Lisnaholic

That's depressing news. It's worrying that there are so many knock-on effects from pollution that we don't much think about until they turn up in some scientific study.

In a similar way, forest fires are in the news only while they are burning, but that's only part of the story. After the news cycles have moved on to other scandals, the real impact of fires starts to kick in, but those reports are most often local news only:-

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Ayn Marx

Underneath discussions such as this is the now forbidden topic, seldom raised since the 1970s, the population explosion.
If by some miracle the majority of our species began behaving in an ecologically sensible way the mere presence of billions upon billions of our species imagining we can continue to increase in numbers without negative consequences is no more than a delusion. Never mind, the planet is about to take its revenge.
Glad I wont be around to see it.

jwb

actually i think it's not mentioned mostly because that book made all sorts of outlandish predictions that never happened... If I'm thinking of the right book anyway that's what i heard

These days decreasing birth rates pose a bigger problem than overpopulation in much of the world.... China is going to be extra ****ed because they put in that one child policy largely in reaction to this hype and it backfired. Now they have reversed it and still can't convince most Chinese people to have more than one kid because it's become culturally ingrained

Frownland

It's a pretty good point if we accept the parasitic nature of capitalism to be inherent to human nature and therefore unchangeable.

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SGR

Oooooh, Malthusianism...

TheBig3

How are you defining capitalism in this case?

I only ask because I'm currently reading The Mushroom at the End of the World, and the author suggests that markets alone don't make capitalism, it requires investment. It's a poorly written book (because economists can't write) but the subject matter is interesting, and she's a Left-wing economist endorsed by Adam Tooze so you might enjoy it.

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Frownland

In the Marxist sense (who has underrated writing style btw).

I generally agree with that but think it's more important to note the violent foundations of the power imbalance between those who can make such investments and those who are exploited by them.

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TheBig3

Well then you might love Mushroom, violence in capitalism is a solid portion of the book.

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jadis

Never read her but FWIW Tsing is an anthropologist, and those have a reputation for being great writers (at least the two most famous anthropologists of the 20th century, Margaret Mead and Claude Lévi-Strauss, were famously great writers). Though of course there's no universal standard, some would say Lévi-Strauss wrote in unintelligible jargon etc.

I love the 18th Brumaire and the other texts where he's in a more essayistic and aphoristic mode but the Capital is tough going for my humanities-addled brain, doubt I'll ever push myself through it from beginning to end.

TheBig3

She sort of does that. She didn't appear to have an editor (that did any work) she suffers from Academese, and she goes off on these semi- to completely unrelated tangents. Why John Cage comes up AT ALL is based on the title of one of his works?

It does make for a better Anthro book, and I think I'd be less hostile toward it if it had been labeled that way. The story of the matsutake pickers is fascinating though.

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