What does "indigenous" even fucking mean. I'm of European descent living in Europe, motherfucker I'm the indigenous one around here.
This comic pretty directly equates "indigenous" with "brown & too poor to meaningfully impact their own ecosystems" (which isn't true either because poor countries have a pretty good track record of destroying their own ecosystems as well).
Saying "humans are a plague" is some edgelord type shit. Equating it with fascism is just dumb and dilutes the term "fascism", and on top of that they've managed to illustrate it in one of the most racist ways I've had the displeasure to read in a while.
Maybe I can give the author some slack and assume they're being a typical yankee and completely disregarding the rest of the world, and trying to be progressive by supporting the work Native American reserves do. But even then it's inexcusably dumb.
Yeah, while I agree with the core message rebuking ecofascism and pointing out that environmental damage is a capitalistic issue, depicting indigenous folks as the sole tenders of the land is some Noble Savage shit.
Do you know where Noble Savage myth came from? From legitimate dialogues between Europeans and Indigenous during the colonization of the Americas. Dialogues like the ones between Kandiaronk and Lahontan, that Europeans were so racist they couldn’t believe were from an indigenous person, so instead they claimed that their countrymen were using metaphor with absolutely no evidence.
THAT'S the term! Thank you! It was reminding me of the Mystical Blackman trope.
I'm just gonna stop and bitch for a second. As friggen disappointing as it is to see left leaning individuals adopt bigioted attitudes, do you know what the real disappointment is? All the people that don't say something. All the people that don't do something.
People will sit there and talk about bringing down the system, about how horrible the right is, "eat the rich" and all that. They'll post memes everyday about challenging the status quo, but when push comes to shove it's crickets.
Meanwhile I'm getting ready to kamakazi my latest social group for the umpteenth time because someone in the group was intentionally violating the personal space of another. I know no one is going to have my back.
People talk a lot lately about the paradox of tolerance and use that as justification for censoring certain political opinions. The problem isn't tolerance though, it's the silence. It's people not wanting to make themselves uncomfortable, or unpopular.
-ninja edit-
After some discussions with chatGPT what im describing relates to "The Spiral of Silence"
The phenomenon you are describing is known as the "spiral of silence." The spiral of silence theory, proposed by German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in the 1970s, explains how public opinion is formed and how individuals may withhold expressing their views if they perceive them to be in the minority. This theory is often applied to political and social contexts, including the rise of ideologies like fascism.
In the context of fascism or any other controversial ideology, the spiral of silence suggests that when people believe their opinions are not widely supported, they tend to remain silent and refrain from expressing their views publicly. This silence, in turn, can create an illusion that the majority supports the prevailing ideology, even if it might not be the case. As a result, individuals who disagree with the ideology might feel isolated and discouraged from speaking out, contributing to the seeming growth and acceptance of the ideology.
Several factors contribute to the spiral of silence phenomenon:
Fear of isolation: People often fear social isolation or rejection, so they may choose to keep their dissenting opinions to themselves to avoid potential negative consequences.
Perceived social norms: Individuals may gauge the acceptability of their views by observing the prevailing opinions within their social circles and in the media. If they believe their views deviate significantly from the perceived norm, they are more likely to remain silent.
Amplification of dominant views: When a particular ideology gains prominence and is amplified through media coverage or dominant social groups, people may perceive its support to be more significant than it actually is.
Social media echo chambers: Online platforms can exacerbate the spiral of silence by creating echo chambers where people are exposed only to like-minded opinions, leading them to believe their views are in the minority.
The spiral of silence can hinder healthy democratic discourse, as it suppresses the diversity of opinions and prevents the exchange of ideas. Overcoming this phenomenon requires fostering an environment that encourages open dialogue, respect for diverse perspectives, and protection for free speech. By promoting inclusivity and ensuring that people feel comfortable expressing their opinions without fear of retribution, societies can better counter the rise of ideologies like fascism and encourage constructive debates on important issues.
Funny, because I’m a native of turtle island, and happen to be very involved with indigenous land protection across multiple continents in collaboration with literally hundreds of unique cultures, all of which are protecting lands and water.
I don't get your 1st issue. That statement was based on statistics offered throughout the blurb. Are you claiming those statistics are wrong or inherently racist?
I think it's fucking weird the comic attempted to differentiate indigenous from the rest of humanity so that's specifically what I'm taking issue with.
And that other 90% of humanity is working to industrialize to get where we are. It’s a massive issue that as far as I’m aware we have no solution to.
The problem has never really been industrialisation or resource shortage (e.g Rare Earth Metals aren't really rare at all, just more difficult to extract and the cheapest methods are polluting >.<) . It's that the technologies used to do it in a green way with more automation have been actively pushed against by the oil and gas industry (for example solar cells have been around for a long time but refining the tech to improve cost/kWh could only happen recently with absolutely tons of pressure, or the way cities are designed for cars, etc.), the fact that we do not recycle important resources very much (phosphorous in particular), and also the fact that the upfront cost of automation for the more dangerous aspects is higher than using slave/cheap labour, which is enabled by capitalism in combination with extreme short-term mindsets which prevent automation systems from reaching economies of scale/meta-automation nya. Also, because right now polluting is slightly cheaper in the current economic system than containing waste and even reprocessing it, which is another problem.
The main risk with "resource shortage" is actually land-use agriculture rather than industrialisation more generally. In particular, we value "unused" (in colonised areas, this is often formerly controlled/managed by indigenous groups, but this was not considered "usage" by colonialists >.<) land very poorly, and our economic systems incentivize using order-of-magnitude less efficient agricultural technologies on wide open land, over using indoor (or vertical) systems which are far more able to recycle water and avoid fertilizer runoff/waste, are more resilient to climactic changes, and produce significantly better yields with no pesticides nya.
Such systems require some construction and hence the land cost is much higher, even though it would be far more ecosystem-friendly and promote food autonomy for urban areas, as well as allowing "re-wilding" efforts by massively reducing land use. The other problem is energy usage - but generally I think we should prefer higher-energy mechanisms that are more circular and less land-hogging, because electrically powered systems can be and are being green-ified over time as the electric grid becomes more powered by renewables or nuclear.
Even basic techniques, not including the vast potential of environmentally controlled indoor farms, massively mitigate a lot of the issues with agriculture, but a lot of places are unable to do these sorts of things due to various socioeconomic factors >.<, including things like intellectual property law increasing costs and decreasing mass production capabilities of mechanized agricultural systems (including things like those robots that can kill weeds without pesticides), or access to research and education on these topics for farmers, or the fact that Slash and Burn is often cheaper in the short term.
For example, the yield of potatoes per hectare has huge variance, with New Zealanders getting on the order of 60-80 tons/hectare, but many other countries getting much lower yields (19-30 tons/hectare >.<). This is just with basic outdoor farming, not including the massive potential of environmentally controlled farms, vertical farms, etc.
(Note: I haven't mentioned the sand issue around concrete, but I could go on a whole thing about that - it is possible to make artificial sand and we could probably do an economy-of-scale thing with that, too, even if it's higher energy for the same reasons of electrification being a good idea even if right this second it still produces more CO2 than directly harvesting the right type of sand from riverbeds and oceans nya).
Agreed. Exactly why we need to listen to these marginalized communities, and empower them to take action on our behalf and with our cooperation. It’s why no matter how good I think my ideas are, I try to recognize that I come from a position of relative privilege, and that it is likely that even my best of ideas will be lacking in intersectional analysis that is needed to develop real, powerful solutions.
That implies that the non richest 10% is happy with that and aren't trying to catch up with the richest 10%. That is completely untrue. The idea behind decreasing the world population is that a smaller population could all live in modern comfort. I have a feeling that this comic was written by someone very much in the richest 10%.
Now please explain how you create a smaller population that doesn’t reek of eugenics
Education. People tend to have fewer kids the more educated they become. Give everyone in the world top class educations, and the population will naturally decline.
That is a disgusting over simplification of what the Nazis did and I'm not even going to bother talking to you if you're just going to go straight to comparing everything to Nazis with zero nuance.
Easy. Un idiot proof the world. All warning labels removed. All laws to protect the physical self removed (seatbelts, drugs, suicide, etc). Let natural selection resume it's work and prune the people these warnings were made for.
That's just one potential facet.
Also before anybody thinks they're so clever to bring it up, yes I know I would've been one of the ones to die since I was a stupid kid
Not to mention the bio-diverse indigenous lands are largely in sparsely populated areas of the americas showing low population goes hand in hand with the better land management. As the comic says. Families, smallholders, and local communities. Not big urban cities. The corpo world we have is one reason when shipements from ukraine get disrupted there is starvation in africa and asia. If the 10% went away we would quickly lower our current population. The cartoon is correct until it gets to its conclusion in the last panel.
It would be more efficient if we shrunk the power of the wealthiest individuals and made everyone fall under a wealthy limit
Why should one person own and control so much wealth when they will never realistically be able to enjoy all of that wealth during their lifetime? Especially if that one person hoarding all that wealth they'll never use is producing, creating and maintaining so much pollution for one individual.
Sure, or we could just ban super yachts, private jets, cruise ships and empower those indigenous communities who have had such meaningful successes to spread their ideas and understanding so that we can begin to develop a sustainable culture, and we don’t need to kill half the worlds population.
We better make sure to completely eradicate all life on Earth down to the tiniest microbe just to be certain that life like us doesn't evolve again, I guess.
I’m unsure of the Artist of this one, but the oldest reference tineye reverse image search found was this medium page, which is down. I’ve linked the archived version I found, but I can’t seem to locate the image itself to be sure this is the origin.
I spent a long-ass time trying to work out why a bunch of randos, dressed in generic national costumes like when '80s Saturday morning cartoons tried to be diverse, would be eco-fascists who want to oppress the indigenous Irish. I actually almost thought it was a racist joke about how England isn't as white as it used to be.
Well, when you live in huts like cavemen and your population is very spread out, of course you’re going to be less impactful. Shrinking the population WOULD help, no matter how much you scream about eugenics and fascism. Gonna be downvoted for this, but it’s just my opinion at the end of the day. No need to get butthurt, keyboard warriors.
What an extremely bigoted thing to say. Most of the worlds indigenous people don’t “live in huts like cavemen”. Where they do have poor living conditions, these are usually a product of external colonization and/or forced migrations leaving them in lands hostile to human life. You realize there are still over 6 million indigenous people in the US, right? Almost 500 million worldwide.
Yeah, shrinking the population would totally help, if we shrank the population starting at the top.