What is Reddit's opinion of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England?

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Aw man, I love the Chicago flag. It's one of the few municipal flags you see used everywhere locally by the city government, businesses, and residents. And it gets adapted by locals for their own designs (it's easy to pair alongside other things). Our state flag to me just feels like "Oh, there's the district court."

Boston's flag -- I love the colors. It's a bit busy with all the writing and sketched skyline, but still decent. I think we could drop the writing and sketch, leave it as a gold and white circle on sky blue, and have something distinctive and lovely.

I'm about 80% negative on the Indian. I'm not sure I'd have said that before reading Changes in the Land https://www.amazon.com/Changes-Land-Indians-Colonists-Ecology/dp/0809016346. But after learning how methodically terrible Europeans were to natives, the Indian just feels like throwing a bone. That's obviously complex and not universally felt.

This book helped me get rid of some myths relating to native Americans and their relationship with the forests. Helped me understand the history a bit better, and also gave me ideas for fictional woodland cultures in my own story.

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England https://www.amazon.com/dp/0809016346/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fab_mrJFFbTZ10TTR

https://www.amazon.com/Changes-Land-Indians-Colonists-Ecology/dp/0809016346

I've heard that as well, and it makes sense. I'm not like a historian or anything, but apparently Eli Whitney's thinking was that the cotton gin would replace all the slave labor needed to separate the cotton fiber from the cotton seeds. But since the majority of slave labor was dedicated to picking cotton out in the fields, all it did was encourage people to plant more cotton and buy more slaves.

Another interesting thing about cotton is that it really sucks the nutrients out of the soil, and it was more delicate than other crops (like wheat or barley). So planting cotton was sort of a gamble - you could take out loans, buy more land/slaves, and make tons of money, but conversely your crop could come up short, and you'd lose most of your wealth trying to settle with creditors. And since cotton sucked the nutrients out of the soil so quickly, anyone who wasn't rotating their crops was turning rich soil into poor soil over the span of a few years.

Land speculation was also a big thing - people buying up large quantities of land with the assumption that they could farm it, or that they could build a town with manufacturing and refining capabilities for surrounding farmers. If the land turned out to be crummy, or if people just didn't chose to move there and plant roots, you could go bankrupt fairly quickly.

I learned part of this by reading biographies of writers during the 19th century, including the South Carolinian Susan Petigru (and her much more famous father, James Petigru). But a really awesome resource to learn more about the way land and agriculture helped to shape American society is Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon. Here's a link to it on Amazon: link. It focuses on 17th and 18th century New England, but it's a really cool look at how our natural landscape evolved over the course of our country's early history.

P2

There are other problems with production-for-profit economies, according to ecosocialists. The system can lead to self-destructive rushes to produce commodities. For example, in a system where we produce for profit, we might build more houses than we have homeless people (as is currently the state of things in the US) or have other boom-bust cycles of overproduction as things remain profitable for various producers up until their collective production leads to a price crash. Presumably, say socialists, if industrial mass society produced for the use-value of the homes, some social planning would avoid the irrational boom-bust action. In addition to resource-wasting overconsumption, there's a problem of overharvesting to feed insatiable far-away markets. The Iroquois in the northeast hunted the beaver almost to extinction in much of its range there. A bit of this had to do with new guns, but much of it was with bows. What changed wasn't the technology so much as the motive. Where before a hunter had no reason to kill more than he needed, he could now kill a whole bunch and trade them for money or wampum that he could spend on things he did need- and the possibility of those demands could be endless. Suddenly, an Iroquois had a reason to go out and kill tons and tons of beavers- and by and large, they did (the book "Changes In the Land" by William Cronon is a fascinating exploration of the development of this and other trends during the settlement of New England. I very much suggest reading it for anyone interested in environmental history or political ecology).

Also, if you produce for exchange values, you can end up with a situation where things are being produced that have exchange-value but little or no use-value. Consider diamonds. There was little popular demand (and little use-value for most people) for diamonds before DeBeers started a campaign to make them the centerpiece of every wedding (restricting supply was also a masterful stroke on their part). Because firms in a market economy have to swim or sink, and keep selling, there is an incentive for them to create new demands and desires where none existed before, because this makes more consumers. It is not good for the economy for you to be satisfied with what you have. It's very much not good for the economy for you to say, "Well, my material needs are basically met, so I'm going to focus on things like friendship, belonging, and personal fulfillment, that I can't really just buy in a store". Companies would rather you believe that those needs can be fulfilled with more consumption, because if you're satisfied, you stop buying- and if you stop buying, investors stop making money, people get laid off, and the economy crashes. Remember that in a market economy, it is more 'rational' to convince a person with disposable income that they need to buy their kid a new cheap gizmo, then manufacture and sell that gizmo to them, than it is to produce bread to feed hungry people who can't pay- the hungry people have a demand but no money to make their demand bear any exchange value, and so don't get to eat, but the person with money has to be squeezed for every last consumer dollar to create more niches for investors. They have to be convinced that they want more things. This is basically what advertising is- a market economy creates a demand for demand. Advertising largely exists to convince you that a diamond is a prerequisite to love, Coca-Cola is a prerequisite to a good time, a watch is a prerequisite to the respect of your peers, a fast car is a prerequisite to the love of a beautiful woman, etc etc. Some of this might even be true, if the advertisers succeed in shaping cultural norms to make it true. In this way, a production for profit economy, because it has to keep selling, profiting, and growing, creates and propagates a consumer culture. The impact of this on the environment, of course, is that more and more natural resources have to be sucked up to feed that consumption and more pollution and waste is churned out. You have an economic system that has to keep growing forever, on a planet with finite resources.

All of this amounts to an 'internal contradiction' in capitalism, according to ecosocialists. In Marxism, which uses dialectical analysis, an internal contradiction is when conflicting tendencies and trends in a system lead to the self-destruction of that system. For example, the rising role of the merchant class that would eventually usurp power from the hereditary gentry was an internal contradiction in feudalism. In capitalism, the 'internal contradiction' laid out by Marx is the conflict between capital and labor (which he observed during his life and which has, in part due to his own writings, raged on since, at times somewhat suppressed by reforms, as environmental degradation can be somewhat suppressed by reforms). Some ecosocialists argue that because capitalism relies on endless growth, is ridden with market failures, encloses commons and commodifies people and the land, creates a consumer culture, and concentrates political power in the hands of an upper class that often resists attempts to fix the environmental problems, that environmental degradation (sometimes called the 'metabolic rift') is a second internal contradiction- that capitalism will undermine the base of ecological resources it needs to survive (and, unfortunately, the same base that all industrial society would need to survive, as well as non-industrial society). The scholar James O'Connor is the main theorist of the 'second contradiction', but I think it makes a great capstone to ecosocialist theory. This theory echoes some (rather under-developed but very important) observations of Marx (who is often painted as an environment-blind industrial development fanatic) regarding of industrial capitalist agriculture on soil fertility. Marx wrote on the subject, and in doing so began to make inroads in critiquing the ecological impact of capitalism, many decades before his time. This work has mostly been fleshed out by later Marxists, though.

TL;DR- Socialists believe that capitalism has enclosed the commons into a market system that is prone to market failures because it does not consider the common ecosystem or the full values and costs of ecological goods. They believe that much of this irrationality comes from the fact that markets produce for exchange-value rather than use-value. They note that markets need endless growth and consumption to remain healthy, and that capitalist societies spread capitalism globally to feed their need for resources and new markets, and that the environmental degradation of this global industrial market system will undermine capitalism and civilization itself.

Section 2: Who Are The Ecosocialists?

Some prominent ecosocialist theorists include John Bellamy Foster, Michael Löwy, Derek Wall, Joel Kovel, and others. There are some groups that promote ecosocialism or similar ideas, including Ecosocialist Network International, the CNS Journal, Ecosocialist Horizons, and the various groups of the Trotskyist Fourth International, which recently embraced eco-socialism. It should be noted that generally speaking, ecosocialism is mostly embraced by Trotskyists and other non-Stalinist Marxists, and ecosocialist theorists are almost universally anti-Stalinist. Most non-Stalinist socialist groups embrace some degree of environmental concern even if they are not ecosocialist.

In addition to these groups, there are some major green party organizations that have formed 'red-green' alliances with social democratic and socialist parties, particularly in Europe. These include coalitions in France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and other nations. In addition, some European political parties have outright merged into green-left parties, like GroenLinks in the Netherlands. In the US, a small red-green political alliance does exist between the Green Party and the International Socialist Organization (a Cliffite Trotskyist activist organization that is the largest socialist group in the US). ISO frequently endorses Green Party candidates and the two groups recently co-sponsored an ecosocialist conference. There is also a red-green alliance between the Industrial Workers of the World and Earth First!- though neither of these groups involve themselves in electoral politics, both preferring direct action. Red-green alliances should not be confused with 'blue-green' alliances in the US and elsewhere, which are alliances between reformist environmental and labor groups.

Some writers who are not 'eco-socialists' per se but do take a social-ecological view on environmental issues are Vandana Shiva (an Indian anti-globalization and anti-privatization writer and proponent of 'Earth Democracy'), Murray Bookchin (who formulated the concept and political program of 'social ecology'), Winona LaDuke (an Anishinaabe indigenous environmental justice activist), and Ariel Salleh (a social ecofeminist)- these are, of course, just a few, and there are many, many more. The social ecofeminist (as opposed to cultural/mystic ecofeminist), indigenous rights, environmental justice, and anti/alter-globalization movements often incorporate views from the social-ecological perspective. Earth First! is a group that often takes a social ecology view along with their deep ecology.

TL;DR- The ecosocialist theorists are largely academics from the first world who identify with Trotskyism and other non-Stalinist forms of socialism, though other thinkers who embrace similar views come from all over the world and many anti/alter-globalization and indigenous rights groups share many of the ecosocialist perspectives on globalization and capitalism. In addition to eco-socialists, there are some political alliances of less-green socialists and less-socialist environmentalists.

Edit: Regarding the role of production for profit in creating a consumer culture: This (as well as the concept of 'green consumption' and its associated greenwashing and consumer culture) should be understood in the light of other developments, including the rise of the mass industrial society over previous close-knit village societies, and the processes of alienation and commodity fetishism.