Ha,I've been to half of that top 10 list
Looks like the Coquihalla will be closed for the winter.
Back on topic, anyone see this? It's worse than I thought.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CWXO21UhmLy/?utm_medium=copy_link
Posted by: syncro
Posted by: tashi
Yes, but IMO primarily due to the fact that their population density has been low relative to the carrying capacity of the land, not due to any unique relationship with the land.
With increased technology comes increased population density and individual impact, regardless of ethnicity or history of “coexistence with nature”.
When I mentioned things being “ruined” I was speaking in the general destruction of life sustaining ecological systems due to human consumption, not the draining of this specific lake. My bad if that didn’t fit the context.
Ahhh - ok, thanks, that makes way more sense.
Agree on the population density/carrying capacity thing to a degree, but at the same time disagree on the rebuttal of coexistence with nature and their relationship with the land. Indigenous culture is rooted in the idea of taking only what you need and making sure you leave more than enough for the future, aka Seven Generations. If you look at fishing and aquaculture systems in the PNW, they were designed to ensure the future health of aquatic species such as salmon. These concepts are their culture, their spirituality and their identity. Indigenous people have a completely different way of looking at the world that we exist in and it is largely antithetical to the Westerm/Capitalist way of doing things. Indigenous peoples in NA got mocked and derided for being backwards, uneducated savages, but they know far more about living with nature than we do and were/are far more advanced than we give them credit for.
Efforts to understand past collapses have had to confront controversy and complications. The controversy involves resistance to the idea that past peoples (some known to be ancestral to peoples currently alive) did things that contributed to their own decline. We are much more conscious of environmental damage now than we were a mere few decades ago. To damage the environment today is considered morally culpable.
Not surprisingly, native Hawaiians and Maoris don’t like palaeontologists showing them that their ancestors exterminated half ot the bird species that had evolved on Hawaii and New Zealand, nor do native Americans like archeologists telling them that the Anasazi deforested parts of the southwestern States. The supposed discoveries by palaeontologists and archeologists sounds to some like just one more racist pretext advanced by whites for dispossessing indigenous people.
Some North American and Australian whites, resentful of government payments and land retribution to indigenous people, do indeed seize on the discoveries to advance that argument today. Not only indigenous peoples, but also some scientists who study them and identify with them, view the recent supposed discoveries as racist lies.
Some of the indigenous peoples and the scientists identifying with them, go to the opposite extreme. They insist that past native peoples were (and their current ancestors still are) gentle and ecologically wise stewards of their environments, intimately understood and respected nature, innocently lived in a virtual garden of Eden and could never have done these bad things. Only those evil modern first world inhabitants are ignorant of Nature, don’t respect the environment and destroy it.
In fact, both extreme sides of this controversy are committing the error of viewing past indigenous peoples as fundamentally different from (whether superior or inferior) modern first world peoples. Managing environmental resources sustainably has always been difficult, ever since Homo Sapiens developed modern inventiveness, efficiency and hunting skills by around 50,000 years ago. Beginning with the first human colonization of the Australian continent around 46,000 years ago and the subsequent and prompt extinction of most of Australia’s large animals, every human colonization of a land mass formerly lacking humans, has been followed by a wave of extinctions of large animals that had evolved without fear of humans and were easy to kill, or else succumbed to human associated habitat changes, introduced species or diseases.
Environmental problems that are hard to manage today would have been even harder to manage in the past. Especially for past non-literate peoples who couldn’t read case studies of societal collapses, ecological damage constituted a tragic, unforeseen, unintended consequence of their best efforts, rather than morally culpable blind or conscious selfishness. The societies that ended up collapsing were (like the Maya) among the most creative and (for a time) advanced and successful of their times, rather than stupid and primitive.
Past peoples were neither ignorant bad managers who deserve to be dispossessed, nor all knowing conscientious environmentalists who solved problems that we can’t solve today. They were people like us, facing problems broadly similar to those we face now, albeit on a vastly different scale.
Above all, it is wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of indigenous peoples in order to justify treating them differently. In many or most cases, historians and archeologists have been uncovering overwhelming evidence that this assumption (about Eden like environmentalism) is wrong.
Jared Diamond
easter islands. nuff said.
https://fvcurrent.com/article/fraser-valley-unacceptable-dikes/
A long-ish artical about how many dikes in the lower mainland were or are inadequate & ready to fail
Posted by: XXX_er
https://fvcurrent.com/article/fraser-valley-unacceptable-dikes/
A long-ish artical about how many dikes in the lower mainland were or are inadequate & ready to fail
Tyler Olsen of the Fraser Valley Current has been just killing it with his coverage of the flood. He's doing a way better job of actually explaining things than just running around saying the sky is falling like the major local news outlets.
Seems that Sumas WA was affected just as much.
Posted by: impressedbyyourwokeness
...
What is fallacy of composition for $1000 Alex?
Hwy 8 is pretty much gone, https://twitter.com/bchydro/status/1462898060862758918
Last edited by: PaulB on Nov. 23, 2021, 9:03 p.m., edited 1 time in total.
Phoof. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/wyntk-bc-floods-nov-23-1.6259055
Be safe everyone
Posted by: impressedbyyourwokeness
Excellent post, thank you for this.
Lots more on the way. Freezing level not helping after snowfall this last week.
https://twitter.com/50ShadesofVan/status/1463318608134742016?s=20
Posted by: syncro
Posted by: impressedbyyourwokeness
...
What is fallacy of composition for $1000 Alex?
A better post, thank you.
Rambling egregious bullshit about island's indigenous populations as first post. Fuck me.
Unsurprisingly, reality is that like any indigenous population ancient Maori and Hawaiians had sustainability as the core tenet of their belief system. Under the kapu system if you broke sustainability laws they put your head on the kapu stone and smashed your brains in right then and there. That old time environmentalism.
_______________________________
Shaping up to be a hell of year for weather eh. If your town didn't burn up this summer, it'll wash away this winter. ☹️
Posted by: impressedbyyourwokeness
Witness teh buffalos.....
Posted by: tashi
Posted by: impressedbyyourwokeness
Excellent post, thank you for this.
Despite there being some truth in that post, it is not excellent. One of the examples cited is flawed/wrong and the statement as a whole draws the reader to an incorrect conclusion. The author, Diamond, has drawn a significant amount of criticism for his work over the years even though there is acknowledgement that some of his work is ok. Like anything though, one needs to consider the entire body of evidence before drawing any conclusions. From what I've read it seems Diamond has some gaps in his understanding when it comes to Indigenous cultures.
Instead of sidetracking this thread any further, I'm going to give a full response to that post in the Indigenous thread as that is a much better place to discuss it. Although we've had some disagreements lately, I seriously hope you'll consider taking the time to read my response. This is a very important topic that has implications that go beyond addressing injustices Indigenous peoples in Canada (and elsewhere) have face. I know I acted like an ass with some of my comments in the covid thread, but I was in a shit place and did not take kindly at all to my words being misconstrued so badly by some people.
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