19th February 2021 | Climate | Birds
The coming likelihood of climate violence; birds are smarter than we think
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: The prospect of climate violence
Climate change is a form of slow violence—an idea invented by Rob Nixon to describe forms of violence, especially climate change, where the outcome is real and damaging, but the process of getting there is so slow that no-one notices.
As the climate emergency becomes more pressing, there’s a live discussion going on as to what forms of violence are appropriate to slow down climate change by preventing the continuing transporting and burning of carbon. It’s one of the themes in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry of the Future, published at the end of last year, and also the main subject of Andreas Malm’s short book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
Kim Stanley Robinson talks about the book (and the issue) in a rewarding—if extended—podcast conversation with Ezra Klein, one of the last Klein did before moving on from Vox. (1 hr 38) Klein describes The Ministry of the Future as “the most important” book he read in 2020:
Robinson imagines a world wracked by climate catastrophe. Some nations begin unilateral geoengineering. Eco-violence arises as people begin to experience unchecked climate change as an act of war against them, and they respond in kind, using new technologies to hunt those they blame.
Ther’s an extract from Malm’s book on the Verso blog:
[T]o have ‘a reasonable chance’ of respecting the limit, human societies would have to institute ‘a global prohibition of all new CO2-emitting devices’
But this is unlikely under current business conditions.
So here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed. ‘We are the investment risk’, runs a slogan from Ende Gelände… ‘If we can’t get a serious carbon tax from a corrupted Congress, we can impose a de facto one with our bodies,’ Bill McKibben has argued.
Whatever you think about the merits of this argument, it isn’t going to go away.
Related event: Kim Stanley Robinson talks with Jane Davidson, the author of #futuregen, about ‘building the ministry of the future’ at a webinar on March 4th. The event is moderated by Cat Tully of SOIF and supported by the publisher Chelsea Green. Details here.
#2: Birds are smarter than we think
(Image of waders in flight by Mdk572: CC BY-SA 3.0)
Birds get a bad press. As Robert O. Paxton notes at the start of this long piece in the New York Review of Books (free, but registration is required):
“Birdbrain,” “silly goose,” “dumb as a dodo”—epithets like these reflect a widespread popular opinion that birds (except perhaps owls) aren’t very bright
The article is a review of several recent books on birds, and notably on bird cognition. It turns out they’re smarter than we think.
Today, [Jennifer] Ackerman reports, research into bird behavior has swung strongly toward exploring conscious thought processes… Avian brain structures and neural connections are organized differently from ours, and birds’ experiences must also differ, she writes, though they may be rich in their own way.
Birds’ sensory organs, too, work differently from those of humans. Inevitably, birds inhabit a world of sights, sounds, and smells unlike ours. Bird vision exceeds ours in several respects: its power at a distance, its speed in resolving detail, its lateral breadth (in most cases), and its perception of a broader spectrum of colors. Notably, birds can see ultraviolet light…
Memory is another competence in which some birds surpass humans. The champions here are jays and other members of the crow family that store food for later use. Clark’s nutcracker, a member of the crow family native to the mountains of the western United States, can hide over 30,000 seeds and recall their precise locations many months later.
And all of this is without getting onto the complexities of birdsong, nest building, or of migration, which the piece also discusses at length. There’s a lot in this article, and it adds up to a sense of humility about the limits of human experience, and some admiration for the sophistication of other species.
(H/t The Browser)
#j2t#035
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