Sunday, March 17, 2019

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE HAS BEEN WARNING US ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE FOR CENTURIES

Such an excellent and incredibly important article! — Molly

  
Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains why "green growth" isn't enough to save the planet.


The most common introductory example we use when we teach kids about interdependent ecosystems is insects They may seem gross and small compared to the charismatic megafauna, we say, but insects play all sorts of important roles: pollinating plants, breaking down organic matter, feeding bigger animals. Without insects the whole web would collapse. I don't think many of us who have given this lesson actually contemplated the mass death of the world's insects as a possibility, imminent or otherwise. We should have.
A new study  in the journal Biological Conservation takes a look at the global status of entomofauna (insects), and the picture is not good. The topline finding is that over 40 percent of insect species are threatened with extinction. That's a situation hard to describe without sounding like a heavy metal concert billing. (Megadeath, Ecocide, etc.) And the lesson about the ecosystem wasn't wrong: Without insects, Earth's environment as we've become familiar with it is toast. Even our apocalyptic thought experiments are coming true.
The trouble with combating climate change, we're often told, is that it's hard to imagine, hard to see. The philosopher Timothy Morton calls climate change a "hyperobject": It's so widely distributed and conceptually sticky that we can't really perceive it except in partial local instances. "When you feel raindrops falling on your head, you are experiencing climate, in some sense. In particular you are experiencing the climate change known as global warming," Morton wrote  in 2010. "But you are never directly experiencing global warming as such." Humans don't have the right sensory faculties.
Maybe it was possible to think that way in 2010, but, less than a decade later, I think many of us have developed the ability to see global warming. We are no longer empiricists who route information through our senses to our brain for analysis; we're conspiracy theorists, every raindrop or sunbeam encountered as hyperobject. Now the totality hits us first. At the beginning of this essay, I didn't say the insects were being killed off by global warming—but didn't you assume it?
To people who don't feel the omnipresence of global warming, people like me sound off. Not necessarily because they refuse to believe the data, I think, but because some of us are no longer bothering with the scientific method. We're not analyzing evidence to develop a theory; we are convinced of what's happening before we hear the particulars. Our question is not whether today's forecast reflects climate change, but how. And we're not wrong.
Since global warming is a fact and in one way or another an imminent threat to the well-being of every living thing known to mankind (including us), I think our increased ability to perceive it represents progress. The positivist method is not the only way to produce knowledge, and though "science" gets a lot of credit for sounding the alarm on climate change, it has been comparatively slow on the uptake. If we pay any attention at all, we can see and feel and hear that nature's cycles are broken, and some peoples have understood for centuries that a society built on extraction and accumulation would burn the whole planet alive. Western science has a lot of nerve showing up just as we're on the precipice of a biospheric death spiral to brandish some graphs and offer to block out the sun just a little.
"Indigenous peoples have witnessed continual ecosystem and species collapse since the early days of colonial occupation," says Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, an activist/scholar from the Nishnaabeg nation and author most recently of the book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. "We should be thinking of climate change as part of a much longer series of ecological catastrophes caused by colonialism and accumulation-based society."

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