Im not going to pull punches on this rant. I am so exhausted by this rhetoric and unfortunately it is pervasive in my personal life and online. I spend most of my productive time reviewing literature on various global issues. Namely land grab discourse, genocide studies, conservation efforts, state development policy, IFI reports etc etc.
Let me tell you something about the lives of rural and Indigenous people in the global south. They get their homes burned down and murdered in their sleep. Their lands are stolen from them with techniques perfected by colonial powers, especially from US settler colonialism.
The state will steal their lands and “preserve it” for use of private capital, for white settlers, or to create a national park or preserves that wealthy foriegners can hunt game and so they can parade to the world how “modern” they are becoming.
If they cannot steal land outright they will use other more complicated manners to incentivise rural people to be tied into market relations, such as dependence on ecotourism or even biochar and other technologies presented as liberatory or as needed due to damages colonialism has done. “A bit of colonialism will help your colonialism problem,” if you will.
These relations will contradict and then corrode their lifeways and distracted from effective traditional methods because white tourists don’t want to see the cattle of pastoralists when on vacation. They are also shamed by the excess wealth of tourists, and the settlers that facilitate tourism, encouraging them to become more enfranchised into modernity so their lands will either become vulnerable to direct theft or the market relations will mold them into what settlers want them to do for the benifit of their estates.
These extreme minority settlers often own like half of an entire county, while the county next door is over half conservation area. This means fewer lands for grazing and fewer water sources available for rural people. It leads to starvation and death, especially during dry periods such as the current drought in east Africa, all while the state concern trolls about food security and executes the development dance to attract aid and FDI. It also means that lands are degraded by over use because these people are being choked out of their ancestral lands. The state and white settlers then blame the pastoralists and forest dwellers and weaponize Human Rights against them, saying the rural peoples are preventing the states quest for water security as they redirect all waters to metro areas and settler estates.
All of this is the genocidal process of primative accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. It is a privilege I am able to research these situations. It is a privilege that I am able to work with organizations that work with local Tribes on the issues they are concerned about. It is a privilege I am a grad student that is paid to do this, although our union has to fight the university for a fraction of a living wage.
I am not privileged to not vote Blue. It is more like a curse of understanding. Who do you think backs these violent efforts of dispossession? USAID is never far away. The EU is never far away. The IFI are always right there. Conservation as we know it was created in North America to conquer the continent and take the land from Indigenous peoples and it has exported these methods abroad. All of this is supported by institutions and policies that democrats and republicans alike believe in and enable globally. It is supported by finance capital which is the foundation of the present democratic party
Let me tell you what people who vote blue do about this. Kenya or some other post colonial state will massacre people and burn down their homes and create a national park. Netflix will then hire Obama to narrate a docuseriese on the glorious national parks of the world. Blue voters will then consume the erasure and genocide of rural people as feel-good, green™ content with satisfaction that the world is becoming a better place. That’s it. Then they go vote blue.
Anyone who says I am privileged to not vote blue has no clue or no care regarding how the world works and is a combination being hopelessly US centric, too focused on bourgeoisie partisanship and embarrassingly naive about the world. Voting blue is the opposite of solidarity. The people who say they are not privileged enough to not vote Blue fail to see their own privilege of living in the Disney land of the global north. What ever gains they think Democrats will give them will either never happen or will be cut from the flesh of people they are happy to sacrifice.
I will not be extorted by bourgeoisie partisans. My moral worth and political identify is mine to create, not theirs to demand. My concern is with the fundamental machinations of capital and the devestating impact it has on people while it reproduces itself, and it is most destructive in places far from the minds of democrats regardless of issues in the US. I’m not going to be tricked into supporting a party that enables the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that stands on a foundation of genocide. They only have moral arguments but they do not have moral standing.
In short (because the idiosyncrasies of traditional land practices vary among communities and is hardly my expertise), for pastoralists, how cattle are managed effects the health of the land. Pastoralists know how the land reacts to different practices because they have thousands of years of experience with their ancestral lands. An example of this may be that some grasses will die if the grow too tall, some landscapes thrive by being periodically trampled by cattle and wildlife. When problems arise they have ways of determining what to do through informal institutions. Basically, the culture and the land co-evolve together so one will effect the other in a feedback loop.
When outside forces seek to integrate these communities with things like ecotourism it can slowly disrupt those relationships. And it is for little gain as the jobs are poverty jobs. Further, tourists unfortunately routinely feel they have a more authentic experience when they occasionally see poor Indigenous people, or hear about their struggle, but don’t want to see their cattle or lifeways being practiced because it challenges the “pristine” aesthetic they are hoping to consume. Another example is how forest peoples have ways of determining how to do controlled burns and other things that keep the forest healthy. The disruptions of the practices is well documented in North America and is why catestrophic wildfires are common now.
If you want to know more you will need to look at specific communities and possibly learn some new language to understand properly. Not all practices are known to academics. Some are withheld or protected by certain families because of the danger of appropriation, especially information about plants because corps will patent the genetics.
Thanks. I understand the disruption from tourism, but I was mostly curious in regards to efficiency comparison between pastoralist method of agriculture and planned, mechanised agriculture (like in China nowadays)
Let me get back to you on this because there is a lot to say and I am woefully busy. But this is something I would like to at least attempt to elaborate on with the attention it deserves.
Thanks in advance! (For the record - I’m not the one downvoting you)