Launched to provide an information service connected with _Toward a Bioregional State, the book; the blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, and news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Development Unincorporated: Ethnobotany, Languages, and the Bioregional State
"The twentieth century is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but rather as the era in which we stood by--neither actively endorsed nor passively accepted--the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet....You know genocide as the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide--the destruction of a people's way of life--is not only not condemned, it's universally in many quarters celebrated as part of a development strategy....In the end then it comes down to a choice: do we really want to live in a monochromatic world full of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity." --- Wade Davis
Development, Inc., to Development Unincorporated: the Bioregional State as Ethnobotany Preservation, Expansion, and Encouragement
This is one major issue that I think about, as important in the grain of the bioregional state. It's actually the major point I pondered long before penning the bioregional state. Whether we see it in the formal institutional ecological checks and balances against unrepresentative developmentalism and state corruption, or see it in watershed commodity ecology arrangements, the bioregional state is a framework of protecting preexisting forms of ethnobotany and human diversity. Species die for lack of diversity, including humans. Species as well die because of ignorance of the destructions of their environment--because bodily their environment is themselves.
However, the bioregional state is more than wistfully or sentimentally protecting pre-existing forms of ethnobotany and human diversity, it is a manner for such frameworks to be the developmental and political economic program itself--expanded as much as protected, institutionally.
...the study of the relationship between plants and people: From"ethno" - study of people and "botany" - study of plants. Ethnobotany is considered a branch of ethnobiology. Ethnobotany studies the complex relationships between (uses of) plants and cultures. The focus of ethnobotany is on how plants have been or are used, managed and perceived in human societies and includes plants used for food, medicine, divination, cosmetics, dyeing, textiles, for building, tools, currency, clothing, rituals, social life, and music.
Such ethnobotany capacities and knowledges can be maintained via different watershed's versions of commodity ecology. In other words, people living sustainability in their areas as knowledgeable about how particularities of their area can be usefully utilized-- instead of ignorantly ignored, clear cut, or paved over.
Ethnobotany is heavily tied into specific ecoregional uses of languages--as the carrier for the knowledge base. The bioregional state is simultaneously a form of ethnobotany preservation arrangement, as much as it is an encouragement of making further ethnobotany reweavings for areas that have been completely lost. Since Fifty Percent of World's Languages Have Been Lost in Last Six Years according to the Harvard anthropologist Wade Davis, the bioregional state is more required than ever--as a way to "regrain" ourselves into particular environments--to learn about locality as the basis for sustainability as well to encourage it being the metric for maintaining human diversity as a whole.
"If you're as concerned as I am about the environment and how it impacts your health, chances are good you might've missed a huge cultural shift. This absolutely fascinating video lecture by a very articulate Harvard anthropologist tells you how we are losing our heritage. By Professor Davis' estimate, about half of the world's 6,000 languages are disappearing, as they are no longer being taught to children, meaning the origins of our world, ethnicity and spiritual life -- what he calls the enthnosphere -- are vanishing. With language serving as "a watershed of thought" -- not just uncountable sets of grammatical rules keen to trip us up when we least expect it -- among various populations around the world, languages will die unless something happens soon to change it."
I got a form letter from Amnesty International many years ago, soliciting funds. There was a bit of room on the form where I scrawled a pleas to help me out. I'm a political prisoner here in Canada. One of my favorite native artists, Lawrence Paul was raised in the town I am now living in. His mother had to deliver him in the local hospital in a room designated the "squaw room". My wife works in that hospitial. She doesn't believe me when I tell her that natives were only allowed to deliver in one room and that no mixing of native and whites was allowed there. Lawrence Paul's father was a shaman. At the age of 17 his father had been transplanted to a catholic reservation school where the conditions were so bad that he got "scurvy" and all his teeth had to be pulled. Lawrence described this treatment on the program "Ideas" on CBC (tape available at www.cbc.ca/ideas) last week where his father's head and hands were strapped down and "all" of his teeth were extracted without anesthetic. Lawrence wants to know why they don't have Remembrance Day for the 75-possibly 200 million native Americans that have been slaughtered since the white man came here.
I'm in the process of building a greenhouse and accoutrements on my lot in Kamloops. I collected all of the material for the construction by extracting it from waste piles headed for the landfill. I know what it's like to extract a lifestyle from a landfill. My good fortune is that I don't have to "compete" for other peoples garbage. Our society just wastes it and dumpster diving just happens to be something I'm passionate about. There are other dumpster divers but they aren't interested in 3/4 inch plywood or panes of glass. It's hard to move big stuff around in a grocery shopping cart.
Anyway, I have all the material I need and have excavated a level spot in the yard. I'm wondering if your architects are flexible? Can they take X materials and graft a floor plan? Timing is everything.
I just dropped this link amid of flurry of my usual rantings over at one of ericswan’s blogs (the wild & woolly FSHOD), after a post he wrote, The Warming Debate and thought you might like it, too. It’s called Life-Enhancing Agriculture, by Jeane Manning, "a review of the agriculture section" of the book Living Energies:Viktor Schauberger's Brilliant Work With Natural Energy Explained, by Callum Coats.
The stuff I was talking about started off in the old & familiar Paperclip weedpatch, but then it turns in a sustainable earth, bioregional sort of direction. If you're interested, you can find my comments here, at Tuesday, April 24, 2007 12:56:00 PM and Thursday, April 26, 2007 11:47:00 AM (pretty far down the page, near the bottom actually.)
I'm also working on something I'd like to share with you and a few like-minded individuals in the near future (Dave West, of Low, Dishonest Decade fame and Big Gav, my Australian Peak Energy friend, for starters.) That comment link was a taste of coming attractions, sort of. Hope all is well...
There is a new documentary coming up this year about preserving the knowledge about plants of the people in the Amazon, tracing the steps of Richard Evans Schultes in Colombia, inspired by Wade Davis' One River.
This documentary was done with a lot of effort, personal funds from the producers and some government grants, there is no promotion budget. We liked your blog so we added you to the blog roll. It would be interesting to have you as a guest blogger.
Thanks for the invite. I salute your project. The singular flows of the Amazon certainly have a difficult time being split across many different abstract jurisdictions, particularly in states like Brazil that are unable currently to find a way to stop destroying the area and their state's durability in the process?
What do I do at that website you mention? Just comment if I see fit? Some webpages have comment locations. Is that what you are talking about?
-----------
Another film of interest about the Amazon is mentioned in this link.
It was produced by the BBC, called "The Secret of El Dorado". Instead of gold, it is about the rich black soil of the Amazon, the terra preta, and how it might be more important to the world than gold to understand how it was created.
Sustaining local land tenure with a less slash-and-burn based agriculture is crucial I think in economically providing incentives and securities of local populations from being ecological refugees. An agriculture based on self-sustaining terra preta creation would be such a thing.
More on that in the film: people are unraveling the 'secret of the terra preta' the mysterious dark soil of the Amazon. Much of the current evidence shows that it was an anthropogenically created soil indicating that a large urban-agricultural society existed in the Amazon and then collapsed as soon as the Europeans brought in epidemics. Only one European explorer saw it. Then a generation later, the Amazon had swallowed up all evidence of it. Except for the durable terra preta.
So instead of only the Inca, the Aztecs, and the Maya--perhaps a fourth major area of urbanized societies in Latin America before the European Conquests will make it into the history books soon: the Amazonians.
The Amazonians seemed quite sustainable in their agriculture--and we can still learn from them:
(It seems that these links on that page are broken since they were removed from YouTube and Google Video. You may find the documentary or its filmed scientists useful if you want to provide a historical view of the Amazon in your Amazon documentary project.
It would be an interesting angle, our unsustainable, self-destroying, current society learning from long gone sustainable one destroyed before we knew its value. A tale of ecological redemption in the Amazon.)
Because [1] there are plenty of material and technical solutions available for sustainability, and [2] from other blog posts, because the majority of the world supports such things, I think our difficulties are entirely political organizational when we start to talk about sustainability and degradation. Gatekeeping and corruption based political economies keep sustainability from happening, instead of degradation happening due to the lack of solutions or concern. There are plenty of solutions, and it is a global majority concern.
Therefore just put the state in sync organizationally with this concern (with some of the suggestions in the bioregional state).
It's more democratic and more sustainable simultaneously. As degradation, corruption, and lack of democracy go hand in hand, you can work toward all being solved with the bioregional state.
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
7 Comments:
I got a form letter from Amnesty International many years ago, soliciting funds. There was a bit of room on the form where I scrawled a pleas to help me out. I'm a political prisoner here in Canada. One of my favorite native artists, Lawrence Paul was raised in the town I am now living in. His mother had to deliver him in the local hospital in a room designated the "squaw room". My wife works in that hospitial. She doesn't believe me when I tell her that natives were only allowed to deliver in one room and that no mixing of native and whites was allowed there. Lawrence Paul's father was a shaman. At the age of 17 his father had been transplanted to a catholic reservation school where the conditions were so bad that he got "scurvy" and all his teeth had to be pulled. Lawrence described this treatment on the program "Ideas" on CBC (tape available at www.cbc.ca/ideas) last week where his father's head and hands were strapped down and "all" of his teeth were extracted without anesthetic.
Lawrence wants to know why they don't have Remembrance Day for the 75-possibly 200 million native Americans that have been slaughtered since the white man came here.
I'm in the process of building a greenhouse and accoutrements on my lot in Kamloops. I collected all of the material for the construction by extracting it from waste piles headed for the landfill. I know what it's like to extract a lifestyle from a landfill. My good fortune is that I don't have to "compete" for other peoples garbage. Our society just wastes it and dumpster diving just happens to be something I'm passionate about. There are other dumpster divers but they aren't interested in 3/4 inch plywood or panes of glass. It's hard to move big stuff around in a grocery shopping cart.
Anyway, I have all the material I need and have excavated a level spot in the yard. I'm wondering if your architects are flexible? Can they take X materials and graft a floor plan? Timing is everything.
If nothing else, Cameron Sinclair sounds pretty flexible on materials. :-) Give that network of hundreds of humanitarian architects a call and see.
Hey Mark!
I just dropped this link amid of flurry of my usual rantings over at one of ericswan’s blogs (the wild & woolly FSHOD), after a post he wrote, The Warming Debate and thought you might like it, too. It’s called Life-Enhancing Agriculture, by Jeane Manning, "a review of the agriculture section" of the book Living Energies: Viktor Schauberger's Brilliant Work With Natural Energy Explained, by Callum Coats.
The stuff I was talking about started off in the old & familiar Paperclip weedpatch, but then it turns in a sustainable earth, bioregional sort of direction. If you're interested, you can find my comments here, at Tuesday, April 24, 2007 12:56:00 PM and Thursday, April 26, 2007 11:47:00 AM (pretty far down the page, near the bottom actually.)
I'm also working on something I'd like to share with you and a few like-minded individuals in the near future (Dave West, of Low, Dishonest Decade fame and Big Gav, my Australian Peak Energy friend, for starters.) That comment link was a taste of coming attractions, sort of. Hope all is well...
IC
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Hi,
There is a new documentary coming up this year about preserving the knowledge about plants of the people in the Amazon, tracing the steps of Richard Evans Schultes in Colombia, inspired by Wade Davis' One River.
This documentary was done with a lot of effort, personal funds from the producers and some government grants, there is no promotion budget. We liked your blog so we added you to the blog roll. It would be interesting to have you as a guest blogger.
www.insearchofoneriver.com
To "blogging blog,"
Thanks for the invite. I salute your project. The singular flows of the Amazon certainly have a difficult time being split across many different abstract jurisdictions, particularly in states like Brazil that are unable currently to find a way to stop destroying the area and their state's durability in the process?
What do I do at that website you mention? Just comment if I see fit? Some webpages have comment locations. Is that what you are talking about?
-----------
Another film of interest about the Amazon is mentioned in this link.
It was produced by the BBC, called "The Secret of El Dorado". Instead of gold, it is about the rich black soil of the Amazon, the terra preta, and how it might be more important to the world than gold to understand how it was created.
Sustaining local land tenure with a less slash-and-burn based agriculture is crucial I think in economically providing incentives and securities of local populations from being ecological refugees. An agriculture based on self-sustaining terra preta creation would be such a thing.
More on that in the film: people are unraveling the 'secret of the terra preta' the mysterious dark soil of the Amazon. Much of the current evidence shows that it was an anthropogenically created soil indicating that a large urban-agricultural society existed in the Amazon and then collapsed as soon as the Europeans brought in epidemics. Only one European explorer saw it. Then a generation later, the Amazon had swallowed up all evidence of it. Except for the durable terra preta.
So instead of only the Inca, the Aztecs, and the Maya--perhaps a fourth major area of urbanized societies in Latin America before the European Conquests will make it into the history books soon: the Amazonians.
The Amazonians seemed quite sustainable in their agriculture--and we can still learn from them:
http://commodityecology.blogspot.com/2007/06/6-soilsdirthydroponics.html
(It seems that these links on that page are broken since they were removed from YouTube and Google Video. You may find the documentary or its filmed scientists useful if you want to provide a historical view of the Amazon in your Amazon documentary project.
It would be an interesting angle, our unsustainable, self-destroying, current society learning from long gone sustainable one destroyed before we knew its value. A tale of ecological redemption in the Amazon.)
Because [1] there are plenty of material and technical solutions available for sustainability, and [2] from other blog posts, because the majority of the world supports such things, I think our difficulties are entirely political organizational when we start to talk about sustainability and degradation. Gatekeeping and corruption based political economies keep sustainability from happening, instead of degradation happening due to the lack of solutions or concern. There are plenty of solutions, and it is a global majority concern.
Therefore just put the state in sync organizationally with this concern (with some of the suggestions in the bioregional state).
It's more democratic and more sustainable simultaneously. As degradation, corruption, and lack of democracy go hand in hand, you can work toward all being solved with the bioregional state.
Regards, Mark
I agree that embracing diverse cultures and protecting existing ways of life are crucial.
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