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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Ringbarking the Tree of Life | George Monbiot
  • Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2015 13:00:24 -0400

http://www.monbiot.com/2015/03/12/ringbarking-the-tree-of-life/


Ringbarking the Tree of Life - monbiot.com <http://www.monbiot.com/>
------------------------------
Ringbarking the Tree of Life
<http://www.monbiot.com/2015/03/12/ringbarking-the-tree-of-life/>
Posted: 12 Mar 2015 05:37 AM PDT
The destruction of cultural treasures by ISIS has parallels in ecological
cleansing around the world.
By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 12th March 2015
Journalists are meant to be able to watch and read dispassionately: to face
horror with equanimity. I have never acquired this skill, and I know I’m
not the only one. It’s true that we seek out bad news, but there is some
news that many of us find hard to face.
This is why I write about extinction less often than I should: most of the
time I just don’t want to know. It’s one of the reasons why I have turned
my gaze away from the Middle East. I’ve been unable to watch, or even to
think very much about the bombing of Gaza, the war in Syria or the
slaughter of hostages by Isis.
But, reluctantly, I’ve forced myself to read about its destruction of the
ancient wonders at Nimrud
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/06/isis-destroys-ancient-assyrian-site-of-nimrud>
and Hatra <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-31779484>.
The war Isis is waging against difference has many fronts. Just as this
rebarbative movement is engaged in the ethnic cleansing of the peoples
whose lands it has occupied, it is also involved in the cultural cleansing
of the pre-Islamic past
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-31769164>. Anything that
deviates from its narrow strictures must be destroyed.
The magnificent buildings at Nimrud and Hatra and the precious sculptures
and friezes they held were, to Isis, nothing more than deviance. Marvels
that have persisted for thousands of years were levelled in hours with
explosives and bulldozers. These people have inflicted a great wound upon
the world.
But while this destruction, as Isis doubtless intends, is shocking, for me
it is also familiar. Almost every day, I find in my inbox similar stories
of the razing of priceless treasures. But they tend to involve natural
marvels, rather than manmade ones.
The clearing of forests and savannas, the trawling or dredging of coral
reefs and seamounts and other such daily acts of vandalism deprive the
world of the wonders that enhance our lives. A Great Global Polishing is
taking place, eliminating difference, leaving behind grey monotonies of the
kind that Isis appears to love. But while the destruction of those ancient
citadels in northern Iraq has been widely and rightly denounced as a war
crime, the levelling of our natural wonders is treated as if it were a sad
but necessary fact of life.
There are countless examples, but I will mention just one: the current
proposal to flood the Areng Valley in Cambodia
<http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/cambodia.htm>.
The indigenous people of this valley have a powerful conservation ethos.
They have protected the huge trees and the rare animals it contains. As a
result, the valley’s mosaic of deciduous and evergreen forest, swamps,
lakes and grasslands
<http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/cambodia/Areng%20dam%20-%20impact%20summary%20October%202007%20_2_.pdf>
is a refuge for species that are either found nowhere else or are now
endangered wherever they occur. It is the last significant habitat for the
Siamese crocodile, of which fewer than 200 still exist in the wild. It is
an important redoubt for Asian elephants, for the very rare white-winged
duck, for a fish called the Asian arowana, for the smooth-coated otter, the
elongated tortoise and the mangrove turtle.
Like infrastructure projects in many parts of the world
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/05/infrastructure-boom-threatens-worlds-last-wildernesses>,
this scheme is also likely to open a wider area to destruction. The roads
associated with it will help loggers and poachers to penetrate the Cardomom
Protected Forest, a natural wonder just as entrancing as the buildings at
Nimrud and Hatra.
Need I point out that the hydroelectric dam the Cambodian government hopes
will drown the Areng Valley is likely to be almost useless? Hundreds of
dams have been built around the world, either for hydroelectricity or for
irrigation, that have failed to deliver their promised benefits, while
inundating natural marvels and the livelihoods of local people. This will
be no exception, as the valley is wide and shallow, which means that the
hydroelectric potential is small.
We deceive ourselves when we imagine that such projects are built to
advance human welfare. Sure, they will enrich certain people, principally
those with construction contracts. The purpose of much of the world’s
construction is construction: its primary function is to provide contracts
for the companies who build it and perks and backhanders for the officials
who commission it. What happens to these projects after they have been
built is often of little interest. This disease is by no means confined to
the poor world; there are plenty of white elephant projects in the US,
Britain and other rich nations.
But there are other motives at play as well, and some of them are not far
removed from the ideas that animate Isis. That old missionary project,
“conquering the darkness”, invoking both the biblical struggle between good
and evil and the colonial imperative to demonise and destroy the resistance
of dark-skinned peoples, enabling settlers to seize their land, their
labour and their resources, still drives the destruction of precious wild
places.
For many people with a crudely extractivist mindset, forests and other
functioning ecosystems represent darkness and backwardness. They sustain
the lives of indigenous peoples, who in some countries are treated as a
stain on the image governments would like to project. The clearance of
forests in Malaysia, in Indonesia and in the occupied territory of West
Papua <http://www.monbiot.com/books/poisoned-arrows/>, for example, has
been accompanied by sermons about the need to drag “backward” peoples and
regions into the light of progress. The same sentiments prevailed
throughout South America until quite recently, and are still used to
justify deforestation in some parts of the continent. Forests are dark,
ranches are light, and for some people this is a metaphor as well as a fact.
In the United States, clearing forests was perceived as a sacred duty,
consonant with the task of eradicating or converting heathen peoples and
heathen places. This worldview persists in the continued sale of trees on
federal lands to lumber companies at prices below even the cost of
processing the transaction
<http://www.derrickjensen.org/work/books-dvds-cds/strangely-like-war/>, let
alone any market value. The forests are given away in the name of progress,
and the state also pays for the roads required to clear them.
Bison were wiped out, thousands at a time, not only to supply skins and
bones for fertiliser (the rest of the carcass was abandoned) but also to
deprive Native Americans of their subsistence. Eradicating the species from
most of its range was considered a patriotic necessity.
In New Zealand until a few decades ago, ringbarking picnics were organised
at weekends: people took their families into the countryside to kill trees
for the good of the nation. They believed that they were doing the world a
favour by destroying a dark and primitive wilderness. Cultural cleansing
and ecological cleansing are driven by the same impulses, in some cases to
serve the same ends.
Sometimes the destroyers see themselves as fighting a war against nature.
Derrick Jensen and George Draffan’s book about deforestation, *Strangely
Like War*
<http://www.derrickjensen.org/work/books-dvds-cds/strangely-like-war/>,
takes its title from a passage by a historian of the north-western US,
Murray Morgan:
“*It was strangely like war. They attacked the forest as if it were an
enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken
into patches, and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only
making lumber but liberating the land from the trees.*”
While purging the species and habitats they considered barbarous and alien,
colonists have often sought to replace them with familiar wildlife. In
several British colonies, for example, acclimatisation societies imported
wild animals and plants, releasing them sometimes for instrumental
purposes, sometimes for “moral” reasons. Often the consequences were
disastrous: think of the starlings these societies introduced to North
America, or the stoats and weasels they brought to New Zealand
<http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/acclimatisation/page-1>. In some cases, they
made an explicit link between replacing native wildlife with species
brought from home and replacing native people with settlers. Take *The
Old-World Sparrow*
<http://wildbirdsbroadcasting.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-old-world-sparrow-1869-poem.html>,
for example, written in 1869 by the Massachusetts poet William Cullen
Bryant.
*… A winged settler has taken his place*
*With Teutons and men of Celtic race;*
*He has followed their path to our hemisphere*
*The Old-World Sparrow at last is here.*
The sparrow, he maintained, would eat American crop pests, which he
described as “*a swarming, skulking, ravenous tribe*”. In case the
connection between barbaric wildlife and barbaric people wasn’t obvious
enough, he portrayed one of these insects, that leaves a crescent-shaped
marking on fruit, as a “*little Turk*” that uses “*sly devices of cunning
and fear*”, reflecting the racist stereotype with which Turks at the time
were characterised in Anglophone nations.
Sometimes the destruction carried out in the name of commerce looks
identical to the destruction carried out in the name of religion. Consider,
for example, the razing of a 4,000 year-old pyramid
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23173628> by a property
developer in Peru in 2013. Or the repeated intrusion by construction
companies
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/07/isis-destroy-libya-cultural-treasures>
into ancient sites in Libya. To those trying to protect our common
heritage, the ideology that motivates destruction is less important than
the fact of that destruction. Whether you are bulldozing an ancient site to
advance jihad or to turn a profit, the results are the same.
None of this is to excuse in any way what Isis has done. Rather, it is to
show that its acts of vandalism are by no means unique, and arise from a
mindset that is common to many cultures. Collectively, through our
intolerance of difference and lack of respect for beauty, we are waging war
on the wonders of our small planet. Needlessly, mindlessly, we are
ringbarking the Tree of Life.
www.monbiot.com



  • [permaculture] Ringbarking the Tree of Life | George Monbiot, Lawrence London, 03/13/2015

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