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You know what could actually help lots of women in the global south? Especially if you're American? Stop consuming drugs. I find it kinda funny how betrayed everyone seems when you can't even give up weed.

Gang violence in LatinoAmerica is huge. And I mean HUGE. Every city under the USA border has its own relationship with drug cartels. You really really don't know how is to live in a country where the drug cartels dictate everything. There have been entire cities destroyed by them. Vacated. Some of them serve as mercenaries for transnational companies, to enslave men for manual labor and women for manual and sexual labor. One of the worst femicide crisis in recent history in Mexico was fueled by drug cartels, just search Dead women of Ciudad Juárez. The drug cartels own human trafficking rings across the country. They kidnap and traffick migrant women, local women and children. They are known for closing highways and cut food and supplies from towns where they think they need control over. There have cases of towns where drug cartels close highways and try to kidnap all the women and girls in there. They kill indigenous people and farmers who refuse to cultivate their crops. Mexico is in shambles because of the narco. We couldn't even send data to the investigation on black holes because the drug cartels wanted money to open a highway that went up a hill where a telescope was. With this I am trying to say that pretty much every aspect of civilian life, especially outside big cities, is dictated by drug cartels.

I did a free walking tour in Medellin, Colombia and the tour guide spent at least an hour talking about how much he hates foreigners who come to colombia to do cocaine and do pablo escobar tours and another hour talking about how fucked up it is that europeans, americans, and australians consume most the illegal drugs but see none of the violence. he went hard before huge group of people, many of them there to probably just party and do drugs. I could've listened to him talk for ages. mad respect.

I specified illegal drugs you fucking stoner. I said weed because of people who aren't willing to even switch to a legal source. If you source it legally then why tf are you on my post.

Okay even if it’s weed. Let’s talk about it. How do you really know where it comes from? Okay let’s say you buy it from a storefront. Seems legit. But a lot of them are not legally obligated to buy their supply from gov regulated producers. So they are selling product most likely from illegal grow-ops, often with falsified labels. Let’s say the product / supply chain is legit. The store front also acts as a money laundering front. The store owner is also a human trafficker and/or a dealer for illegal substances. This is just his “legal” business.

This applies to Europe too. The Netherlands are famous for having legalized marijuana, but a lot of the (completely legal!) marijuana in the Netherlands is supplied by dangerous cartels. And of almost all of the cocaine in Europe comes from South America, so from the same woman killing cartels. Europeans who do cocaine are also funding the enslavement and murder of women in Latin America. To boot a lot of the cocaine in Europe is trafficked through Africa, where drug cartels there also hurt and murder women, so cocaine in Europe often has the blood of both Latin American and African women on it.

I don’t think a lot of people really understand that ecosystems in North America were purposefully maintained and altered by Native people.

My mom is an ethnobotanist and getting people to understand this is literally her life’s work. A lot of native tribes just had a whole different way of looking at agriculture. Instead of planting orchards in tidy rows near their villages, they went to where the trees were already growing and tended them there. They would girdle trees by stripping the bark in order to stop the spread of disease or thin out badly placed saplings. And they would encourage the companion plants they wanted and weed out the ones they didn’t, so that in the end the whole forest would be productive while remaining an ecosystem and not a monoculture. It is still agriculture, but it is a form of agriculture that is so much gentler on the landscape that, as OP says, the European settlers could not recognize what they were seeing. To them the natives must have seemed to magically live in abundance while they starved. They did do controlled burns, but so-called slash and burn agriculture was never a primary farming strategy in North America. They were just way more subtle than that. They also made the amazing Mississippian mound structures so it’s not like they couldn’t do dramatic reshapings of the landscape when they wanted: but they changed their minds about that, walking away from Cahokia and the dense, farming-supported urban structure they had build there in the 13th century, well before any European contact. My mom says it wasn’t a collapse, it wasn’t a war, it wasn’t a natural disaster; the farmers in Cahokia just voted with their feet. They just gradually left, dispersing in different directions but generally not very far, and it was probably because they’d gotten tired of men’s bullshit. See, agriculture was a female domain in pretty much all the native American cultures. The specifics differed by tribe, but often they had gender-specific age-grade societies: for example, the Hidatsa Goose Society was composed of married women of childbearing age. Not only did they physically plant the fields, they also had responsibility for conducting the social and ritual events around ensuring the harvest. This included things like digging the storage pits, and organizing feasts in order to bring the whole community together to plant plots for families who were suffering illness or disability, and could not do it themselves.  So, as Cahokia urbanized (at its “height” it was a population center of  between 10,200 and 15,300 people), it is very likely that the traditional, informal systems of land use-right allocations–again, always the women’s domain–became stressed by top down political pressures from the rulers (who were men). And as my mom puts it in her book Feeding Cahokia: “If rights to land ever became highly restricted as a result of a top-down, centralized process of allocation, the likelihood of poorly informed and unfair decision making is extremely high.” So basically, the farmers took their families and they moved away. Not all at once, no mass exodus, just…gradually, they decided that they’d tried doing things the urban way, and they didn’t like it. They went back to living in smaller villages sustained, not by intensive farming, but by more garden-style plots and the traditional, sophisticated management of “wild” lands that they had never stopped practicing. It takes a shift in thinking to recognize that was a deliberate choice on their part. Not a failure: Cahokia never collapsed, not dramatically–it just gradually wound down. They were perfectly capable of feeding themselves and they did for well more than a century. They went back to the old way because they liked it better.

“By 1492 Indian activity throughout the Americas had modified forest extent and composition, created and expanded grasslands, and rearranged microrelief via countless artificial earthworks. Agricultural fields were common, as were houses and towns and roads and trails. All of these had local impacts on soil, microclimate, hydrology, and wildlife.”

“We cant raise minimum wage bc rent will increase”