Earthling Liberation notes

Victim:

• homeless
• mental problems
• 13 years of slavery
• live in average rural animal shelter (horrid shack)

Slavers:

• old couple

This kind of news pops up every year.

"Taking advantage of his vulnerable situation, the two would have accommodated him in inappropriate conditions, at the animal farm they own in the vicinity of the town of Valea lui Mihai. Here, he would have exploited him through daily work, subjecting him to repeated physical violence and degrading treatment," the prosecutors said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15823220

Four parties hammer out agreement filled with bad news for scientists

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The nationalist, populist Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, won 23% of the vote in the November 2023 House elections, putting Wilders—once a fringe figure who proposed a “head rag tax” on women wearing headscarves—close to the center of power. Since then, Wilders has been in contentious and often chaotic negotiations to form a government with three other parties, including the center-right party led by outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which saw its electoral share shrink to 15%. The governing plan endorsed by the four parties, which marks a crucial step in forming a new government, includes a series of harsh anti-immigration measures. Centrist and left-wing parties fiercely criticized the plan during this week’s debate.

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Another sharp turn comes in environmental policy. The Netherlands, a major agricultural exporter, has more farm animals per square kilometer than any other country in Europe, and their waste emits high levels of nitrogen compounds that violate EU rules and harm the country’s ecosystems. Past government plans to tackle the issue have triggered massive protests by farmers and the rise of a new party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement, that won 4.7% of the vote and is part of the new coalition.

The CDC is locked in a power struggle with key states and agriculture players as it tries to better track the virus and prevent another potential pandemic.

Many farmers don’t want federal health officials on their property. State agriculture officials worry the federal response is sidelining animal health experts at the Agriculture Department, and also that some potential federal interventions threaten to hinder state and local health officials rushing to respond to the outbreaks.

A big reason for the resistance: Farms don’t want to be identified publicly as potential hotspots for the virus, nor do they want to draw scrutiny to their workers, a significant proportion of whom are undocumented immigrants and fearful of government officials.

https://www.humanehoax.org/ for context

https://fishfeel.org/

Donna Haraway

Issue #75

September 2016

Pesticides are critical to agricultural intensification but can negatively impact human health. We show that as soy cultivation spread across Brazil, agricultural pesticide exposure was associated with increased childhood cancer mortality among the broader population indirectly exposed to these chemicals. We find that populations were exposed to pesticides through the water supply, but negative health effects were mitigated by access to high-quality cancer treatment centers. Our results support policies to strengthen pesticide regulation, especially in contexts intensifying their food production systems, and increased public health attention to pesticide exposure in the broader community.

Over the last several decades, Brazil has become both the world’s leading soy producer and the world’s leading consumer of hazardous pesticides. Despite identified links between pesticide exposure and carcinogenesis, there has been little population-level research on the effects of pesticide intensification on broader human health in Brazil. We estimate the relationship between expanded soy production—and related community exposure to pesticides—on childhood cancer incidence using 15 y of data on disease mortality. We find a statistically significant increase in pediatric leukemia following expanded local soy production, but timely access to treatment mitigates this relationship. We show that pesticide exposure likely occurs via water supply penetration. Our findings represent only the tip of the iceberg for substantial health externalities of high-input crop production and land use change. Our results are of particular interest in developing contexts with demand for intensified food production systems and underscore the need for stronger regulation of pesticides and increased public health attention to exposure in the broader community.

Next. Diamond likewise argues that the Eurasian landmass offered a uniquely amenable population of potentially-domesticable proto-livestock. His principal contrast here is to the Americas, where Amerindians puzzlingly domesticated nothing but the llama, the alpaca, the Muscovy duck, and the (yum!) (awwww) (yum!) (awwww) guinea pig (the foregoing being the Andeanist version of the tastes great/less filling debate). Now, again, this argument runs into the a posteriori problem. He asserts that it is possible to infer that undomesticated animals are and always have been undomesticable animals. But this is unpersuasive. It supposes that we moderns (or specifically Jared Diamond) could (for example) look at a jungle fowl and infer, finger lickin’! even in the absence of domesticated chickens. He surveys the world outside Eurasia and declares it deficient in proto-goats, proto-chickens, proto-pigs, proto-cows, proto-sheep… Make of this what you will, in essence it is hand-waving.

Furthermore, in the lowland South American context at least, there is considerable evidence that human-animal relationships are in important respects conceptualized and experienced as relations between social equals, such that a pastoral, dominating, domesticating relationship is rendered “no good to think” (apologies to Stanley Tambiah). Philippe Descola is writing about this, and the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro lends itself to the same interpretation. This sounds a bit New Age & woo-woo as I’ve thumbnailed it here, but (I promise) it is compelling and thought-provoking when properly expounded. Given the many parallels between Melanesia and Amazonia, I wonder if a similar analysis would be applicable there (and, perhaps, elsewhere too). The point, though, is that given the presence of potentially useful animals, it is not a foregone conclusion that humans will set about domesticating them. It is simply not valid to read back from a present absence of domesticated animals a past dearth of proto-domestic animals.

Citated paper:

Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication

In 2006, the animal agriculture industry was confronted with the first global estimate of the livestock sector’s contribution to anthropogenic climate change. Consistent with other industries, including tobacco and fossil fuels, the animal agriculture industry’s response to evidence that its product caused harm was to push back. The industry employed the help of universities. Industry-funded university-based researchers and centers have helped downplay livestock’s contributions to climate change, increase public trust that the industry is proactively reducing emissions on its own accord, and shape climate policymaking in the industry’s favor. Despite more than 15 years of research attributing significant climate change impacts to animal agriculture, US policies to mitigate the climate impacts of livestock emissions remain insufficient and dominated by industry-supported financial incentives that are voluntary and taxpayer-subsidized.

In this interview with freelance writer Christopher Ketcham, we unpack the techno-industrial extractivism that plagues modern societies and the media’s complicity in failing to challenge the growth model on which it is based. We discuss Chris’ book This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West in which he outlines the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, corruptly supported by the federal land management agencies, who are supposed to be regulating these industries. He tracks the Department of Interior’s failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry.

We also chat about the green growth ideology behind the lithium mining at Thacker Pass in Nevada which is driving the destruction of ecosystems and species as well as the displacement of local Indian tribes from what they consider to be their sacred lands. This same ideology, combined with the failure to acknowledge and reckon with the realities of ecological overshoot, has caused many leading environmental groups to abandon their commitment to nature conservation in order to prioritize industry interests. Chris’ vision of ecological restoration calls for freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.

Book lecture: https://www.c-span.org/video/?462742-1/this-land

this is the title of a podcast interview by "Non Toxic", listen to it here (or wherever):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHBRX00WoMs

It's an interview about a project titled "Broken Spectre" https://jackshainman.com/exhibitions/richard_mosse_broken_spectre with the author: Richard Mosse

Joining Non-toxic from his studio in New York, Richard discusses the best ways to get powerful men to let you film their crimes, why women bare the brunt of the Amazon's destruction, and whether there's anything an artist can do to try to avert catastrophe.

The reason I'm mentioning it is because it reveals a contentious conflict and it shows the participants as they are.

Anyone following the genocide and ecocide in the Amazon region can probably understand that it's about settler-colonialism. The contention is about the fact that the settler-colonial class, these frontier types, they are workers and small business owners (and also large business owners and corporations).

The interview mentions that the Brazilian miners and ranchers are following the "Wild West" of colonization so hard that they're actually going for country songs and clothing style - called "Texano" cowboy.

This isn't the first time I've seen such documentaries or reports and it's important to understand the mentality and ideology of these settler-colonialists and how that relates to class politics.

Think of this problem as part of the "jobs tho" argument. The "jobs tho" argument is basically that:

You can't change the system! It would take away jobs and livelihood!

In this sense, "jobs tho!" is actually #BusinessAsUsual (BAU), it is conservatism.

We do need a lot of jobs to go away entirely. Starting with the Amazon miners and loggers and ranchers and their helpers, but it goes on for a lot more. Otherwise, each of these jobs is just as "indirect assassin", because that's the result, and the indigenous people in the Amazon are being genocided, as is common under settler-colonial invasion. And the #pastoralism angle is not surprising either, there's no better way to take over land than to make claims over land with the extensive land use: herding.

What's the alternative? Well, do you ever wonder how bad it has to get? That's the thing. The "pressure" of how bad is used by capitalism to push frontiers, to accumulate new capital (and, later, to catabolize/cannibalize). The top-down force is pushing, and instead of the opposite force pushing back, the opposite force is pushing sideways.

But "I was just following economic orders", right?