic value of the food produced.
If we humans are a part of nature, then to even talk of a “pristine” environment at all is misrepresentative and ideological.
World Bank economists calculate that the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population uses close to 60 percent of all the world’s resources. [...] If this richest 10 percent reduced their consumption to the average consumption of the rest of humanity, total global resource use would be cut in half. [...] A 2015 report by the British charity Oxfam found that the wealthiest 10 percent were responsible for half of all emissions of greenhouse gases, whereas the poorest half of the world’s people were responsible for about 10 percent.
By making individual persons the solution to waste, we become the very thing capitalists want: consumers. Conscious and concerned or otherwise, it doesn’t matter. Efforts to change consumption habits instead of production will not solve the problem. As Samantha McBride writes: What we have for producers is freedom: freedom to be green or semi-green or not green, freedom to do what is in their best interests, without strife or inconvenience. What we have for citizens are (1) a definition of their scope of political action as not just personal behavior, but the purchase transaction, and (2) an utter lack of knowledge needed to reenter the realm of the political and advocate for regulatory change.112 Stressing individual responsibility of ordinary people leads us to ignore the waste associated with production. It also ignores the waste associated with consumption by the very wealthy, the military-industrial complex, the vast incarceration system, and the advertising industry. It leads us to disregard that companies will always be striving to sell more products year after year.
It is estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of the food grown in the United States goes to waste. Food is left in the field if it doesn’t meet certain cosmetic standards of large buyers, even if it is perfectly good quality. Supermarkets routinely overstock their produce shelves in deliberate displays of abundance, knowing that a portion will spoil and be thrown away. Globally, about one-third of food is wasted, amounting to about 1.8 billion tons and worth approximately $1 trillion.93 All of this wasted food means wasted water, labor power, energy, and all the other resources that went into making it.
Nature is a hard word to define. Originating in Latin as natura, meaning “birth,” today people give the word a wide variety of meanings. Colloquially, it’s used as a blanket term applied to everything that isn’t human or constructed by humans. In everyday speech, people refer to animals as if humans were in an altogether different category (aside from species), instead of being fellow animals. [...] Nature in Western societies is commonly viewed as a place that we travel to visit rather than inhabit on a daily basis.
Neoliberalism has achieved an incredible stranglehold on our thinking in recent decades. Even people who genuinely care about the environment have started to believe that market-based solutions like pollution offsets and carbon trading offer a better solution than government regulation and enforcement.
Heede’s research shows that nearly two-thirds of anthropogenic carbon emissions originated in just 90 companies and government-run industries. Among them, the top eight companies—ranked according to annual and cumulative emissions—account for 20 percent of world carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement production since the Industrial Revolution. So why not just stop these companies from operating and promote the building of a clean energy system? There is no evidence that governments will discipline giant corporations and shift the global economy away from fossil fuels. To do so would require drastic downsizing or liquidation of many of the largest corporations on the planet. It would leave Wall Street in tatters. It would also require a huge investment to build a replacement consisting of renewable energy infrastructure. While costs for solar (PV) and wind energy installations have dropped drastically, and in some cases are cost competitive with new fossil fuel installations, it is wishful thinking of the most utopian kind to expect that capitalists and governments will allow public financing for an effort to replace existing electric power facilities. It is only when the elite feel a direct and immediate threat to their system of capital accumulation, such as a major war or civil insurrection, that they are willing to commit the vast amount of financial resources necessary and agree to have production directed by government.
In our society, however, recycling serves an important ideological function by convincing people that they’re doing something positive for the environment while obscuring the question of why so many products are purposely designed for single use or ready disposal. This perspective puts the responsibility of waste on the individual, not on the company or the system as a whole.
Relying on unpaid work done primarily by women instead of provided by social programs, means lower taxes on the wealthy and more profits for capitalists.
The source of our alienation is the lack of control in the workplace, and the unequal opportunities it affords for financial well-being as well as quality of life. Consumerism is a form of emotional compensation we use in a futile attempt to overcome alienation. Recognizing this can help us begin to constructively deal with our alienation.
In a study across sixty-three countries, researchers estimated that approximately 20 percent of suicides were the result of unemployment.
Inherent in the blame-the-victim ideology is the myth of equal opportunity for everyone. If you work hard enough and make the right choices, you will succeed. But a child conceived and born into poverty, with its associated stresses and limitations, does not have the same opportunities as a child born into wealth. The continuing belief in the falsehood of equal opportunity and the equally false notion of easy upward mobility, as well as the widespread acceptance of racist and sexist ideas, help to explain many people’s acquiescence to gross inequalities in society and continuing discrimination. This ideology sanctifies wealth and greed as reward for good behavior and good decisions and helps to explain, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen.”
To Wall Street, which sorts risk by its ability to maximize profit, “adaptation” to climate change simply means learning how to profit from it. And there are a variety of ways of doing so—for example, rebuilding after flooding offers a boost for the construction industry as does the building of coastal defenses against rising seas, already occurring along the East Coast of the United States. Miami is spending $400 million for pumps and other infrastructure to prevent flooding. Hoboken, New Jersey, received a $230 million federal grant to shore up protections, and Norfolk, Virginia, received $100 million from the federal government to carry out a plan to protect neighborhoods from flooding. All of this spending adds to the measured national economic growth (GDP) and thus is seen as positive—even when the reason is negative.
[...] One of the growing areas of financial speculation is the issuance and trading of so-called catastrophe bonds, referred to as cat bonds, offering insurance against catastrophic weather events as well as other types of disasters such as wildfires. The $72 billion in cat bonds in 2016 is expected to double in the next few years.
Under capitalism, efforts to ameliorate or reverse the damage caused by ecological rifts and disturbances all have a common element: the underlying cause of the problem cannot be questioned.
In the 1960s, the U.S. government stole hundreds of thousands of acres from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in order to build dams in the Missouri River watershed. In the process, “hundreds of Indian families from various tribes were forcibly relocated and their way of life completely destroyed."
What we should really be worried about is the system of capitalism, not robots or our humanity. What has been shown to give people true happiness—control over our own lives and creative and socially meaningful work, participation in community activities, and time with friends and family—has decreased through longer hours at work, less control over the workplace environment, always-on connectivity, more job insecurity, longer commutes to and from work, and an unachievable quest for satisfaction through ownership of consumer goods.
When women audition for symphony orchestras, they are more likely to be accepted if the selection committee is unaware of their gender. Women software developers are considered better coders than their male counterparts if “their peers didn’t realize the code had been written by a woman.” And students judge a professor teaching an online course more favorably if they think that she is a he.