solarpunkcast:

fatehbaz:

fatehbaz:

It was done on purpose. They knew.

Ecological degradation is a weapon.

So, this:

Was in response to this:

And I wanted to respond without derailing the original post:

You’re right. But also. What Holleman was kinda trying to do with this research, and what I also believe is true, is that US institutions, corporations, etc., absolutely knew that Indigenous people maintained the best and most time-tested environmental knowledge of North America, but settler-colonial institutions were deliberately choosing to ignore it.

On purpose. Ignoring Indigenous knowledge, purposefully. Ignoring their own settler-colonial reformists and scientists, purposefully. Certain US agencies and institutions, and their proxies or satellites, clearly knew that ecological crisis was coming, and not only did they passively ignore solutions, they actively worked to make ecological crisis worse.

That’s why Holleman says this [in an October 2016 interview]: ”Contemporary Dust Bowl literature […] frames the disaster […] narrowly as a […] natural event, void of social content. […] Prevailing perspectives therefore make invisible the colonial and racial-domination aspects of the [ecological] crisis and lead to the whitewashing of Dust Bowl narratives,“

And from her 2017 article: “By the 1930s there was a well-established body of scholarly literature, government reports, conference proceedings and periodical articles discussing the growing problem of soil erosion across the colonial world. These sources not only provide documentation of the scale of the issue in the absence of consistent data, they also show how this phenomenon was understood by many at the time as linked to white territorial and resource acquisition.”

They knew what they were doing.

What I mean by that is: Another of Holleman’s proposals is that the Dust Bowl was basically a manifestation of the US’s maneuver to, I guess you could say, “outsource its approach to Indigenous people,” by using environmental degradation and ecological crisis as a weapon. A weapon not just against Indigenous people of Turtle Island, but also on a global scale against other regions, and a weapon against its own poor white communities, too. As if the US institutions saw how effectively ecological damage had neutralized many Indigenous communities’ ability to resist, and the US was like “nice, now let’s do it to everybody.”

The time period that Holleman is focusing on is 1870 to 1930-ish, corressponding with the US military campaigns against Indigenous peoples of the 1870s and 1880s, culminating in the “end” of the “war” around 1891 (that’s the date claimed in US settler history books). So after imposing this kind of resource extraction and “removing” Indigenous peoples in “the Wild West” of the 1880s, it’s no coincidence that the US then almost immediately entered “the Gilded Age” and engaged in the Spanish-American War (1898), during which it took control of Cuba, Philippines, etc., effectively outsourcing its industrial agriculture and forcing it on new communities in the tropics and especially in Latin America. And it’s also no coincidence that the end of this period, around World War 2, saw the ascension of the US as global superpower. So the tactics that the US used in that time period, the tactics that created the Dust Bowl, are still used by the US today, on a global scale.

Purposefully ignoring Indigenous environmental knowledge was/is profitable, at least in the short-term. Through monoculture crops, devegetation and timber exctraction, expansive cattle rangeland, etc. Those extraction corporations definitely know that resources are finite. They can cash-in quickly, and bail-out later.

Ignoring Indigenous knowledge of North American landscapes provided, like, some bonus advantages for the settlers, especially during the 1870-1930 time period in discussion. US institutions could (1) make a bunch of money off of industrial-scale resource extraction; (2) they could simultaneously dispossess Indigenous peoples and weaken their communities, thereby eliminating a threat to US cultural hegemony; and (3) when soil degradation and devegetation would ultimately lead to economic collapse even of white settler communities, then unions and working class types living in those regions would also be harmed, thereby neutralizing another threat to US corporate power and allowing further consolidation of US imperial control.

Like feudalism: Hit a rural community with environmental damage. Now they don’t grow food. Next, they’re bankrupt. Debt and bankruptcy anchor people to a single place. Then they’re forced to Participate in the Game and Follow The Rules. They can’t run away from a rental debt; if they try to escape to another side of the country, the banks there still know not to lend to them or give them an account. They’ll get arrested for shoplifting some food. And the result - you could argue, the intended result - is that then people are, essentially, “too poor to get involved in reform, organizing, agitation, and radicalism.”

Holleman, also from the 2017 article: “Globalizing the ecological rift involved the racialized division of nature and labor on a planetary scale as a precondition for the development of the first global agricultural market and food regime. All of this shaped farming practices worldwide, including on the US Southern Plains, as areas were subject to an intensifying ecological imperialism and brought into the global market under conditions of unequal ecological exchange.”

In other words, the 1930s Dust Bowl was a local manifestation of the kind of ecological crisis that Euro-American imperial powers were provoking worldwide - in the African Sahel, in the savanna of Brazil, in the palm plantations of Central America, in the sugar cane fields of Philippines - in order to expand monoculture and industrial-scale resource extraction, and in order to consolidate power, to force people to participate in their “market.”

They did it on purpose.

Euro-American settlers knew exactly what they were doing by deliberately targeting ungulate herds, because eliminating a species like bison not only removes a primary food source and a symbolic, iconic touchstone vital to cultural identity, but also results in loss of soil nutrition and devastation of the wider native prairie/plains ecology. Sort of like a long-term investment: Degrade the soil, and within a few years, food is scarce and now the settler-colonial institutions have leverage. Europe repeated this process in West Africa and the Sahel during the Scramble for Africa and the early 20th century: Burn woodland in seasonally-dry savanna environments, and eliminate the vast ungulate herds (buffalo, antelope, etc.) which are vital to maintaining the healthy soil; then when mass vegetation loss occurs and food resiliency is lost, local communities are forced to install rubber, palm, and sugar plantations. Today, burning of forest in the Amazon similarly targets Indigenous communities.

I mean …

[Bison skulls, 1892. Via Detroit Public Library.]

… does this look like an accident?

This image is burned into my mind, and it still fucks me up every time I see it.