Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Guardian author Peter Sutoris, we need to rediscover the environmental connectedness of indigenous peoples, though we might get to keep some of our tech toys.
The climate crisis requires a new culture and politics, not just new tech
Peter Sutoris
Mon 24 May 2021 21.00 AESTThis moment calls for humility – we cannot innovate ourselves out of this mess
We are living through what scientists call the Anthropocene, a new geological age during which humans have become the dominant force shaping the natural environment. Many scientists date this new period to the post-second world war economic boom, the “great acceleration”. This rapid increase in our control over the Earth has brought us to the precipice of catastrophic climate change, triggered a mass extinction, disrupted our planet’s nitrogen cycles and acidified its oceans, among other things.
Our society has come to believe that technology is the solution. Electricity from renewable sources, energy-efficient buildings, electric vehicles and hydrogen fuels are among the many innovations that we hope will play a decisive role in reducing emissions. Most of the mainstream climate-change models now assume some degree of “negative emissions” in the future, relying on large-scale carbon capture technology, despite the fact that it is far from ready to be implemented. And if all else fails, the story goes, we can geoengineer the Earth.
…
Our civilisation is underpinned by extractivism, a belief that the Earth is ours to exploit, and the nonsensical idea of infinite growth within a finite territory. Material possessions as markers of achievement, a drive to consume for the sake of consumption, and blindness to the long-term consequences of our actions, have all become part of the culture of global capitalism. But there is nothing self-evident about these things, as indigenous peoples teach us.
Many indigenous groups got to know their natural environments intimately and sustained themselves over millennia, often despite harsh conditions. They came to understand the limits of what these environments could support, and they grasped that caring for the environment was simultaneously an act of self-care. Pacific islanders would designate no-go areas of the ocean to avoid overfishing, while high-altitude farmers in the Andes would rely on terraces that reduced erosion to grow their crops. It is not a coincidence that as much as 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversityis located within territories inhabited by indigenous peoples.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/24/climate-change-crisis-culture-politics-technology
Talk of society re-embracing indigenous lifestyles in my opinion is nonsense. People who choose to live this way, I have no problem with that. But most of us enjoy our comforts.
Most people in advanced countries, even people whose ancestors lived indigenous lifestyles, live modern lifestyles of their own free will.
Authors like Peter Sutoris talk the talk, but my guess is he is typing on a computer which contains lots of plastic and refined metal, lives in a warm, waterproof and comfortable house, has a nice place to sleep, and has a freezer stuffed full of food, at least some of which he didn’t have to hunt or grow.
The idea of ending “speciesism”, ending prioritisation of human welfare, might sound nice and fluffy, but a serious attempt to downgrade human welfare as a priority would almost certainly have severe consequences. You don’t have to look far back in history to find periods of horrible suffering, like Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or the periods of severe famine in early Soviet times, all caused by governments which focussed on priorities other than taking care of their people.
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I think Peter Sutoris is preparing to re-brand Kool-Aid as “Speciesism”.
(And thanks once again Eric for taking one for the team here by reading the absolute tosh that The Guardian publishes, thereby saving us from the prospect of having our intellects compromised)
Peter Sutoris appears to be vagenda driven.
Thanks 🙂
Can we still watch the pride parades of lions, lionesses, and their [unPlanned] cubs? Or would that be speciest appropriation?
That said, Planned People… Persons will complement Planned Parent/hood. From conception to grave following a progressive path and grade.
Welcome to The Outer Limits. You have now entered The Twilight Fringe. Perhaps an episode of V.
And you quote The Grauniad…..why?
Clickbait ?
Everyone on this site knows it’s a long lost rag with dwindling readership that panders to the far left: not worthy of our effort.
Don’t give it the time of day.
Why – because I don’t want to be a participant in a Western version of the Great Leap Forward. If you say nothing they think everyone agrees with them.
Rubbish,
Don’t give them the bandwidth.
Use their own Alinsky rules against them. Starve them of oxygen. Cancel them out.
Given they have MSM behind them I don’t think that is an option I can deliver.
The concept of MSM, and of a “mainstream,” presupposes Big Media that are trusted by nearly everybody. Such a thing no longer exists. And our consumption habits make that more true. I stick to blogs like this one, and podcasts. The Hollywood media have nothing I want.
So let “them” control the bandwidth?
That’s canceling ourselves out.
To be aware of what they are being told, when you meet one, just might help you give them the “breath of fresh air” they need.
I understand your position & point of view, however, history is littered with examples of where people turned a “blind eye” to somebody’s rantings & pronouncements, as the 1930s & 40s can display, & it came at a huge Human cost to the world!!! Ignoring them is NOT an option!!! Every false, fabricated, & invented concerns of theirs must be taken apart & shown for the falsehoods they are!!!
Hell, I read CounterPunch, which I can’t tell whether they are Maoists or Trotskyites. Knowing what the fringe is up to is important, especially when CounterPunch sounds just like several Democratic congresscritters.
The Guardian has about 4 or 5 silly climate change articles every day. The worst ones are from Australia.
Mostly written by people who live in cool southern states who are frightened of warm weather…
Leit,
For good reading by Australians, bookmark Quadrant Online.
You will find material like this example which is on theme with taking indigenous advice
“2. The Aboriginal cultures that existed before and have continued since 1788 are among the disgustingly violent and determinedly anti-learning that have been uncovered anywhere on Earth.
3. The British takeover offered Aborigines their best opportunity ever to escape their terrible ignorance and terrible violence -but no, most have not taken that opportunity” A blog comment by Harry Lee in response to: “The Pascoe Stain on the Academy of Science” by Tony Thomas. Geoff S
It’s good to know what the enemy is thinking and sometimes humorous in its stupidity.
The Guardian is also quite excellent for finding out what is the truth. Need I say more?
OK, I will. That second paragraph must be close to some kind of record in how many lies it’s possible to shoehorn into so few lines.
To date they and those like them have been given or have taken ALL THE BAND WIDTH. The majority of the public believes the subject is settled and we’re just spouting nonsense. long since forgotten by “real science”. Our problem has been playing by the rules and hoping everyone else will also play along. It we were playing the game as it needs to be played, Trump would be the President and Obiden would be in a care how where he should be.
“Real science” will always be corrupt so long as a handful of government agencies control both their funding and their reputations.
Science is big business today and government insists on being up to its trotters in that trough too …
Forewarned is forearmed. We need to know what the Woke brigade are planning to unleash on us next.
Turning your head away or shutting your eyes to it will not make it go away, AJE. It’s like that nasty shadow lurking in the corner, the one where dust bunnies gather and look like something else in the moonlight… and spook you. If you don’t get out the broom and dustpan and put them where they belong, they’ll still be lurking there the next time you look.
Sadly our leaders and our elites have been taken in and are going full pelt towards the deconstruction of our current civilisation.
In reality, global population will start to decline towards the end of this century and the best approach would be to manage that decline with the use of our existing systems and infrastructure (improving with time) instead of dismantling it all.
If we cause impoverishment of peoples around the world they will raise the birth rates again in order to try and avoid poverty and isolation in old age and we will never reach a satisfactory resolution.
As usual, the doomsayers will bring about the very outcome that they purport to fear.
Peter sutoris amongst other things is a “Social Scientist, ” I have extensive experience with assessing the growth potential of development intervention” and aspects of health, it seems hes been preaching the faith in the poorer parts of the southern hemisphere and Eastern Europe,
He’s a interventionist, plying his brand of environmentalism to the poor and uneducated,
Similar in some respects to what 18th and 19th centenary imperialists did in poorer parts of the world , we used to exploite the poor now we preach to them what they can and can’t do with what they have left,
The common denominator between Peter and the imperialists is ,its all about whats good for the west,at the expense of the poor.
Eco-colonialism
Agreed Redge
“Exploiting” the poor for financial game, as the British did to us, is on net a favor; it left us with a set of customs and institutions that led to prosperity. Let us not conflate that with bad “colonialism” which tries to keep the colonized people poor — which is what China is doing to the west with stupid climate treaties.
Eric, sorry about the sad ending to your spider deal. We had a similar deal with summer bats at our fishing cottage in Canada. They roosted in the outside rafters during day, but they had to follow our boat at dusk and eat all the mosquitos we attracted while we fished for smallmouth bass off the cottage.
What numskulls like Sutoris and the Guardian never understand is scope and scale of what they propose. Great to advocate an indigenous lifestyle, but lets not be that extreme. Pick the peak of Rome at AD1 for comparison. Romans had nothing like an indigenous life style at that time. They had roads, aquaducts, sophisticated agriculture, the Coliseum…Yet at that time the maximum estimated world population was 300 million; could have been as low as 150 million. There are demographers that study and argue such stuff.
Well, now the world population is approaching 8 billion.
Unintentionally advocating by implication the removal by death of about 7.7 billion people to save the climate is not something any thinking person should want to be associated with.
The Romans?
What did they ever do for us?
(apart from roads, aquaducts, sophisticated agriculture, the Coliseum…)
Safe to walk the streets at night?
It’s not “unintentional”, it’s the goal
Good heavens. What an utter idiot. Environmental connectedness of indigenous people? Wot?
Smallpox anybody?
— yeah, people who think that they can learn from primitive tribes should try to seek out a few of those very primitive tribes that live in the Amazon Basin. In their last conscious moment of thought, the only thing they would “learn” is what a futile stupid idea it was!
Is there enough environment around for 7.5 billion people to connect to their idigenousosity?
We have much to learn from the Aztec of Tenochtitlán who cut the hearts from virgins as part of their environmental connectedness.
And of course there are those Bushmen of the Kalahari for which every one of us would trade our unconnectedness for their environmental connectedness.
Peter Sutoris should go to Canning Town tube station and try out his ideas on the commuters there.
He did.
They turned him into a newt.
(but he got better . . . )
Maybe he could be dropped off on the beach of North Sentinel Island to consult with the indigenous population on how best to deal with outsiders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
Griff, Loydo, any other CAGW zealot out there. You too Nick Stokes. What does fighting climate change mean? What do you want the climate to be once victory is declared against climate change?
I fight climate change every summer, fall, winter and spring.
I use (in sequence) –
shorts, a jacket, a coat and shorts again.
What does fighting climate change mean?
We loose. They win.
David, I’ve been asking that for years and still haven’t gotten an answer.
Many species want to eat flesh. Perhaps the author wants to volunteer to be food for them
The madness continues-
Explainer: What the Dutch court carbon emissions ruling means for Shell (msn.com)
It’s not Royal Dutch Shell’s consumers that have to reduce their emissions but Shell. Infantile logic common to watermelons and now it infects our unelected legal jurists.
Is the Dutch court telling Royal Dutch Shell that it must reduce production of the carbon fuels that the corporation sells worldwide by some set amount, not simply to reduce the leakage of greenhouse gases such as methane which happens as those fuels are being extracted, refined, and shipped? I presume it’s the former, not the latter; i.e., Royal Dutch Shell must reduce its total production of oil, gas, and refined petroleum products.
“The district court ordered Shell to cut its absolute carbon emissions by 45% by 2030”
I think Shell should comply immediately …
They should combine with all other oil company’s & cut of 50% of ALL product sales to country’s that pass laws like that.
Let’s see how long the hypocritical politicians / law makers last, when the public get hit with astronomical prices, shortages of everything & blackouts.
…. and charge twice as much for the products, and give all their employees huge bonuses from the windfall profits.
Affluent people can afford to be environmentally aware. The best thing for the environment is to spread prosperity (as we are actually doing) to all the peoples of the world.
If the greenies manage to bork civilization, the ensuing environmental destruction will exceed even the wildest nightmares their feeble little brains are capable of imagining.
“Fallen Angels” is climate fiction written by some serious anthropogenic warming skeptics, back when nobody outside of LA had heard of the Climate Crisis – they make exactly that point. In the story the shutdown of industry and crash in anthropogenic CO2 emissions has triggered a new ice age. The greens, who still exercise some control over an increasingly fragmented society, are still fighting global warming. Kind of Logans Run meets the Postman.
Eric, I haven’t checked in a while, but Pournelle’s blog used to have quite a few posts of him savaging the AGW idea.
jerrypournelle.com is still up. I believe his son Philip maintains it.
Brings to mind Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
I daresay “Educating The Anthropocene” sounds impressive to your average Guardian reader ( as opposed to those of us who visit to check on the nutters ).
I want to believe that the sorts who read the Guardian aren’t as dim as the people who write for it – but honestly… there isn’t much evidence for that and I see profoundly stupid talking points regurgitated by people who one might reasonably expect to to be in possession of critical faculties allied to some subject knowledge.
Maybe it’s a tribal allegiance thing … maybe an anthropologist could investigate?
Yeah, I’ve always wondered why these dipshits can’t figure out how to virtue signal on their own without having the Guardian or the Baghdad Bob Corporation hold their hands and teach them the doom chants.
Not true. This article had comments open for barely 3 and half hours. The comments were so disparaging it was embarrassing.
By the timing, one of my comments was one of the very last to sneak in:
Correction: Open for 2 and half hours, not 3.
This complete idiot watched Disney’s Bambi and Pocahontas too many times as a child. His idea of nature is absolutely stupid. There is no such thing as an “indigenous” person. Mankind has constantly migrated back and forth and different groups have shared genes because of weather and climate changes since the dawn of prehistory. The people who sustained their tribes were the lucky ones, the others are only known because of archeological digs. Sustainable living, aka subsistence living, is not pretty and certainly not safe. It wasn’t until man started extracting that our population started growing.
Indigenous peoples also attacked each other for commodities, land, women ,water wiping out one tribe for another, perhaps this is what Peter wants he is a self proclaimed interventionist after all. Genocide again in another form rears its ugly head yet again from a environmentalist.
It was climate change that allowed the Amerinds to cross the isthmus that eventually became the Bearing Straight and make their way south along an ice free corridor. Who knows what “indigenous” peoples they encounteed, but they lucked out. They found a land of plenty and survived. People who romanticize their lives and fail to look at how they really lived are dangerous idiots. The “Noble Savage” is a figment of imagination.
i can’t for the life of me understand why so many people romanticize indigenous and primitive peoples. Yes, while they may have seemed to live in harmony with nature, they also suffered from all sorts of problems that are much more easily dealt with in modern society. Imagine dying of infections and diseases that are fairly easily cured today…imagine suffering an injury and needing medical/surgical intervention and there being no anesthesia….infections with no antibiotics…cancer (well, assuming you would even live long enough to develop cancer) with certain death and no chance of a cure…childbirth with no modern intervention for mother or child….sorry, there’s nothing about all that to be romanticized or sought after!
Maybe Peter the Indigenous lover should give up his state funded healthcare that he believes is a “right” and make himself one step closer to nature. If he’s feeling ill, he can go suck on some leaves.
He works for the Guardian, his health care is probably privately paid for not our wonderful NHS
I think it was Isaac Asimov who said, I only have one word for people who romanticise life in the past: “dentistry”.
Eric, Terry Pratchett’s character Cohen the Barbarian’s one thing was “soft bog roll.”
Sorry, dk_ I should have read your reply first. T-paper is king in the out doors.
Rory, I consider this, sometimes, to be a team sport. Not to worrry.
Flush toilets and toilet paper are another underrated modern advantage (especially for those in the Pacific North West who first learn that Devil’s Club is not a suitable substitute for T-paper).
“i can’t for the life of me understand why so many people romanticize indigenous and primitive peoples.”
The problem is that these people have no concept of real hardship. Their idea of primitive living is taken from Walden and modern fiction.
Can these Extreme Green proponents be force parachuted into Siberia, the Kalahari or the Amazon to live indigenous? OK, give them a metal knife and fire started instead of nothing. Pick the survivors up after a year and air a new NG TV series about them.
A noble savage fantacist. Didn’t we call “harsh conditions” over “millenia” the stone age? “An act of self-care,” with a typical (male) life span about 25 years, and an infant mortality rate at around %75, and starvation and untreatable disease vying for the primary cause of death.
“They grasped” no such thing as “caring for the environment.” In fact, those idyllic primitives were mostly responsible for the processes of the new meaning that Sartoris assigns to “extractivism.”
Having spent some 18 years in Papua- New Guinea, & during ny work as a Police Officer visied many small settlements.
Those on the coast are far advanced in their thinking & way of life as most have boats with sails thus are in contact with the “Real World”.
But those in the Mountains are right back to the Stone Age way of living.
Some in the “West” may think that is a back to nature lifestyle & thus good. Perhaps they should try it out for a year or two…
Vk5ellmje
m.j.elliot
I’ve read some accounts similar to your experiences. I hope that I have enough remaining sense not to equate the “primitive conditions” encountered on a weekend camping trip with living in the neolithic.
Have you published an account of that time?
They should be forced to try it out for a year or two, before insisting that we all do what they, in their infinite stupidity, insist that we do. At the very least, they need to lead by example, not try to impose their silly notions on the rest of us.
Don, My arbitrary mean survival rate prediction is less than 30 days. If I had an idea that we could get an experiment running, I’d take bets on it.
Before some media completely lost their minds, there were several, mostly BBC, shows putting modern people into 19th century, and earlier, living conditions. I found the first several episodes of these entertaining, but without exception they turned into constant whining by the participants. Withdrawal and failure rates were pretty high at the beginning. And these mostly had supplied food, clothing, and shelter.
The remaining programs of this format in the U.S. and from BBC are much less entertaining, but today I’ve nearly unplugged the television, anyway.
The ExxonMobil vote demonstrates beyond any shadow of doubt that morons are now in full control of the United States.
On the same day that a Dutch court orders Royal Dutch Shell to curtail its business, it is obvious that pseudoscience and superstition have prevailed in the West.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are laughing their asses off.
Just another adherent to a religion of cosmological maintenance
Peter Aboriginal people lived in “harmony” with nature because they knew no other way. You seem to be another white European lost in the “Nobel savage living in paradise” fallacy. They were not noble and it wasn’t paradise. Life was brutal and short. None of them want to go back.
Mao and Stalin were model anti-specieists, by eliminating vast swaths of the human species. They fought valiantly again the systemic specieism that is the basis of our western society. They raised their fists against specieism!!
Indigenous lifestyles and peoples like the American Plains where one could smell the aboriginal villages for miles before you arrived at them, and the people from those villages had to up tents and move every several months because after a while, even they couldn’t stand the smell or find new places to dig holds to put their waste in?
Those indigenous societies that lived in harmony with nature?
Good call Windy. Due to sanitation problems the plains tribe encampments were usually only a few hundred souls and as you wrote they moved every few months to clean sites. The reason Custer was caught out at his last stand was because several encampments had gathered together for a meeting and there were approximately 1250 instead of the usual two or three hundred.
I just turned 67.
Over the years I’ve heard lots of wacky ideas.
PeTA people not wanting others to use insulin produced from animals.
End animal research.
Ban products tested on animals.
Back in the ’60’s there were the anti-(nuke, oil, capitalism, chemicals, God, Christ, etc., etc.) groups flying their own banners. Many sincere in supporting their cause.
CAGW has given them a common banner (or should I say, “lever”?) to achieve their aims.
Those who are sincere need to examine just who has been waving the CAGW banner and for what end?
A couple of starting point:
How many of them are poor?
How many of them are politicians?
How many of them don’t do without what they’d have you do without?
How many of them have gained wealth and/or authority at the expense of your personal freedom?
How many of them think Greta and/or AOC are wise?
Time to get “woke” for real!
The Guardian is a glorified tabloid at this point, minus the entertainment value.
Stick with The Sun, it’s at least got page 3.
My response to such ideas only needs two words, and it can be directed to the author, Hollywood morons, and politicians alike. “YOU FIRST.” Similarly, after Warren Buffett repeatedly telling us he could pay more taxes, I’m still waiting for him to write a $100M check addressed to US Treasury with a “thanks for everything” written on the memo line.
“Our civilisation is underpinned by extractivism, a belief that the Earth is ours to exploit, and the nonsensical idea of infinite growth within a finite territory.”
I read a lot of business news and have never seen anyone claim that there can be infinite growth. We can always give up extractivism and return to the Paleolithic. Who’ll volunteer to go first, Mr. Sutoris? Ale Gore? Bill McKibben? Barack Obama who went from a poor college grad to a very wealthy man- I doubt he’ll want to go back to poverty. Bill Gates? In his book, Gates says we don’t need to go back to poverty, especially himself.