The Forest People

Fascinating article, on a part of the world that gets largely ignored

The kicker is at the bottom:

> The expansion of the ‘Green New Deal’ and the rise of ‘renewable’ industrial technologies may be the death knell for these archaic and peaceful people. Make no mistake, these green initiatives – electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar batteries – these are actively destroying the last remaining strongholds of biodiversity on the planet.

This reads like so much contrarian trollery since time immemorial. Jonas Salk is exploiting children! The abolitionists are actually harming slaves! The vaccines are actually a nefarious controlling plot and the pandemic is a sham!

Basically, the trick is to say people who claim to care about the problem are actually the source of the problem. This isn't to say that cobalt extraction is harmless or that this harm is disconnected from the global desire to use low-carbon mechanisms to power the economy, but I sincerely doubt this citation-free article portrays the situation accurately. For one thing, the Green New Deal is a purely US thing, and it isn't a particular piece of legislation that has stood any chance of being enacted under that name since the Democratic primaries (and not even then, though at least then it had proponents who stood some chance of gaining significant political power), so singling this out as the demon to fear is to single our environmental action in general. Insulating your home!? What about the pigmies! Buying milk in returnable glass bottles!? Oppressor! Going vegetarian to reduce your carbon footprint!? You cannibalistic monster!

I sincerely doubt the WWF is the sole funder of park rangers, or that a desire they might have expressed to remove people from areas of biological diversity is targeted at pigmies rather than, say, illegal logging or mining operations. I cannot believe that "addressing climate change and working to preserve the rain forest are the chief threats to pigmies" is an argument offered in good faith. I'm pretty sure the pigmies would suffer more and faster if the loggers, miners, bushmeat trade, and climate change are allowed to roll along unstopped.

> In particular the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been lobbying to convert the Messok Dja, a particularly biodiverse area of rainforest in the Republic of Congo, in a National Park, devoid of human presence. This aggressive act of clearance is rooted in the idea that a ‘wilderness’ area should not contain any people, thus rendering the original inhabitants of the forests as intruders, invaders and despoilers of ‘Nature’.

There are other examples of this sort of "ecofascism", namely the "Half Earth" proposal wherein half the Earth's landmass should be dedicated to human-free "nature". Of course, no one will willingly give up their home, so this is tantamount to ethnically cleansing those regions--Africa and the Global South--that are geopolitically weak so that the wealthy Western nations can maintain their decadent quality of life.

Remind people that life is not fair, if you don't progress you'll be ran over, and that you should stick with your neighbours instead of betraying them - depending on which side you're on.

These forest people are as good as dead. Their neighbors are murdering them just so they can sell natural resources at bottom prices.

Those who turn the resources into much more valuable stuff couldn't give a flying fuck, but they tell their own countrymen that they do.

It's all rather funny. But such is life.

The point of the article is that the philosophy underpinning eco-conscious modernity, specificially the fundemental separation between "humanity" and "nature," leaves no place for humans who live as a part of nature. In the modern world this concept is almost entirely taken for granted, as most of us spend the vast majority of their lives in artificially constructed environments designed specifically to insulate us to the greatest extent possible from the pulse of nature. This is baked in to both our interpretation of the challenges we face and our proposed solution to these challenges, sometimes with unintended consequences.

This article is an invitation to more closely consider this underpinning philosophy. The tone of your response indicates this maybe isn't so easy and also why it is so important.