In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

Billy wrote:
In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

Billy wrote:
In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

Bill who putters wrote:
In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

wrote:
Billy writes:

An urgent transformation to 'eco-farming' is the only way to
end hunger and face the challenges of climate change and rural
poverty, said Olivier De Schutter, U.N. Special Rapporteur

That statement is ridiculous.

No amount of additional production will "end" hunger.
Not with an ever increasing demand for food.

All of these political types are afraid to admit the truth.
There are limits.

The shade of Malthus wails over Africa, nobody listens.

David

Read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and
note the down under issues.

I have. I do. Oz is not in the high birthrate and starving group
(far from it). I don't see the connection with Malthus and Africa.
What do you think it is?

David

The carnage left by colonization.

What is your point? What carnage was left in Australia?

D

We may be talking past each other at this point. The carnage to the
land and the indigenous inhabitants. I don't know their quality of
life is, but I suspect that it would be better, for them and the
land, if auslanders hadn't come there, or here. The destruction of
cultures in Africa by Europeans in quest of treasure (King Leopold's
Mine).

Agreed the land has been mistreated, we are learning better now. I am
mildly optimistic that agricultural land management will improve
considerably in the next generation as many farmers are trying quite hard to
do better in the long term. I am not so sanguine about the common practice
of ruining good land (which is in short supply) to build McMansions on it or
to extract minerals from it. You can say that this was a consequence of
colonialism but I think ignorance is simpler and more apt.

The aboriginals' quality of life is not good, what it would have been like
if they had been left alone in a time warp we can only speculate on.

Here it is much more clear cut. The Europeans had the weapons, but the
native had the culture. Sadly, the weapons won.

http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Histor...esent/dp/00605
28370

A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn

p20-21

20 A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
In the villages of the Iroquois, land was owned in common and worked in
common. Hunting was done together, and the catch was divided among the
members of the village. Houses were considered common property and were
shared by several families. The concept of private ownership of land and
homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest who
encountered them in the 1650s wrote: "No poorhouses are needed among
them, because they are neither mendicants nor paupers. . . . Their
kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what
they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common."

Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were
matrilineal. That is, the family line went down through the female
members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons who married then
joined their wives' families. Each extended family lived in a "long
house." When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband's things
outside the door.

Families were grouped in clans, and a dozen or more clans might make up
a village. The senior women in the village named the men who represented
the clans at village and tribal councils. They also named the forty-nine
chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of
the Iroquois. The women attended clan meetings, stood behind the circle
of men who spoke and voted, and removed the men from office if they
strayed too far from the wishes of the women.

The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs
while the men were always hunting or fishing. And since they supplied
the moccasins and food for warring expeditions, they had some control
over military matters. As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of
early America, Red, White, and Black: "Thus power was shared between the
sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination
in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society."

Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritage of
their people and solidarity with the tribe, were also taught to be
independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. They were taught
equality in status and the sharing of possessions. The Iroquois did not
use harsh punishment on children; they did not insist on early weaning
or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn
self-care.

All of this was in sharp contrast to European values as brought over by
the first colonists, a society of rich and poor, controlled by priests,
by governors, by male heads of families. For example, the pastor of the
Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners how to deal
with their children: "And surely there is in all children ... a
stubbornness, and stoutness ot mind arising from natural pride, which
must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the
foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness,
other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon." Gary Nash describes
Iroquois cultu
No laws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or
courts or jails‹the apparatus ofaudiority in European societies‹were to
be found in the northeast woodlands prior to European arrival. Yet
boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly set. Though priding
themselves on the autonomous individual, the Iroquois maintained a
strict sense of right and wrong. . . . He who stole another's food or
acted invalourously in war was "shamed" by his people and ostracized
from their company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated
to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himsell.
Not only the Iroquois but other Indian tribes behaved the same way. In
1635, Maryland Indians responded to the governor's demand that if any of
them killed an Englishman, the guilty one should be delivered up for
punishment according to English law. The Indians said:
It is the manner amongst us Indians, that if any such accident happen,
wee doe redeeme the life of a man that is so slaine, widi a 100 armes
length of Beades and since that you are heere strangers, and come into
our Countrey, you should rather conform yourselves to die Customes of
our Countrey, than impose yours upon us. ...
So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty
wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely
populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human
relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations
among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out
than perhaps any place in the world.

They were people without a written language, but with their own laws,
their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral
vocabulary more complex than Europe's, accompanied by song, dance, and
ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of
personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion
and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature.

-----

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith
http://www.amazon.com/Vegetarian-Myt...ability/dp/160
4860804/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1297274630&sr=1-1
(Available at better libraries near you)


Currently, the deer are overrunning the northeast's forests, eating
the saplings out of existence. In fifty years there may not be a forest,
and that will mean an end to the deer as well. That's because, through
human interference, there aren't enough predators, and to survive, the
deer need their predators. Pollan explains, "[H]owever it may appear
to those of us living at such a remove from the natural world, preda-
tion is not a matter of morality or of politics; it, too, is a matter of
symbiosis... Predation is deeply woven into the fabric of nature, and

28 The Vegetarian Myth

that fabric would quickly unravel if it somehow ended, if humans
managed to 'do something about it.'"23 In the case of the northeastern
United States, humans have managed to do something about it, and
without wolves and mountain lions, without predation, the results are
getting grimmer by the year. The deer population has exploded past
any possibility of sustainability. Writes Ted Williams:

In a 10-year experiment, the US Forest Service found that
at more than 20 deer per square mile you lose your eastern
wood pewees, indigo buntings, least flycatchers, yellow-billed
cuckoos, and cerulean warblers .... At 38 deer per square mile
you lose eastern phoebes and even robins. Ground nesters like
ovenbirds, grouse, woodcock, whippoorwills, and wild turkeys
can nest in ferns, which deer scorn, but these birds, too, are
vastly reduced, because they need thick cover.24

He describes Crane Estate, a barrier-beach north of Bos-
ton, completely stripped of native plants, its bare dunes lost to
the wind, and the rest of [he wildlife along with them. The deer
themselves were starving, having long overshot the land's carry-
ing capacity, and were in the process of permanently degrading
it. Without predators, the land dies. In this case, those predators,
mainly cougars and wolves, were killed off by the early European
settlers. "This behavior flabbergasted the Indians." writes Williams.
"After much arguing and theorizing, they decided it was a symp-
tom of insanity."

---

In Africa it was no different, the Europeans came, and imposed their
will. Organizing the locals into groups and activities that suited the
colonizers wishes, and effectively destroyed social relationships that
supported the local populations.

Even when, if, the Europeans left, the indigenous societies were left to
weave the fabric of a new society, within arbitrary borders that have
been imposed on them. However, the "West" is still in Africa, via
corporate support for local dictators.

Avarice and greed, and its concomitant deleterious effects on land and
people, seem to be the legacy of colonialism.



This
is a huge and continuing problem which leaders of all political colours have
made little impact upon. Time does not permit me to go into detail but in
brief we have major conflicting requirements and not all can be met at once.

One of those conflicts is, it is now impossible for the aboriginals to live
as semi-nomadic hunter gatherers but there is no practical way for most to
join the modern way of life without giving up their relationship to the land
which is extremely important to them and their culture. There are very few
jobs in the outback and without jobs there is only slow death by welfare.
There have been a few success stories where aboriginals run their own
enterprises while maintaining their relationship to the land. These are
mainly in the arts, tourism or pastoralism but that isn't possible in all
locations.

David
--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYIC0eZYEtI
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/3/7/michael_moore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyE5wjc4XOw