earf thirst

There’s an instinctual understanding, I think, of what’s a good soil and what isn’t. Given the choice between a rich black loam, dark with organic matter and squirming with all manner of fauna, and a handful of dusty clay, beaten into clods harder than stone by the plow, just about anyone would know the former as superior to the latter.

And yet, how many soil science classes have I taken? How many different tests for humus content, nitrogen levels, textural classifications? If the difference between good and bad soils is so immediately obvious, why bother with sieves and porosity tests and Walkley-Black analyses?

Because nearly all of our soils are bad, and splitting hairs is the only way to distinguish one from another. Because modern agriculture is obsessed with nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium levels in the soil, to exclusion of everything else. Because we’ve started to see the soil as nothing more than an inert medium supporting the roots of the plant and containing chemical nutrients to be extracted, and have treated it accordingly.

Alienation is a pretty simple concept—to put it simply, becoming separated from something, losing your understanding of it. Workers are alienated from the products of their labor, of course, but that’s just the beginning of it.  We’ve been so cut off from an organic connection to the environment around us that detached, scientific knowledge has become our only way of understanding it.

In the same way, we’re alienated from our own desires, and from one another. The conditioning inflicted upon us by our civilization since the moment we were born has buried some needs and drawn out others, twisting us in whatever way is most convenient for its own growth and maintenance. This is why we argue about what it means to have ‘autonomy’, what it means to have genuine relationships.

Outcomes of scientific studies such as Marks-Block’s often affirm what Native people already know from tradition and experience, but that doesn’t mean the studies aren’t useful, Tripp says.

“We knew what the outcome was going to be,” he says. “But nobody listens if it isn’t written down like that.”

“When we look at forest gardens, they’re actually enhancing what nature does, making it much more resilient, much more biodiverse—and, oh yeah, they feed people too,” says Armstrong.

The paper may be the first to quantify how Indigenous land stewardship can enhance what ecologists call functional diversity—a measure of how many goods an ecosystem provides. It joins a growing scientific literature revealing that Indigenous people—both historically and today—often outperform government agencies and conservation organizations at supporting biodiversity, sequestering carbon, and generating other ecological benefits on their land. Leaving nature alone is not always the right course, scientists are finding—and the original land stewards often do it best.”

…

“ “Western science for too long has embraced the idea of primordial wilderness,” says Jesse Miller, an ecologist at Stanford and Armstrong’s coauthor. “We’re seeing this paradigm shift to recognizing how much of what was thought of as primordial wilderness were actually landscapes shaped by humans.” 

The forest gardens Armstrong studied once supplied Indigenous villages with food and medicine, including plants that had been imported from elsewhere. “Historically it was really important to have all the resources here,” says Willie Charlie, a former chief and current employee of the Sts’ailes Nation of the Coast Salish people. “If you had all that in your family, you were pretty self-sustaining.”

Willie Charlie, tirelessly explaining Indigenous practices to/with scientists

…

“In other cases, however, government policy continues to diverge from both Indigenous knowledge and science. This spring, for example, the state of Wisconsin authorized a wolf hunt that both scientists and tribes had protested.

“People outside the tribal community tend to … think a lot of our positions are culturally based. But I would argue they tend to align much more with science than the non-tribal worldview,” says Peter David, a wildlife biologist for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, which represents 11 Midwestern Ojibwe tribes.

Peter David, a wildlife biologist with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, hanging out with some wild rice

“The tribal worldview says wolves ought to be able to establish their own population levels, and they do that at very low levels…it aligns much better with the science.”

domestic honey bees are doing just fine, and in fact are out-competing native pollinators because they have human intervention giving them the leg up. meanwhile local pollinators are disappearing and with them a lot of the plants they co-evolved with will likely disappear too, along with every species that relies on those plants including us.

It was the ancient Romans, who by the original definition were barbarians themselves, who first transformed the use of the term. Late in the Roman Empire, the word 'barbarian' came to refer to all foreigners who lacked Greek and Roman traditions, especially the various tribes and armies putting pressure on Rome’s borders. There was never a single united barbarian group, and many of the different tribes–including Goths, Vandals, Saxons, Huns, Picts and many more–shifted alliances over the years or fought alongside Roman forces against other barbarian armies. Later scholars would expand on this use of the word when writing about attacks on cultures considered 'civilizations' (be it ancient China or ancient Rome) by external enemies who don’t share that civilization’s traditions or structure."

*Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990; ISBN 0-521-43961-2) chapter II "The popular protonationalism", pp. 80–81 French edition (Gallimard, 1992). According to Hobsbawm, the main source for this subject is Ferdinand Brunot (ed.), Histoire de la langue française, Paris, 1927–1943, 13 volumes, in particular volume IX. He also refers to Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, Judith Revel, Une politique de la langue: la Révolution française et les patois: l'enquête de l'abbé Grégoire, Paris, 1975. For the problem of the transformation of a minority official language into a widespread national language during and after the French Revolution, see Renée Balibar, L'Institution du français: essai sur le co-linguisme des Carolingiens à la République, Paris, 1985 (also Le co-linguisme, PUF, Que sais-je?, 1994, but out of print) ("The Institution of the French language: essay on colinguism from the Carolingian to the Republic. Finally, Hobsbawm refers to Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte, Le Français national: politique et pratique de la langue nationale sous la Révolution, Paris, 1974.

–Wikipedia, "History of French: Modern French"

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"Firstly, for centuries up until the Unification of Italy in 1861, the country was divided into a number of different states, which were usually under foreign rule. When Italy was united in 1861 the decision was taken to make Tuscan the official language of the country.

[..] As a result, dialects were used as the everyday language for centuries, and anyone who was able to express themselves and communicate in Italian did so using grammatical, lexical and phonetical aspects influenced by regional and local dialects.

[..] In 1950, just as the country was going through a time of complete infrastructural, economic, social and politic reconstruction, less than 20% of the Italian population spoke Italian fluently in their day to day to life.

TV programs began to be broadcast by RAI, the state broadcaster, in 1954 on just one channel. In the years that followed, up until the economic boom between 1958 and 1962, television did not just become a way to bring people together (as very few people actually had a TV set), but also a way to broadcast cultural programs and linguistic models.

In fact, between 1960 and 1968 RAI broadcast a show in the late afternoon which was called Non è mai troppo tardi, or ‘It’s never too late,’ which was presented by the teacher Alberto Manzi. As a result of this show, many illiterate people learnt to read and write, and it is estimated that in this period around one and a half million Italians managed to get their certificate of primary education.

And so, the spreading of a standardised Italian language was aided by economic growth, a better quality of life, the gradual spread of education and linguistic programmes shown on TV."

–Wikipedia: "African American Vernacular English: Social Context"

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"In the United States, there is a general negative stigma surrounding the Southern dialect. Non-Southern Americans tend to associate a Southern accent with cognitive and verbal slowness, lack of education, ignorance, bigotry, or religious and political conservatism, using common labels like ‘hick’, ‘hillbilly’, or ‘redneck’ accent. The accent is also associated nationwide with the military, NASCAR, and country music; in fact, even non-Southern American country singers typically imitate a Southern accent in their music. Meanwhile, Southerners themselves tend to have mixed judgments of their own accent, some similarly negative but others positively associating it with a laid-back, plain, or humble attitude. The sum negative associations nationwide, however, are the main presumable cause of a gradual decline of Southern accent features, since the middle of the 20th century onwards, among younger and more urban residents of the South."

Between 1869 and the 1960s, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. Though we don’t know how many children were taken in total, by 1900 there were 20,000 children in Indian boarding schools, and by 1925 that number had more than tripled. The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. They suffered physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse and neglect, and experienced treatment that in many cases constituted torture for speaking their Native languages. Many children never returned home and their fates have yet to be accounted for by the U.S. government."

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wolfi-landstreicher-a-balanced-account-of-the-world-a-critical-look-at-the-scientific-world-vie

I am concerned, because for me the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.