Discussion
Javiera Barandiaran is an associate professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara and author of ‘Living Minerals: Nature, Trade and Power in the Race for Lithium’.
I’m listening to her on @PlanetCritical.
I especially appreciate her highlighting how the depletion of minerals for commercial and industrial ends *is* the depletion of the web of life. Flamingos in the high altitude Chilean salt flats provide a particularly clear example of that
https://overcast.fm/+BTFx2EUJlE
@urlyman @PlanetCritical Going carbon free at the expense of poisioning our planet (and indigenous peoples) through aggressive mining is not a good trade off. We need to find a better way.
@btschumy we do. I hope we can collectively see that clearly with conviction before it’s too late
…Javiera puts it another way to push the point home:
the pursuit of industrial economic ‘productivity’ that’s perpetually ravenous for pristine minerals is at the expense of *reproductivity*.
We *have* to find a different mode of being, otherwise the substrate of everything that matters will become so degraded there’ll be nothing upon which we or other creatures co-evolved for this moment can thrive
…Once one integrates Javiera’s framing it’s not hard to see it in everyday life.
e.g. The profiteering from the light fractions of oil to produce plastics which seem now to be in most products and increasingly… in us.
Driving GDP at the expense of habitability: https://mstdn.social/@MBergmann/114148552082891042
And our own reproducibility: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111597000415994656
Utter madness
"Driving GDP at the expense of fertility" is at the heart of "overpopulation is not a problem" argument, isn't it though?
We could all live happy at a modest peak population of 10 billion if only we shared equally. Equally among humans of course, not with the rest of the biosphere.
@jackofalltrades scale tightens the noose. But the mindset of uninhibited transactional extractivism, stripped of any relations with regenerative life, places the noose around our neck
