rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

Moodles OTM. This is some extremely committed throwback old school racism

Bracing.

so i follow a few national parks on facebook, and apparently last week was "national invasive species awareness week" (NISAW). capitol reef national park and great basin national park both did a few posts about it. capitol reef chose to highlight the tumbleweed, which is russian thistle that was introduced to the american west in the late 1800s. kind of an interesting choice considering what's going on in the world. someone commented "fuck tumbleweeds." it seemed to me like idk something else must be contributing to the passion behind that comment other than the inherent badness of tumbleweeds.

then great basin national park, which is in the middle of nowhere in nevada and often posts questionable things related to climate change, straight up posted a meme image asserting that more species extinctions are attributable to invasive species than to human caused climate change (with no citation). which is very disingenuous considering invasive species are human caused.

anyway, invasive species - the more i think about it the more it's basically a reflection of xenophobia and american nationalism? is there any soundness to the concept, when "invasive species" have been the majority of what's going on environmentally worldwide for idk hundreds of years? it also seems like the mainstream of environmental science or whatever the name of the field we're talking about here has moved past the concept and argues that it's outlived its usefulness. from a quick glance at google. idk if we have any environmental scientists or anything here to elucidate but is this generally what's going on?

anyway, invasive species - the more i think about it the more it's basically a reflection of xenophobia and american nationalism?

no. geez, learn some ecology. ecosystems that evolved in isolation from other ecosystems are very highly integrated and balanced

is there any soundness to the concept, when "invasive species" have been the majority of what's going on environmentally worldwide for idk hundreds of years?

fuck me. hundreds of years you say? biology on earth has been evolving for approximately 1 billion years. and trans oceanic migration and successful establishment of non-local species before humans got involved was on the order of maybe idk one species per ten thousand years.

Also, not all non-native introduced species become invasive!

It's not just the US where you hear about "invasive species" btw. You hear a lot about it in the UK, what with being an island and all.

reminds me of the strange case of the murder/suicide lab technician who claimed in his suicide note it was all because of his fear of Japanese Knotweed.

map, the nib had a recent article talking about this. The concept obviously not being that ecosystems can't be disturbed by new arrivals, but that the vocabulary around this is coded in xenophobic ways, and that this is reflected in some of the strategies employed against them as well.

Here it is:

https://thenib.com/invaders/

UK grey squirrel/red squirrel discourse is some astonishingly bloodthirsty and quasi-racist bullshit tbh yes

Any new deepfake conspiracies today?

Here it is:

https://thenib.com/invaders🕸/

-poop-

How the hell did that get in there

I'm choking on my breakfast over here.

English is a nice language (for Boring, Maryland to poop on).

Yeah I don't buy english as somehow being a language lacking a soul or anything either, quer dizer, não é português mas é ok. The language no more to blame than the species brought over by the colonizers, really. But it's an aside and as you said, not gonna chide Native American ppl for getting some shots in at the dominant culture.

I poop blood and soil

^Skrewdriver getting lazy

well it's been fun trolling national park followers who go off on completely unhinged rants about a plant.

there may be some validity to the concept of a plant species being 'invasive' i.e. disrupting an ecosystem but people who then focus their intense rage on the plant itself or the immigrants who brought it here need therapy.

and if you really think about it, it isn't immigrants who are responsible, it's .............
.............
........
....
capitalism

haha, i don't think most people that are into invasive plants are like that, though. one of the greatest guys i've ever met, kind of my mentor if i ever had one, at my old job, was an ecologist who spent his weekends leading small groups in expeditions to teach people to identify and remove invasive plants. he'd talk about that stuff all the time, and now that he's retired, he's stepped up his plant whacking game even more.

anyway, i would guess that anyone that has intense rage about a plant or immigrants would also rage about many other things which also don't deserve it at all, so better to unfollow/unfriend

i get that they are nice people but .. i remember hearing a bit about the tamarisk debate when i lived in moab. and i just never found the old guard side of it convincing at all. you hear all sorts of arguments about all the bad stuff that tamarisk does but ultimately it really is a magic eye kind of situation isn't it? you can sure raise a lot of bad things about what the act of removing tamarisk does to an ecosystem.

there is a lot of projection and dare i say religious substitution and maybe some gene selecting ideology and not a lot of clear thinking involved with these people ime. but yes they are nice.

I swear I have never seen “invasive species” associated with human immigration or whatever. Most of this stuff comes over via shipping and our glorious international trade. So this whole “trying to combat invasive species is racism” train of thought is just weird to me.

The point of trying to keep non-native species at bay is to try to preserve biodiversity and endangered native species that get frequently crowded out of the ecosystem.

anyway, i would guess that anyone that has intense rage about a plant or immigrants would also rage about many other things which also don't deserve it at all, so better to unfollow/unfriend

― the world's undisputed #1 fan of 'Spud Infinity' (Karl Malone), Wednesday, March 9, 2022 4:19 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh these people aren't my friends lol they're just rando followers of national parks who pushed back very emotionally after i posted a note about xenophobic overtones along with this article https://e360.yale.edu/features/native-species-or-invasive-the-distinction-blurs-as-the-world-warms

xp haha, i don't know, i'll just agree to disagree on that, sorry. whacking invasive plants is the kind of family-friendly, normal activity that you can do with children to teach them about ecology

I swear I have never seen “invasive species” associated with human immigration or whatever. Most of this stuff comes over via shipping and our glorious international trade. So this whole “trying to combat invasive species is racism” train of thought is just weird to me.

same

like, if i were teaching 3rd grade or whatever, i think it would be good to take them on a short field trip to learn about invasive plants

I mean the emerald ash borer kills ash trees. We already lost american chestnuts and elms. I’d like to not have another eastern us tree species go bye bye.

well i have some bad news for you

Still a bit confused about whether we're talking about rhetorical framing (which is what the nib article I posted is about) or the actual effects of plants on ecosystems.

why not both?

i'm just postin tbh, drinking some coffee :)

Fascists will seize on anything, and there is evidence that eco fascists are performing exactly the kind of nudge nudge wink wink stuff that map is talking about. It isn’t to say that biodiversity isn’t important, of course it is, but like anything in this cursed world, beware of your fellow travelers who might agree with you on this one issue.

we need a thread about trees. trees are cool

Sometimes I feel like a character in Meredith Monk’s “Memory Game”:

I remember… elm trees
I remember… when it snowed in the DC area

So glad to have spent time confirming map wasn’t imagining things :)

Fascists will seize on anything, and there is evidence that eco fascists are performing exactly the kind of nudge nudge wink wink stuff that map is talking about. It isn’t to say that biodiversity isn’t important, of course it is, but like anything in this cursed world, beware of your fellow travelers who might agree with you on this one issue.

― mardheamac (gyac), Wednesday, March 9, 2022 4:42 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm a huge fan of biodiversity. i don't actually think weedwhacking is terrible. if we could really fight species loss by *ahem* losing species i would advocate for it, but i have my doubts.

that being said, people who are really into protecting wilderness have a vibe, and that vibe is friendly to extreme stances that emphasize purity.

So says California’s civil rights agency in a lawsuit filed against the electric-vehicle maker in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday on behalf of thousands of Black workers after a decade of complaints and a 32-month investigation.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Friday, February 11, 2022 6:24 PM (three weeks ago)

omg ... i feel like there's something here that speaks to the focus of the vocal activists against racism and white supremacy here in Alameda County, which is very vocal and active around these issues. I don't mean this in a negative way. But, considering we had major protests in the past couple months about public school closures (due to budget issues and population shifts) that were centered around race and racism, including teachers on hunger strike ... the fact that there weren't major protests and callouts about this is noteworthy. Maybe it's because the plants are out in the suburbs idk. Again, not wanting to be a "whataboutist" just that I actually wasn't aware of it, and Alameda County activists are very good at letting people know about racist shit going on locally.

* saying "Alameda County" as a way to concisely include Oakland and Berkeley people

kudzu discourse in the south has absolutely had racist overtones (or just tones) to it

Yeah, sorry, there being fascist over or undertones to some rhetoric in the environmental movement doesn't mean that invasive species don't exist and aren't totally destructive to native biodiversity.

To me it just seems like a real baby and bathwater moment.

"Oh these fascists are using the language of ecology to spread racist tropes? Might as well not care about the principles of ecology "

To me it just seems like a real baby and bathwater moment.

"Oh these fascists are using the language of ecology to spread racist tropes? Might as well not care about the principles of ecology "

I wasn't addressing anything you, just adding my pov? Why do you take everything I write as a personal assault on you? Calm down.

Always a good look, telling a woman to calm down.

xp
sorry, I may have muddied things even further. I wasn't even talking about the environmental movement, just kudzu discourse in general (the "green plague" the "thug plant"). I do not think the concept of invasive species is inherently racist

map, not sure if you can read this but it may interest you: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26225593

interesting.

i don't know to what extent this is really present in ecologic discourse but i think any time there's a framing of it in terms of "original = good" and "corrupted = bad" it's a weak point. it doesn't mean that some plants aren't too far on the extreme of hogging resources to be desired in a particular environment. but in general i think people should move away from trying to "preserve" and "restore" and acknowledge that stewarding biological diversity is an act of creation that includes human input in important ways.

i'm not trying to criticize or start a beef or anything, but i'll just note that "stewarding biological diversity is an act of creation that includes human input in important ways" sounds like a slogan for an oil company

i agree, of course, that humans are part of the environment and that the sum of what we do and don't do has an enormous effect on the rest of it