Toward a Land Ethic

May your “place” be transformed beyond recognition, whether you like it or not.

Lol.
Don’t hold back Mandos. Tell me what you really think of it.
😉

https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/together-with-earth/from-watersheds-to-mountains-what-if-we-based-our-borders-on-nature

I got mine, Eric? LOL I’ll not leap to conclusion as readily as others, but I am having one of those Eiron, the Goddess of Irony flying by and discretely passing gas moments … as I am writing elsewhere of my intimacy with So.Cal.ism – with mid-fifties promiscuous pregnancies and sixties serial Southern California divorce. My parents didn’t do me, the bastard no one wanted, any favors. There’s a pretty famous song about that – you check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

And though I’ve spent most of the fifty years since I last hitch-hiked out of LA living on the Oregon High Desert where I was born, and the High Cascades of Montana which are my heart (not all that far, as those such as you and I measure distance), all of that was but the result of dust-bowl migration, of 🎼Hey Oakie tell Arkie Tex is in California, headed to Oregon! A grand notion, a Great Notion, and the butting up against the terminus of two hundred years of Westward Ho! Quite the story. But I digress, engaging as were in verbosity. There’s another not quite as famous song, same band… The Last Resort.

🎼And you can see them there, on Sunday morning; stand up and sing about what it’s like ‘up there’. They call it Paradise, I don’t know why; call some place Paradise… Kiss it goodbye.

‘Course Linda said it better – 🎼Lose your love when you say the word mine.

Are you suggesting that the Jews who fled Nazi Germany were cowards and should have stayed?

Ask the Palestinians.

We’re fast approaching a time when fleeing will no longer be a feasible option. Playing musical countries in the face of what’s coming isn’t a solution. It may have worked in the past and still works to a certain extent now with increasing resistance, but it’s clear that window is closing.

450, North America was no Eden like paradise but a howling wilderness that was as likely to eat you as to feed you.Eden was a walled tended garden surrounded by wilderness/chaos. The Indians had managed to carve out small walled gardens from the wilderness/chaos before Europeans arrived but they still lived short, cruel and dangerous lives. Most faced the dying time every year when their food stores ran out and game was scarce. If their crops failed they didn’t even make it to the dying time. Because they were adept if primitive tool users they could harvest some of the bounty of the wilderness but one false step and they were dead.
Indians adopted European tech, ideas and animals quickly and benefited greatly. The Horse Indians once defeated and settled on reservation ranches and farms saw their lifespans double Something as simple as planting corn in rows and using animal manure doubled their corn yields.
Their transition wasn’t a bed of roses but once their women saw steel needles and their men saw steel hatchets their primitive stone age existence was over.

Peter, you are a goddamned liar. But your writing is improving. I’ve been meaning to congratulate you, seriously, in the couple of three years since you first showed up here the improvement is remarkable. Still a few idioms, a few Americanisms you haven’t quite caught on to but …

A sustainable carrying capacity population for the US with a 21st century technological/industrial base is between 100 and 200 million. The current US population is 330 million going to a little less than 400 million by 2050. The biggest driver behind US population growth is immigration, legal, illegal, and refugee. Eliminating most immigration and allowing the natural demographic trends to play out, we can work our current population overshoot down to manageable levels. Will we? As with climate change, probably not.

Evolution creates multi-layered bio-feedback loops that get adjusted in tiny increments over long periods of time, to better align with facts on the ground. Same with societies as with any other dynamic organism. Many, many layers, cross-currents all over the place, all moving toward a natural balance of resources and power. Having the power to defend your territory has always been a basic; nature does not care whether you think that is moral or not.

Maybe we civilized folks just have a hard time being honest about power, and how it really works?

Or maybe none of us really has the capacity to think beyond one or two layers of change, so we think our ideas of the moment would easily create perfection in the world?

It is perhaps instructive to reality-check the quality of our reasoning process, so maybe try this one:

Those lovely words about the “huddled masses” on the Statue of Liberty were written circa 1870 by someone who was a proponent of Manifest Destiny (bye-bye, Indians of the West), and a proponent of Zionism before the term was coined. Yet the same people today who robotically repeat these words like they were a holy mantra, also routinely decry the Native American genocide and the existence of Israel.

So, who’s got the next great idea that will fix it all?

I’m anti-immigrant because historically, mass immigration has had more to do with the way the prevailing PTB were doing business than it ever did any common good empathy or refugee need. In short, natives have rarely ever had any say in the matter. Major economic and cultural changes were imposed on them against their will, usually as a result of the greed or incompetency of their own “betters” or those from elsewhere.

The whole immigration question is vexedly complex. Let’s get that out of the way at the start. It’s not just a case of “those poor refugees vs. the fascist thugs of ICE & BP”. At some point, you have to consider the effects of all these low skill, non-English speakers have on the economy, especialy the lower end of the economy, where an increasing number of Americans find themselves. Try getting a dishwasher’s job as a half-bright Anglo, when there’s somebody who speaks Spanish like the rest of the kitchen staff and is the prep cook’s cousin. And has a degree in Economics. It causes some resentment among the locals, not all of which can simply be dismissed as xenophobia and racism. 450 raises a valid point about nation destabilization. All these people wouldn’t be fleeing their homelands if they weren’t neo-liberal hellscapes. The obvious course of action is to ensure some kind of benevolent regimes in place of the vile dictatorships currently prevailing in much of Central America. We’re not getting any refugees from Costa Rica or Belize, now, are we?

Speaking of the Native Americans:

How did they not break out into the copper and iron age??? UP of Michigan had copper so abundant that you could pick it off the ground and indications are that there was extensive copper mining during the Bronze Age in the UP. Then around the time the Bronze Age Collapse was ongoing in MENA, the Natives stopped mining copper and never touched the Iron deposits in the Northwest US or the coal deposits despite knowing about them and having even made a few trinkets out of copper and iron.

It is a question mainstream historians refuse to answer despite it having importance to how a society develops.

On a lighter note:

Star Wars Episode 9 is still being worked on, with rumors flying and Kathleen Kennedy basically not allowed to speak publically about Star Wars without Bob Iger or George Lucas present in the room. If half the rumors are true, Rise of Skywalker will either be a total SJW Dumpster Fire and bomb horrifically or if Lucas was indeed brought in, will hit it out of the Ball Park and along with the Mandalorian will bring the fans back.

Iger knows now that Woke SJW films and series bomb, non-Woke SJW movies succeed. How else would Joker, a movie touted as a one-off that won\’t make it, could be breaking records across the board and being hit up for sequels?

Joker shows that good writing sells. This movie shows how a realistic Joker could actually happen today and serves as a warning that we need to not shortchange the Mentally Ill and downtrodden and then blame them for their ills.

Terminator Dark Fate: SJW Dumpster Fire that James Cameron tried and failed to keep out of theaters, relenting only when he was assured that he wouldn\’t get the blame for it flopping.

Charlies Angels Reboot: SJW Dumpster Fire. They threw the source material away and forgot why men like me loved the show and its early 2000s movies. Even women hated it.

Get Woke, go broke.

Future generations, worldwide but especially in the US, will return to an understanding of humanity in the context of nature, and having forged a connection with the spirit of the land. Once your ability to eat depends on your ability to convince the land you live on to yield crops and nurture animals, I think this period of madness will finally come to an end. That said, I do not think Millennials are any more innocent than Boomers. Boomers have their sprawling suburbs, and Millennials have their Ikea/Amazon/Google/Walmart/whatever other global corporations that plunder the earth. The people of the twenty-second century will hate us just the same.

I grew up angry, in the middle of a sprawling suburb, because people literally did not believe that open prairie deserved to remain unpaved. Every time a new parking lot or burb was to be put in nearby, I would go there and mentally tell the snakes and prairie dogs and bugs and worms to flee, then apologize to the dirt and grasses. That land has made a permanent mark on me. I can still close my eyes and feel the wind from there. My sense of direction is still based on sighting against the open horizon. But I have left that place, and if I can help it, will never return. Not because of the land, but because of the people.

In college, I studied abroad in a gorgeous community in the mountains. I spent a year just walking around, trying to put words to what I was feeling. Instead of starting a LinkedIn account and planning for my “future,” I spent my weekends and evenings hiking in the forest and staring out across the valley. I tried everything I could think of to get a more permanent visa to stay, but I wasn’t a strong applicant. In the last month when I knew I would be leaving, I felt physically terrible, like I was being forcibly torn away from a loved one. Back in the US, I struggled to put these feelings into words, because any mention of “the spirit of a place” or some kind of connection to the life of the land was too woo-woo for the pearl-clutching atheists.

I tried settling in a blue bubble, “eco-friendly” city in the US, but that was even worse. Car drivers regularly struck cyclists and got off free. But don’t worry: this Prius gets good mileage. And guess what color it is? Green. I left the country.

Now I’m in an ancient European city that has been conquered so many times that surely every inch of the soil here is drenched in human blood. I love the trees and rivers of this place with such ferocity that I could relate to Eric’s sentiment. I am doing everything I can think of to stay here. I’d fight for this place. If I can get a permanent visa, I will gladly never fly again.

Eric’s framing of the problem of protecting his personal eco-balance vs immigration is part of the problem with the essay. People have always migrated from place to place and have always affected the balance of nature wherever they go or wherever they settle for good or ill.

For the record, I’ve been hearing about overpopulation and its manifest crises all. my. life. I was born when global population was in the 2.5 billion range. That was already way too many more people than the earth could sustain according to some students at the time. And those complaints originated long before I was born, deep in the mists of the past and within largely Euro-centric notions of what appropriate population levels should be and where people should or shouldn’t be.

So here we are now facing yet another crisis in a perpetual population crisis on top of a rolling climate crisis and eco-collapse, none of which seem reversible at this point. The goose is long since cooked and eaten. Now what do we do?

I can’t say I fully understand Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic and other points in “A Sand County Almanac,” but I did plant that acorn in my front yard many decades ago. A gnarled oak tree grew from it and was cut down last year. Another tree was planted in its place. So it goes.

People have been living on that plot of ground where I planted that acorn and nearby for hundreds, likely thousands of years, and ironically — or perhaps not — most of those who live there now are the descendants of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. They’re called ‘immigrants’ because they or their ancestors may have migrated from what’s now Mexico or Guatemala or wherever to what’s now the United States, but borders are a construct that many indigenous people — not just in North America — don’t recognize. National borders still make little sense in most Native cultures. People move from place to place. They have always moved from place to place, so that even when the slaughterers from Europe moved in to the Americas and brought trains of captive Africans with them, it wasn’t considered odd or necessarily out of place. What was odd was the Europeans’ impulse to slaughter, the glint of blood and the flash of fire in the new-comers’ eyes.And their overwhelming greed and lust for power.What’s wrong with them? Native peoples are still wondering.

Eric claims to want to move past old ways of thinking, but he appears locked in ancient European notions of ownership, place and possession. Many of the descendants of European immigrants to the Americas have moved past that narrow and ultimately bloody vision, but many have not. Many don’t have the choice or don’t know they have the choice to get past it.

But whatever the case, immigrants per se aren’t the problem. I think Aldo Leopold would agree.

450, North America was no Eden like paradise but a howling wilderness that was as likely to eat you as to feed you.

There you go with the religious references again. Paradise does not equal Eden. I meant paradise in ecological terms and yes, you are correct, an ecological paradise puts human in its place where it belongs. Hollywood abstraction is a poor surrogate for the visceral & primal experience provided by nature.

One of the most powerful and intriguing dimensions of A Sand County Almanac is Leopold’s description of the journey/adventure of a nitrogen atom in our animated world. Without animation, or without life, a nitrogen atom would have a pretty dull existence on this planet, but precisely because of animation, the nitrogen atom’s existence is quite literally a roller coaster-like adventure (a nitrogen atom can and does lead many lives) and Leopold does an excellent job of sparking your imagination and cajoling you to consider that journey. A nitrogen atom, and also a tree, are history books and the rub of all that came before has been captured by both and more.

Consider the following quote as it relates to our grotesque standard of living and the resulting population overshoot. Immigration for capitalistic notions of progress and profit is an abomination. The often bandied about statement that “America is a nation of immigrants” is a disingenuous bromide meant to distract from and obscure the deleterious, and I’d say purposeful, effects of the the scourge that is neoliberalism.

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. ~ Aldo Leopold

During the impeachment proceedings the Dems cleverly and disingenuously utilized this bromide that “America is a nation of immigrants” to score points with the polity. They underscored that Vindman and Hill were immigrants who chose to be American citizens. Alexander Vindman is an Iraqi war veteran. Iraq was a an illegal war and if the Nuremberg Standard was faithfully applied, those who ordered it and approved it would be in jail as war criminals. Is this what we want? Do we really want vulnerable and easily-duped immigrants, fleeing the former Soviet Union or some other current day tyrannical autocracy, zealously and patriotically lining up as cannon fodder in the neoliberal’s forever wars and machinations? Do we want to encourage and enable and support Indian immigrants, from India, immigrating to America who are fascist fodder and who support Modi back home and Trump and all he represents here in America. The same thing with Romanians. We know a slew of Romanians and they are huge Trump supporters, and tax evaders, as are many former Soviet Jews who struck silicon in Silicon Valley after they escaped the Soviet Union.

What’s the point of fighting for principles and values when your fight is consistently undermined by a tsunami of immigration that is not only not in line culturally with those values but is in fact in direct opposition to those values and principles?

“If I leave my place, it suffers from the knowledge and support I remove” Suffers??? WTF?
Dude, you are the burden your place must bear. Make sure you do it lightly. Letting some of the Dominionist ego go might lighten the load. We’ve been settled agriculturalist for only about 10000 years, before that Hunter Gatherers migrating the Great Circle. Migration is hardwired. Settling in one place might be the evolutionary dead end. And this comes from someone who has live 70 some years in the same rural county..the last 30 in an incredibly beautiful Native American camp ground. The natives are long gone, their artifacts remain…I too soon will be long gone…and I don’t think the land will miss any of us.

The point is, Mandos, the persecuted Jews ended up becoming the persecutors. How dare you minimize the suffering of the Palestinians. They have had to involuntarily pay the price for the sins of the world as it relates to the Jews and your diminution and whitewashing of that is pathetic and disingenuous.

If Wilson didn’t force America into WWI, Nazi Germany never would have transpired and there would be no State of Israel in Palestine. America’s involvement in WWI, to include its influence in the Treaty of Versailles, paved the way for Nazism. Without that kindling, the Nazi conflagration never could have taken hold.

The point is, Mandos, the persecuted Jews ended up becoming the persecutors. How dare you minimize the suffering of the Palestinians. They have had to involuntarily pay the price for the sins of the world as it relates to the Jews and your diminution and whitewashing of that is pathetic and disingenuous.

I’m not sure where I “minimized the suffering of the Palestinians.” I characterized the Zionist acts dispossessing the Palestinians as coming from the same ideology of Place as Eric is promulgating, itself originating from European theories and ideas of the moral rights of Place that were used against Jews. That is standard in pro-Palestinian argument. Where “dimunition and whitewashing” of Palestinian suffering took place is rather mysterious to me. Unless you are deliberately misreading me.

If Wilson didn’t force America into WWI, Nazi Germany never would have transpired and there would be no State of Israel in Palestine. America’s involvement in WWI, to include its influence in the Treaty of Versailles, paved the way for Nazism. Without that kindling, the Nazi conflagration never could have taken hold.

The ideologies that supported the Nazi conflagration predated the world wars: antisemitism, colonialism, and blood-and-soil ideology are cut from the same cloth. Israel was in the process of formation well before the Nazis. Whether one historical event or another could have averted the whole agony if it hadn’t happened is a useless hypothetical, the ideologies were there and the potential for violence was there.

Zionism did not require the Holocaust to justify the establishment of Israel, the moral justification had already been deemed to have been achieved by major players. See the Balfour Declaration.

Whether a different sequences of events would have led to a conflagration in Europe with the implementation of genocidal ideologies is another question. I am dubious of theories that tell me a single event was crucial, or the whole thing would have been averted. It may have happened later or earlier, in a Europe that was very different. It may have come under a different name, or from a different capital city. Clearly, war-associated organized genocides are a common feature of the industrial era.

This is going very far afield from the original point, which is the inherent danger of land-connectedness ideologies.

That being said, your points about “place” are very compelling and you make an excellent case and counter refutation to Eric’s thesis. However, your thesis is perfect justification for the neoliberals to continue with business as usual in their campaign to displace the globe because “place” is not sacred and humans evolved to be transient and migratory.

No, because the neoliberal idea is fundamentally dependent on establishment of property rights, ie, the hoarding of “place”. They support transience as the escape valve they require to permit that hoarding. Neoliberalism is not a full open-borders ideology, it requires the selective enforcement of borders, in particular, constraining democratic decision-making and state sovereignty to immutable bounds. In practical terms, borders are used to ensure the variation of labour costs that are currently crucial to capitalist value-extraction.

A better response to neoliberalism than falling back on a reactionary ideology of Place or a blood-and-soil Land Ethic is to take a page out of pro-aboriginal activism and accept that both transience and place-rootedness exist in dynamic tension, not easily constrained by an abstract right to property, but rather, a right to live in relation to one’s own environment. In that framework, people have the right to transience, but abstractions of property and capital do not. The neoliberal world is more or less the opposite.

“Eric claims to want to move past old ways of thinking, but he appears locked in ancient European notions of ownership, place and possession.”

I really have no clue how this conclusion is reached. It’s seemingly a straw man and is driving much subsequent discussion.

The thesis is stated by Wendell Berry right at the top:
“If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”

The problem, as I see it, is the fact that we don’t know WHO we are, which leads to materialist striving to fill the void. Knowing the land from which we derive informs our sense of self, and reinforces our drive preserve the integrity of our place.

Which, I’ll add, takes a big bite out of both the drive to possess property, and the neoliberal wealth acquisition drive.

450, your idea of paradise reflects an occult quasi-religious worship of nature that condemns the only conscious beings on the planet to suffer under a harsh mistress. If nature somehow gave us awareness of our suffering, mortality and the possible future she also gave us the right to use our abilities to tame her most cruel and mindless powers.
With the right to create habitable order from chaos comes the responsibility to respect, not worship, the source of the bounty and good life
We have made many mistakes because we are only human but we learn and are becoming much more skilled at repairing the damage from our mistakes and avoiding further permanent damage.
The occult self hating ideas of many people today would certainly create more chaos and suffering. Their quest for power and dominion over humanity, by any means necessary, could and likely would lead to irreparable damage to the planet they claim to want to save.

Peter, civilization is responsible for even more suffering than nature dulls out. What do you call obese people suffering from debilitating diabetes and coronary artery disease? What do you call people living twenty years with cancer in a greatly diminished capacity? What do you call the homeless plight and the drug addict epidemic? F*ck landing on the moon if that was and is the price tag. There’s an entire planet that has never been fully appreciated and understood and instead has been utterly destroyed.

Well, immigration as an effect on wages is nill. We all know this. It’s absurd nativist bullshit to pretend otherwise. However, as far as “immigration” from Africa…seems like it’ll be a good thing for actual development and wages and the economy. The “stresses” that come with it are not economic, but the fascist politics that nativists will run with because racism is a successful political tactic. Mandos is trying to form a politics that sees this as inevitable, and finding a foothold before anti-immigrant fascism swallows us whole.

According to the BLS, 17.4% of the US work force was foreign born in 2018. And they are more poorly paid. “The median usual weekly earnings of foreign-born full-time wage and salary workers were $758 in 2018, compared with $910 for their native-born counterparts.” This wage differential has a depressive effect on both native born wages and jobs because foreign born workers are cheaper and more disposal. Foreign born workers have had a major impact in occupations like construction, meat packing, accomodation, and food services. It is one of the big four factors in the war on American workers along with Fed policy, de-unionization, and off-shoring.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/forbrn.pdf

Well, Eric, your position is basically a defense of Blut und Boden.

It’s not a Land Ethic, not even remotely, and your theory that people who migrate “don’t know who they are” is horseshit. They may not know, just as you may not know, but their migration, just as your staying in one place, is not due to lack or presence of self-knowledge. It is due to human nature.

Humans have always migrated. If they did not, they wouldn’t have covered the earth so thoroughly. It’s not because our ancestors didn’t know who they were. If anything, they knew too well.

Why are you where you are? You or your ancestors moved from wherever they or you had been, right? Sometimes that is under compulsion of circumstance (famine for example, as in the case of my Irish ancestors) or ruler’s demand, but often enough, it’s voluntary (as in my personal choice of residence). There are all kinds of reasons people move from place to place and have always done so.

It’s all but instinctual.

There are plenty of reasons why people stay in place as well. Material incentives play their part, but they don’t have to be determinate. People are funny that way. They do things that aren’t always logical or materialist or spiritual.

I don’t know why immigrants and immigration gets so many Americans and Europeans and Australians and Canadians into such a sweat-soaked tizzy. What are they afraid of? Oh, I get it, sure. The fear of The Great Replacement. Unless new immigrants to those lands are repelled with force, they will replace the clean and beautiful and good residents with their filth and disease and that will be the end of civilization. It has ever been thus, no?

The disease ridden hordes outside the gates will destroy Civilization if we let them in. Everybody knows it. Right?

Or more personally, they will interfere with my life in some unpleasant way, so keep them out.

Given the way European conquerors and missionaries behaved toward the native peoples of the Americas, Africa and Asia, and given how so many of the conquerors came specifically to loot and rape the land and slaughter the people, it’s understandable that some advocates of Blut und Boden would deeply fear the immigration or return, particularly of indigenous peoples, who might want to take revenge. But guess what? Not everyone is like those conquistadores and empire builders of yore.

Even in their own time, they were a minority.

A Land Ethic can be very appealing and beautiful. But that’s not what you’re proposing.

Stories can be powerful. Stories can give meaning to what we do. We humans love stories, stories are entertainment and politics and sports and family and school and work and community.
.
What stories are not is true.

Maybe it’s not so complicated.

Maybe if you are comfortable where you are, as a group or an individual, you stay where you are, and over time you incrementally improve your immediate surroundings to increase your daily pleasure, convenience, security, and stability.

If you can no longer feel comfortable where you are, you move, hopefully to a place that is more comfortable for you.

And when you try to make your new place a place that someone else has been building a life in for a long time, they may very likely resent your intrusion and all the conflicts that can arise if you bring your very different cultural values and practices with you, and seek to maintain them despite any frictions with the established residents.

Maybe we should just stop trying to attribute a supposedly superior morality as arbitrarily as we do?

I would also note that a person’s value of their place might be a function of the nature of that place. If your place is in a safe, hospitable environment supportive of human needs, you will have a different view than if your place is unsafe, inhospitable and a true hellhole which you are powerless to change.

Bullshit. It is extremely relevant to this discussion. War leads to displacement and dislocation. Dislocation and displacement leads to the dispersal of the seeds of conflict elsewhere. If America didn’t enter WWI, the outcome would have been very different in many ways and respects. The outcome of WWI, how the “peace” was handled via the Treaty of Versailles, predicated the rise of the Nazis and if not for the rise of the Nazis there is no Holocaust. Yes, there still would have been historical persecution of the Jews but nothing that even came close to approaching the magnitude of the Holocaust. I didn’t bring up the Jews, some other commentator did, so talk to them about it not being relevant. I think it is relevant and I don’t begrudge that commentator bringing it up. You certainly come across as though you’re the final arbiter on all things that were, are and will be. I applaud you on how sure of yourself you are. That’s quite an accomplishment.

I am not entirely sure why you have latched onto the issue as somehow dispositive of the entire discussion. I riffed off your reference to the Palestinians to make a larger point about Eric’s “Land Ethic”/ideology of place. I could have picked some other conflict; there are others that fit the bill.

In any case, it seems like your “the outcome would have been very different in many ways and respects” is doing a lot of work here. Very likely, many things would have been different. But which things? I find it highly likely that some other conflict would have broken out, with different victims and on a somewhat different schedule, maybe, but the ideologies were all in place and the underlying stresses would not have been dissipated by a different WWI outcome.

But that’s the problem. It’s a very heavy counterfactual.

Bruce:

On the other hand, I have seen several arguments presented in this thread that, in the guise of some flavor of cosmopolitanism, seek to deprive others of a legitimate point-of-view or interests. It is reckless to reduce every tale of political conflict to a manichean battle in which the narrator chooses sides.

Oh, which? And which others? Are you arguing that every point of view or interest is legitimate? I fully well recognize that there is a population of “sessile” non-movers who are unfairly expected in this neoliberal world to pick up sticks, break their ties, and let themselves be reforged into Silicon Valley coders from coal-mining dross etc, and are blamed for their own plight when they don’t. If this were a discussion about the right not to be moved, I would be fully on board. What I am not on board with, however, is an implicit moral judgement against those who will move, or worse, must move.

No, what he’s doing is providing apologia and cover for neoliberalism and its disingenuous bromides that play on people’s emotions and sense of decency. Human may have been transient and migratory once upon a time in its evolution, but there is a system in place and systems within the system of civilization which has/have rendered that evolutionary phase of human development irrelevant. There is nothing “natural” about current human migratory trends. It’s all fabricated by mainly neoliberal policies heretofore and now increasingly by climate change impacts. It’s no longer about human, as tribes, moving from one feeding ground to the next as one is exhausted and the next fully replenished.

You are putting words in my mouth. Who said it is *now* about “humans, as tribes, moving from one feeding ground to the next”? Rather, the current system, yes, forces some people to move, and it forces some people to stay still, and it permits a small number of people the opportunity to choose one or the other.

It isn’t meaningfully “neoliberal” to say that we should increase that privilege (to choose to move or not move, based on one’s own assessment of one’s own wants and needs, rather than imposed from without) to more people. Once upon a time I would have thought, indeed, that expanding privileges held by the few was the point.

Obviously you have no idea what rigors immigrants to English-speaking countries, among others, are routinely subjected to.

But even if they weren’t it’s likely you wouldn’t suffer because of it.

Political power is the product of political organization. The reasonably well-organized polity is going to have a state with sufficient power to exclude or select would-be migrants. If the polity is democratic, the state may well be directed to serve the interests of the citizens making up the body politic.

You feel all of these political facts should be set aside in ordering political relations in favor of your personal preferences expressed as moral judgments. That strikes me as more narcissism than philosophy.

Place-ism is certainly a theory on how to organize society and attitude within any certain set of boundaries. And if enough people believe in place-ism to have a visible effect on policy and actions inside any particular place, those people may be considered a TAG ( a Theory Action Group).

In a country this big, we can have any number of different TAGs pursuing their different approaches and see how those different approaches work out for those different TAGloads of people.

If people of a certain place wish to develop themselves a land ethic for living in that particular place; the more actual factual information they have about the creatures, things and forces living in/ acting on that place, the more reality-based and long-term functional their land ethic will be.

The people who created Whole Earth Catalogs and the CoEvolution Quarterly ( then Whole Earth Review) Magazines were very sympathetic to the idea of “bio-regions”. Also “watersheds” as a level of analysis and also social-cultural action. They reviewed books on the subjects and also printed articles. It might be worthwhile for the land ethicist to find and read those books and articles.

The Whole Earth Catalogers reviewed very favorably the Smithsonian Museum series of American Indian Nations and said that was a good place to start for bio-viable life-and-survival information for every part of the country. I can’t easily find any reference to this series on the Search Prevention Engine I am using. One would have to remember the exACT title of the series.

Here is an interesting article in that vein on the Resilience.org website, called Lyla June On The Forest As Farm. Here is the pre-article intro lead-in teaser showing what the article will be about.

“In Part Two, she delves more deeply into the eye-opening science coming forward about pre-colonial land management practices and the sophisticated foodscapes co-created with nature over the centuries. This piece was drawn from a presentation to the Sovereign Sisters Gathering at Borderland Ranch in South Dakota.”

Here is the link: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-11-19/lyla-june-on-the-forest-as-farm/

If you are going to be a land-ethic rooterist-in-place, you might want to read this article and think about what knowledge you and/or other land-ethicists would need to be able to manage your place as a live-in food-and-supplies gardenscape for all the people who live there.

@ Mandos

Thank you for your patience. I feel I am getting a much clearer understanding of your argument.

My understanding of politics is that politics arises from social cooperation and the politics of government from cooperation in creating and maintaining the state, to which those in society concede some part of their natural power in autonomy in more or less Hobbesian fashion for Hobbesian reasons, the state’s near-monopoly on legitimate violence in creating and maintaining the political order being an outcome of that concession. I do not hold much stock in imagining a state of nature or a primordial social contract; it seems to me the political order is being constantly reproduced in on-going politics of dispute and discussion. I do subscribe to democratic norms and ethics in my idea of how the political order of the state (my state) ought to be structured.

All that said, it seems to me that the state-less migrant is a supplicant without political rights per se in a political society in which she is not yet accepted as a member. (States can and do negotiate among themselves regarding mutual respect for the rights of their respective citizens who may travel or migrate — a significant contrast in my way of thinking.) It seems to me — correct me, please — is that you regard the state as illegitimate — not properly a creature of a bordered, coherent society forming a political order and suspect because it embodies and administers violence in creating and maintaining that political order.

I am using a high level of abstraction in expressing myself, but i am arguing that politics is grounded concretely and even organically in the organization of the particular state on a foundation of cooperation in the society that creates it and which it governs and instrumentally represents in producing public goods, not in my preferences (though I have some). When i said that your view seemed “narcissistic”, I meant that i do not see it as having an objective foundation in social constructions outside your head. Maybe it is just the view of an anarchist?

Blut und Boden (“Blood and Soil”) was a Romantic notion of ‘place’ as it related to the Germanic peoples of Europe that became pernicious under the Nazis. The basic idea was that Germanic peasants formed the basis of the Herrenvolk, the finest examples of the race, and they were tied to the land by history and blood (meaning genetics as well as struggle) which only they knew or could know intimately. It was only by and through them that the Germanic peoples attained greatness.

Nazis took the Romantic notion of Blut und Boden as a command to reclaim the land for themselves and their progeny. The ‘land’ in this case included almost all of Europe and most of what was then the European portion of the Soviet Union. In other words, wherever Germanic peoples lived or had ever lived was deemed Germanic “soil” by right. This led to conquest of course, and to the expulsion and/or murder of non-Germanic Slavs, Jews, Gypsies or whatever ‘trash people’ occupied these ‘Germanic’ lands. Only Germanic peoples had a right to those lands because only Germanic peoples knew them through ‘blood.’

‘Trash people,’ like Jews and Slavs and Gypsies and such did not know any ‘place’ and they did not know themselves or who they were so they wandered — substituting material goods for the absent spiritual connection to the land. They infested the land and especially the cities like vermin and had to be removed, contained, and ultimately destroyed. They were migrants by nature or were suited only to be slaves and they were utterly unlike the Germanic peoples who were settled, knowledgeable and hard working. The Germanic peoples were intimately familiar with the land as only they could be — because they were spiritually a part of the land and the land was spiritually a part of them.

Eric recasts the notion of Blut und Boder in a more contemporary context and divorces it from the explicit racism of its origins, but his argument is little different in the end. He and people like him have an intimate knowledge and connection with ‘the land’ (which is what? The continent?) which immigrants (or migrants or cowards or people who do not ‘know who they are’ ) do not — and apparently cannot — have, and therefore he and people like him have a right to the land which others do not. He will fight to the death to see that that is so.

Much as Eric might like it to be, this is not a Land Ethic. This is an identity thing (cultural, social, or yes, racial) that separates himself and people like him from the Outside Other, an Other to be excluded, rejected, and left to die wherever they may be as they have no place where he is.

Mandos calls it by its right name: Evil.

A Land Ethic is not, in and of itself, evil. In Aldo Leopold’s vision, it’s quite the opposite, though the details aren’t entirely clear. Since I live in a rural area, I see variations of a Land Ethic in operation all the time. The ranchers and farmers and environmental advocates all have different ideas and ways of appreciating the land and its gifts, but they all know it intimately and comprehensively. So do the Native peoples — who sometimes show the Outside Others how better to appreciate the land and treat it with respect and honor.

For all the cultural and language and insight variations among the peoples living here, there is a common thread that I would say is an operating Land Ethic shared between them, and newcomers-migrants are not excluded, at least not for the reasons Eric would exclude them.

What Eric is proposing is not something we need.

So, the squirrel who stores up more acorns than he needs to eat this week is a thief?

Where do you draw the lines about when one has exceeded one’s ‘subsistence’ needs? And why do you get to draw those lines so rigidly?

IOW, perhaps if you think your alleged ‘prior rights’ automatically trump the rights of the in-placers, then please do tell us what is the authority that decreed and enforces those rights? That is really the crux of the matter, isn’t it?

You seem unwilling to deal honestly with the role that power should play in human events. Please give us some reason other than religion to justify your view on power.