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in title, tags, annotations or urlBattling 'biopiracy', scientists catalog the Amazon's genetic wealth | PLACE - 0 views
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In a bid to stop "biopiracy", researchers are building a giant database to catalog genetic material from the world's largest rainforest. From the rubber in car tires, to cosmetics and medicines, genetic material contained in the Amazon region has contributed to discoveries worth billions of dollars. Communities living there, however, have rarely benefited from the genetic wealth extracted from their land - a form of theft that legal experts call "biopiracy".
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"At the heart of the conservation debate is: how do you find a way for a person in the forest to get more cash in their hand right now from preserving that habitat rather than cutting it down?"
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compelling investors to pay royalties
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'Everything we've heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong' - researchers | PLACE - 0 views
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Widely accepted numbers on how much of the world's population lives in cities are incorrect, with major implications for development aid and the provision of public services for billions of people, researchers say
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Using a definition made possible by advances in geospatial technology that uses high-resolution satellite images to determine the number of people living in a given area, they estimate 84 percent of the world's population, or almost 6.4 billion people, live in urban areas.
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Asia and Africa, which are routinely cited as majority-rural continents that are rapidly urbanizing, turn out to be well ahead of figures in the U.N.'s latest estimates.
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Beware thought leaders and the wealthy purveying answers to our social ills - 0 views
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“Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it,” Wilde wrote, “so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”
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“For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is — above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners,”
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to question the system that allows people to make money in predatory ways and compensate for that through philanthropy. “Instead of asking them to make their firms less monopolistic, greedy or harmful to children, it urged them to create side hustles to ‘change the world,’ ”
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The Military-Industrial Jobs Scam | naked capitalism - 0 views
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despite defense contractor claims to the contrary, increased military spending has been accompanied by job losses in the US
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the contracting fraud results in US taxpayers paying way more than it would have cost for US personnel to do the work…with the added insult that the tasks were performed by locals for a pittance
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the Trump administration has stopped at nothing to push the argument that job creation is justification enough for supporting weapons manufacturers to the hilt. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he was already insisting that military spending was a great jobs creator. He’s only doubled down on this assertion during his presidency. Recently, overriding congressional objections, he even declared a national “emergency” to force through part of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that he had once claimed would create more than a million jobs. While this claim has been thoroughly debunked, the most essential part of his argument — that more money flowing to defense contractors will create significant numbers of new jobs — is considered truth personified by many in the defense industry
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First rule of fight club: power concedes nothing without a struggle - The Correspondent - 0 views
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Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, but this India-born academic is also so much more. A leading left-wing thinker, and public commentator in the United Kingdom, and a force to be reckoned with on Twitter, Gopal has spent years digging through old books and dusty papers in libraries and archives all over the world to produce Insurgent Empire: Anti-colonial Resistance and British Dissent, a book that, page after page, takes apart the idea that Britain “granted” freedom to the people enslaved by its empire. In it, she looks deeply into the historical record for examples of how people living under the most extreme forms of domination imagined freedom for themselves, how they fought for it, and how they won.
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Immigration, race relations, global hotspots like Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq, and concepts such as free trade and foreign aid all emerged out of the crucible of empire. And they continue to shape so many lives both within and outside Britain.
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As long as we live with capitalism as a global economic system, we haven’t left the age of empire behind us. Colonialism’s first and most important driving force was the search for profit, resources, and markets. That dynamic remains with us.
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Decolonizing IR: A Response to Gilley | Duck of Minerva - 0 views
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Gilley’s piece makes three inter-related claims; all of these are supported only sloppily by a bad reading of evidence and scholarly literature: that colonialism was beneficial, that elites often supported it, and that we need a return to colonialism today
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a substantial social science literature has already developed to show the effects of colonialism. While this literature is too voluminous to review here, some findings are significant to point out as illustrations: Inter-communal violence is highly correlated with colonial legacies. Colonialism has an impact on the psychophysical health of colonized peoples and their dependency on the state. Colonialism has annihilated entire populations. One example: 84% decline in population of indigenous peoples of Australia between British colonization and 1900.
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Gilley also brings up some anecdotal examples of local elites supporting colonialism in colonized areas. His lack of a nuanced discussion here is due largely to the fact that he does not engage with the post-colonial social science literature on dependency, which has long argued that many elites had economic interests in common with colonizers, often to the detriment of the colonized peoples they represent. André Gunder Frank called this the “comprador class,” and this group is implicated directly in the perpetuation of underdevelopment in the wake of post-colonialism. They are not a piece of contrary evidence about colonialism’s effects. They are effects. And bad ones.
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America's War Exceptionalism Is Killing the Planet | naked capitalism - 0 views
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War, in other words, is our new normal, America’s default position on global affairs, and peace, some ancient, long-faded dream. And when your default position is war, whether against the Taliban, ISIS, “terror” more generally, or possibly even Iran or Russia or China, is it any surprise that war is what you get? When you garrison the world with an unprecedented 800 or so military bases, when you configure your armed forces for what’s called power projection, when you divide the globe — the total planet — into areas of dominance (with acronyms like CENTCOM, AFRICOM, and SOUTHCOM) commanded by four-star generals and admirals, when you spend more on your military than the next seven countries combined, when you insist on modernizing a nuclear arsenal (to the tune of perhaps $1.7 trillion) already quite capable of ending all life on this and several other planets, what can you expect but a reality of endless war?
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A partial list of war’s many uses might go something like this: war is profitable, most notably for America’s vast military-industrial complex; war is sold as being necessary for America’s safety, especially to prevent terrorist attacks; and for many Americans, war is seen as a measure of national fitness and worthiness, a reminder that “freedom isn’t free.” In our politics today, it’s far better to be seen as strong and wrong than meek and right.
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never-ending war weakens democracy while strengthening authoritarian tendencies in politics and society. In an age of gaping inequality, using up the country’s resources in such profligate and destructive ways offers a striking exercise in consumption that profits the few at the expense of the many.
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Africa: How Seriously Is Germany Taking Its Colonial History? - allAfrica.com - 0 views
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German colonial traces are plain to see everywhere for Naita Hishoono from Namibia. A walk through the country's capital, Windhoek, reveals German street names, German shops, an imposing church built during German colonial days. And under the surface lurks something more sinister and haunting: the genocide of Herero and Nama people by German colonial troops. It's a dark chapter every Namibian knows, but it's a topic that barely sees daylight in Germany.
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in Germany, you would completely forget that Germany had colonies
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It took more than 100 years for a German government to officially acknowledge the country's colonial actions in Africa. In 2018, the ruling coalition of the conservative CDU/CSU block and Social Democrat (SPD) parties agreed to take a fresh look the Germany's colonial past.
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Decolonizing ecology - Briarpatch Magazine - 0 views
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The traditional fish weir on the Koeye River. Photo by Bryant DeRoy. Decolonizing ecology by Jade Delisle Jul 2, 2020 18 min read Share Twitter
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At a time when Indigenous land defenders are fighting for cultural resurgence and the application of traditional knowledge to combat the climate crisis, they are often cast as the monolithic, mystical, degrowth opposition to the secular modernity of white leftists and their fully automated socialist future. In reality, solutions to ecological and social problems that were historically or are presently used by non-European cultures are compatible with modern technology, often in consensus with cutting-edge scientific findings, and more necessary than ever.
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Indigenous Peoples now make up less than five per cent of the world’s population, but the lands they maintain hold 80 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity. Protecting and restoring Indigenous Peoples’ lands is the fastest and most readily available way to sequester carbon and mitigate the impacts of climate change, a result of the optimally efficient relationships between fungi, plants, animals, and people in a given bioregion, which Indigenous cultures have coded into their knowledge systems over millennia of human-environmental interactions.
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Adam Tooze on World Order, Then and Now - ChinaTalk - 0 views
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if you're dealing with a bunch of herbivorous Social Democrats, they'll take you in one direction and you'll end up with a welfare state and full employment, but if their same knowledge is in the hands of a group of nationalist militarists, what you've really provided them with is the blueprint for highly efficient mobilization of a military economy in times of peace. So deep in the heart of neoliberal thought and conservative thinking about the modern state and its potential lies a fear of that possibility.
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China’s not the Soviet Union, China's not fascist Italy, China's not Nazi Germany. The growth of China is a phenomenon that dwarfs all of those previous developments and has to be understood on the timeframe that was laid out for us by the economic data of somebody like Angus Maddison, who shows us global GDP all the way back to the birth of Christ. All the way through the beginning of the 19th century, the Asian economies actually dominate once you've adjusted GDP by purchasing power parity and so on.
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It's tempting to say, is there anyone in the United States that could play the role of the British elite after World War One? But America's position of dominance was vastly greater than that ever by enjoyed the British so the psychological challenge of accepting this transition is far greater. And, of course, in key respects America remains an absolutely dominant player, most notably with regard its hard power, its weapons, but also in certain respects with regard to its financial centrality.
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How Brexit marks the end of the British story | Latest Brexit news and top stories | The New European - 0 views
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The pride and pomp of the British in the heyday of empire did not last long. Two world wars impoverished the country and destroyed its empire. (Our 'special relationship' with the USA consisted in getting desperately needed aid during the Second World War in return for a promise to dismantle the empire. Even if the UK could have maintained the empire, which it could not, as proved by Suez, it in effect traded the empire for survival in the 1940s.)
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Entry to the EEC/EU saved the country's economy and saw it flourish, and offered a new and significant role as one of the big three states in one of the big three blocs in the emerging new post-Cold War world, alongside the USA and China
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British self-congratulation in the first decade of the 21st century had given a group of people in our political order - a fifth column from the past - the feeling that now was the time to reassert what they mythologised as the spirit of Britain in Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee
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Amitav Ghosh: What the West doesn′t get about the climate crisis | Global Ideas | DW | 06.11.2019 - 0 views
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The Great Derangement, Ghosh's book-length essay from 2016, subtitled Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
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Western literature has, in the past 200 years or so, become trapped in a world where human comedy and tragedy is separated from nature.
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Western novels, he believes, are mainly bound by two constraints: plausibility and human agency. Could this happen? And can our hero fight his way through his moral adventure? In some ways, his new novel, Gun Island, full of freak typhoons and unlikely coincidences, is a conscious attempt to break free of those conventions, and so finds room to use climate change as a backdrop.
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The Great Patriotic War on Education - Systematic Organization - 0 views
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For anyone who keeps abreast of politics in places like Japan, South Korea, or Turkey, the spectacle of a nationalist movement attacking textbooks and curricula for being insufficiently patriotic is a familiar one. The current strife gives experts in, say, Japanese history curricula a chance for their own “what would you say if you saw this in another country” moment.
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unlike those countries the United States doesn’t have a national educational curriculum, since we’ve decided in our infinite wisdom to allow states and localities to decide what our children in public schools will learn. This is an oddity, given that educational curricula in most countries have been founded specifically to help nationalize disparate communities—to turn peasants into Frenchmen, or serfs into the new Soviet man, for instance
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even before the dreaded Texas school textbook adoption committee used its market power to enforce a degree of uniformity in historiography that we basically had a form of national consensus about what should be taught: a blandly consensual, Whiggish, sunnily white-apologist curriculum in which all good things (like democracy, capitalism, and the interests of big business) went together and all bad things (like labor unions, radical activists, and political divisions) could be ignored
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End voluntourism and the white saviour industrial complex - The Mail & Guardian - 0 views
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The existence of these missionaries might not concern an unconscious mind, after all, we are socialised to respect religion, to need religion as it was deftly packaged and violently honed into our psyche by colonialists. But when one asks the question: “What does Africa need to thrive in the 21st century?”, voluntourism should not be the answers.
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At her NGO, Serving His Children, Bach, relying only on her missionary righteousness of her calling to save black babies, specifically black babies in Africa, would be involved in what was effectively a medical experiment in which at least 105 children died in Eastern Uganda.
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the decolonisation movement that is gaining momentum on the heels of Black Lives Matter is long overdue
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The Empire of All Maladies | Nick Estes - 0 views
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For the Lenape historian Jack D. Forbes, it was not so much the Indigenous who were suffering affliction, but the Europeans who had been infected with what he called wétiko, the Algonquin word for a mind-virus associated with cannibalism. The overriding characteristic of wétiko, as he recounted in his 1979 book Columbus and Other Cannibals, is that “he consumes other human beings” for profit. This concept is nearly synonymous with the European psychosis of domination and plunder.
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When Lewis and Clark led a military expedition upriver, Missouri River Indigenous nations had already experienced several rounds of smallpox epidemics as a result of increased contact with British and French trappers. But none were as apocalyptic as the smallpox epidemic of 1837, by which time the United States dominated the river trade. U.S. trading led to the utter annihilation of furbearing animals through over-hunting, the ecological destruction of the river, and its increased militarization (the U.S. presence heightened conflict between Indigenous nations engaged in trading). Under these adverse conditions, the Mandans were nearly wiped out by smallpox. From 1780 to 1870, Indigenous river nations experienced an 80 percent population decline, with some experiencing rates higher than 90 percent, mostly due to disease.
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The forced diet proved to be one of the deadliest diseases imposed by colonizers
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By Ignoring Racism and Colonialism, Mainstream International Relations Theory Fails to Understand the Modern State System - 0 views
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Beginning with its creation as an academic discipline, mainstream IR has not been entirely honest about its ideological or geographic origins. It has largely erased non-Western history and thought from its canon and has failed to address the central role of colonialism and decolonization in creating the contemporary international order.
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the international processes through which race and racial differences have also been produced.
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The history of the modern state system, as it is often taught, focuses on the impact of the American and French Revolutions in the late 18th century. However, this is precisely the period of colonial expansion and settlement that saw some European states consolidate their domination over other parts of the world and over their populations, who came to be represented in racialized terms.
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Figures of Speech - Yale Daily News - 0 views
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Beyond any specific distortion, the anti-PC writers’ most tendentious claim was that only their opponents were political and self-interested, while they stood for capital-T Truth and what Kimball called “the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.” “The people out there making arguments about being scrappy underdogs trying to speak against the establishment — there’s almost always millions and millions of dollars behind them,” said Mary Anne Franks, a legal scholar at the University of Miami who studies free speech and discrimination and whose latest book, “The Cult of the Constitution,” studies campus speech controversies. “These people try to present their views as intellectually untainted, when in reality we’re talking about corporate sponsorship.”
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By the mid-1990s, the belief that college campuses were overrun by a liberal thought police had leached into the American mainstream, thoroughly scrubbed of its highly partisan and deep-pocketed origins
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For conservative individuals and organizations on the front lines of the campus culture wars, the post-9/11 national atmosphere of civilizational besiegement and revanchist bloodlust provided welcome ammunition. One such group was the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA, an organization founded in the 1990s by future Second Lady Lynne Cheney on explicit opposition to “political correctness.” Two months after the attacks, the organization issued a report titled “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.” The report called university faculty a “weak link in America’s response” to 9/11 and listed the names, institutional affiliations and anti-war statements of dozens of professors, which included lines such as “build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls,” “break the cycle of violence” and “there is a lot of skepticism about the administration’s policy of going to war.”
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The Annihilation of Florida: An Overlooked National Tragedy ❧ Current Affairs - 0 views
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since development in Florida began in earnest in the 20th century, state leaders and developers have chosen a cruel, unsustainable legacy involving the nonstop slaughter of wildlife and the destruction of habitat, eliminating some of the most unique flora and fauna in the world.
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Consider this: several football fields-worth of forest and other valuable habitat is cleared per day2 in Florida, with 26 percent of our canopy cut down in the past twenty years. According to one study, an average of 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation worldwide.
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Prodevelopment flacks like to pull out the estimates of the millions who will continue to flock to Florida by 2030 or 2040 to justify rampant development. Even some Florida economists ignore the effects of the climate crisis in their projects for 2049, expecting continued economic growth. but these estimates are just a grim joke, and some of those regurgitating them know that. By 2050, the world likely will be grappling with the fallout from 1.5- to 2-degree temperature rise and it’s unlikely people will be flocking to a state quickly dissolving around all of its edges.
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