Everyone knows that sharks are pretty neat, but do you know just how neat? Do you know about the skin teeth? Do you know about the glowing?
A lot of the focus on sharks tends to be on their mouth teeth, but they’ve got much, much more going on, as Ze Frank will explain:
Humanity has the knowledge and resources to deal with climate change; what we lack is the “political will”, which means power in the hands of those who want do do that. This has become something of a mantra for me, because the idea that we need to do more research before we can deal with our greenhouse gas emissions has been annoyingly persistent. Normally, when I talk about this, it’s about energy production, infrastructure, and adaptation, but today it’s about number three on the greenhouse gas list – nitrous oxide. A research team from the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science has concluded that it would actually be pretty straightforward to mostly eliminate industrial nitrous oxide emissions:
Researchers have found that one method of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is available, affordable, and capable of being implemented right now. Nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas and ozone-depleting substance, could be readily abated with existing technology applied to industrial sources.
“The urgency of climate change requires that all greenhouse gas emissions be abated as quickly as is technologically and economically feasible,” said lead author Eric Davidson, a professor with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “Limiting nitrous oxide in an agricultural context is complicated, but mitigating it in industry is affordable and available right now. Here is a low-hanging fruit that we can pluck quickly.”
When greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, they trap the heat from the sun, leading to a warming planet. In terms of emissions, nitrous oxide is third among greenhouse gases, topped only by carbon dioxide and methane. Also known as laughing gas, it has a global warming potential nearly 300 times that of carbon dioxide and stays in the atmosphere for more than 100 years. It also destroys the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere, so reducing nitrous oxide emissions provides a double benefit for the environment and humanity.
Nitrous oxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased at an accelerating rate in recent decades, mostly from increasing agricultural emissions, which contribute about two-thirds of the global human-caused nitrous oxide. However, agricultural sources are challenging to reduce. In contrast, for the industry and energy sectors, low-cost technologies already exist to reduce nitrous oxide emissions to nearly zero.
Industrial nitrous oxide emissions from the chemical industry are primarily by-products from the production of adipic acid (used in the production of nylon) and nitric acid (used to make nitrogen fertilizers, adipic acid, and explosives). Emissions also come from fossil fuel combustion used in manufacturing and internal combustion engines used in cars and trucks.
“We know that abatement is feasible and affordable. The European Union’s emissions trading system made it financially attractive to companies to remove nitrous oxide emissions in all adipic acid and nitric acid plants,” said co-author Wilfried Winiwarter of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. “The German government is also helping to fund abatement of nitrous oxide emissions from nitric acid plants in several low-income and middle-income countries.”
Turns out we do have the political will, at least in some areas. I think it’s worth noting, based on my introduction, that more research is needed for eliminating emissions from things like agriculture, but for those who are new around here, I’m also of the opinion that we should be dramatically changing how we produce food, because continuing to rely on seasonal weather patterns at this stage is a recipe for famine. Still, it’s great to hear that efforts are being made to actually pick this low-hanging fruit. The more progress that’s made on this, the slower the climate will warm. It might not feel slower, but there’s no question that it will be.
It turns out that a lot of what needs to be done is very much within reach, for those controlling the levers of power. Some of those powerful people are actually taking some action, and for the others, well, they should be removed from power, and replaced with people who serve something other than profit. Better yet, maybe we could stop giving individuals so much power to begin with. Regardless, while there is a terrifying amount of work to be done, I find it just a little comforting to know that it is work that’s very much doable.
So, the Supreme Court decided to get rid of Affirmative Action, and the people who’ve been blaming it for their problems are about to discover that those problems haven’t gone away. As usual, conservatives have been led by their bigotry to blame problems on anyone but the powerful, and the Supreme Court was happy to put the force of law behind those petty grievances. There’s a lot to be said about the ways in which this was a bad decision, but I appreciate Beau’s point about manipulation through prejudice.
One of the hallmarks of modern conservatism is their love of making up completely silly attacks, and sticking with them, no matter how much they’re debunked, or how many legitimate attacks may exist. By endlessly insisting that the Clintons are evil incarnate, we now have a sizable portion of the US that believes, without evidence, that Hillary Clinton regularly has people assassinated for getting in her way. It doesn’t matter that it’s nonsense invented by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, it just matters that it has been woven into the tapestry of bullshit that has become conservative “common knowledge”.
Another such myth is the idea that wind turbines are too noisy. There are real reasons to be concerned about wind turbines, like their effects on local ecosystems. Here in Ireland, turbines built in peatlands, and the infrastructure supporting them, have resulted in at least one landslide. Likewise, one could point to the damage done to birds and bats, or even – maybe – the flickering effect of the blades when the sun is behind them in the morning or evening. The problem is that with the exception of the last point, all of the others require acknowledging that ecological harm is something worth considering.
Plus, you know, turbines are big fans, and fans make noise. Sometimes that’s all the “reasoning” that’s needed to make a bit of propaganda stick.
Well, it probably won’t persuade the right people, but some scientists looked into nighttime turbine noise and found that at worst, it’s comparable to normal traffic:
Short exposure to wind farm and road traffic noise triggers a small increase in people waking from their slumber that can fragment their sleep patterns, according to new Flinders University research.
But importantly, the new study also shows that wind farm noise isn’t more disruptive to sleep than road traffic, which was a little more disruptive at the loudest audio level but not at more common levels.
Sleep researchers at Flinders University have studied the impact of exposure to wind farm noise during sleep in three new scientific publications to better understand its impact on Australians.
The study played 20-second wind farm and road traffic noise samples repeatedly during participants sleep using 3 different sound pressure levels to compare their sleep disruption responses between the two different noise types.
On a separate night, the study tested if longer 3-minute noise samples, including very low-frequency wind farm infrasound alone, resulted in sleep disturbance.
The researchers also found that wind farm infrasound at realistic levels was not audible to the human ear during wake and produced no evidence of sleep disruption. These findings were presented at the International conference on Wind Farm Noise in Dublin on June 22, 2023 and are still to be journal peer reviewed.
The project took 5 years to complete and involved over 460 sleep study nights from 68 participants who each spent seven consecutive nights in the sleep laboratory.
I get the impression that this sort of thing is difficult to study.
I don’t know that I would call this conclusive, but it adds to the general thrust of past research – wind turbines certainly aren’t silent, but they’re no noisier than many other aspects of day to day life. I also appreciate that they specifically looked into the infrasound issue, because I’ve definitely seen people – usually NIMBY types – claiming that the real harm comes from sounds that humans can’t detect, but that mess with our bodies. Basically, some people think that these things are sonic weapons. The problem is that nobody has ever been able to detect any sounds that could cause harm.
These researchers clearly recorded what infrasounds do exist, and found that they don’t do squat, so it’s nice to have another bit of research in my back pocket for future use. It won’t help with the true believers or the paid propagandists, but it could be good for folks who’re just trying to figure out what’s going on. If nothing else, it might save someone from falling prey to the Wind Turbine Nocebo Effect.
Back in February, I wrote a post describing how the US government kills people with policy to benefit the capitalist class. It’s a good post, and you should check it out if you haven’t. The basic premise, for those who just want a refresher, is that the government actively creates and maintains poverty, as a way of keeping the population desperate enough to take any job they can get, and to undermine any efforts at using organized labor power to actually push through leftist policies. The USian aristocracy was traumatized by the New Deal, and they’ve spent the generations since then reshaping society to prevent the workers from rising up like that ever again.
I would imagine, however, that some folks who’re a bit more conservative than me might find my claim – that the government kills for capital – to be a bit sensationalistic. They might accept that something like raising interest rates will cause people to lose their jobs, but this is America, right? Surely people aren’t actually dying from poverty! Right?
A University of California, Riverside, (UCR) paper published Monday, April 17, in the Journal of the American Medical Association associated poverty with an estimated 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people 15 years and older.
This estimate is considered conservative because the data is from the year just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused spikes in deaths worldwide and continues to take its toll.
The analysis found that only heart disease, cancer, and smoking were associated with a greater number of deaths than poverty. Obesity, diabetes, drug overdoses, suicides, firearms, and homicides, among other common causes of death, were less lethal than poverty.
“Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes,” said David Brady, the study’s lead author and a UCR professor of public policy. “Poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as all the homicides in 2019. And yet, homicide firearms and suicide get vastly more attention.”
Another finding is that people living in poverty – those with incomes less than 50% of the U.S. median income — have roughly the same survival rates until they hit their 40s, after which they die at significantly higher rates than people with more adequate incomes and resources.
The analysis estimated the number of poverty deaths by analyzing income data kept by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and death data from household surveys from the Cross-National Equivalent File. Deaths reported in surveys were validated in the National Death Index, a database kept by the National Center for Health Statistics, which tracks deaths and their causes in the U.S..
Their findings have major policy implications, the researchers say.
“Because certain ethnic and racial minority groups are far more likely to be in poverty, our estimates can improve understanding of ethnic and racial inequalities in life expectancy,” the paper reads.
Additionally, the study shows that poverty should get more attention from policymakers, said Brady, the director of UCR’s Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty.
Beyond the emotional suffering of surviving family members and friends, deaths are associated with a great economic cost. Experts agree that a death is expensive for a family, community and government, Brady said.
“If we had less poverty, there’d be a lot better health and well-being, people could work more, and they could be more productive,” Brady said. “All of those are benefits of investing in people through social policies.”
Poverty, in addition to making many things more expensive, acts to turn difficult or dangerous situations into potentially lethal ones. The US is by far the worst among the wealthy nations in this regard, and it makes for a good example – an emergency room will treat an emergency, but it won’t provide cancer treatment over a period of months, or screening for a non-emergency that might warn someone of a growing problem. Poverty also pushes people into accepting more dangerous jobs, to avoid the even greater danger of homelessness. On top of all of that (and partly because of all of that), poverty is extremely stressful, and it’s pretty clear by now that stress is, itself, a serious health risk:
People with low incomes and racial/ethnic minority populations experience greater levels of stress than their more affluent, white counterparts, which can lead to significant disparities in both mental and physical health that ultimately affect life expectancy, according to a report from the American Psychological Association.
“Good health is not equally distributed. Socio-economic status, race and ethnicity affect health status and are associated with substantial disparities in health outcomes across the lifespan,” said Elizabeth Brondolo, PhD, chair of an APA working group that wrote the report. “And stress is one of the top 10 social determinants of health inequities.”
Stress-related illnesses and injuries are estimated to cost the United States more than $300 billion per year from accidents, absenteeism, employee turnover, lowered productivity and direct medical, legal and insurance costs, according to the report.
People with lower incomes report more severe (but not more frequent) stress and having had more traumatic events in their childhood, said the report. African-Americans and U.S.-born Hispanics also report more stress than their non-Hispanic white counterparts, stemming in part from exposure to discrimination and a tendency to experience more violent traumatic events.
And all that stress can lead to mental and physical health problems.
“Stress affects how we perceive and react to the outside world,” Brondolo said. “Low socio-economic status has been associated with negative thinking about oneself and the outside world, including low self-esteem, distrust of the intentions of others and the perceptions that the world is a threatening place and life has little meaning. Stress is also known to contribute to depression.”
Stress may also play a role in physical health disparities by affecting behavior. High levels of stress have been consistently associated with a wide variety of negative health behaviors, including smoking, drinking, drug use and physical inactivity. These behaviors and their outcomes (e.g., obesity) are closely linked to the onset and course of many diseases, including diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline later in life, according to the report.
A 2016 analysis indicated that men whose income is in the top 1 percent live almost 15 years longer than those in the bottom 1 percent, according to the report. For women, that difference is almost 10 years.
And this report is about the United States, a country that unequivocally has the resources to end poverty altogether. This system is designed, on purpose to make your life shorter, for the convenience of the rich.
Obviously, my solution for this is to organize both at the community and workplace level, but beyond that, I hope this encourages you to be gentler with yourself, and with those around you. That brighter future we want is still possible, but it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and the whole point of our struggle is that people deserve better lives. That includes you, dear reader. You deserve a good life, with stability, comfort, and real potential for joy, because you are human.
If you want me to be more healthy and less poor, you can sign up at patreon.com/oceanoxia, to toss a few coins in my cap. Even small contributions help, especially given the fact that my immigration status bars me from conventional employment. If you can’t, consider sharing my work around, to help me reach a wider audience. Thanks for reading!
Climate change is an emergency. We’re all clear on that, right? It looks like we’re entering a new phase of warming, with sea surface temperatures rising off the charts, Antarctic sea ice falling off the charts, killer heat waves, and fires stretching across Canada, the need for change has never been more urgent. Regardless of what action we’re talking about, the most likely way for the dysfunctional government of the US to do something real and immediate, is for the president to declare global warming to be a national emergency. I don’t have high hopes that Biden will do much, but the possibility is there, and it increases as things get worse. Naturally, the GOP is responding to that possibility by trying to change the law to remove that power from the presidency, for climate change in particular:
Senate Republicans introduced legislation earlier this week that would prohibit President Joe Biden from declaring a national climate emergency as millions across the U.S. shelter indoors to escape scorching heat and toxic pollution from Canadian wildfires, which have been fueled by runaway warming.
Led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.)—a fossil fuel industry ally and the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee—the GOP bill would “prohibit the president from using the three primary statutory authorities available (the National Emergencies Act, the Stafford Act, and section 319 of the Public Health Service Act) to declare a national emergency solely on the basis of climate change,” according to a summary released by the Republican senator’s office.
Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), another friend of the oil and gas industry, is leading companion legislation in the House.
The updated version of the bill, first introduced last year, comes as Biden is facing mounting pressure from environmental groups to use all of the power at his disposal to fight the climate crisis as it intensifies extreme weather across the U.S. and around the world.
A climate emergency declaration would unlock sweeping executive powers that would allow the president to halt crude oil exports, block oil and gas drilling, expand renewable energy systems, and more.
While Biden reportedly considered declaring a climate emergency amid a devastating heatwave last year, he ultimately decided against it to the dismay of environmentalists.
But the impacts of Canada’s record-shattering wildfires, which are likely to get worse in the coming weeks, have sparked another round of calls for Biden to follow in the footsteps of jurisdictions in more than 40 countries and declare climate change a national emergency.
It doesn’t seem likely that the bill is going to be made into law, but it’s a nice demonstration of where the GOP stands on all of this. Well, the GOP plus Joe Manchin (of course), and Mark Kelly. Basically, it seems like the filibuster and a potential veto are what stand in the way. I do think the filibuster needs to go, but as long as we have it, it’s nice to see it do something good once in a while.
On a personal note, I don’t like that the US is at a point where executive action through a national emergency is the most likely way to get progress on climate change. There are a number of ways in which our current system has been sabotaged in a way that almost encourages people to look to authoritarianism as the best way to get things done. At times, it feels as though the US population is being primed to welcome an eco-fascist, in the name of action, when it becomes impossible to deny the failures of our “democratic” system. Maybe this is just the authoritarian streak that has always existed in the US, but it feels especially dangerous in this moment.
A while back, when my job had me looking for biological impacts of climate change, I remember there being a number of articles about the possibility of tropical diseases spreading north, as the temperature rose. As the world has begun to wake up to the fact that we have to deal with things like killer heat and sea level rise now, that concern has taken a back seat, and I think that’s pretty reasonable. It’s not that there’s no cause for concern there, but I feel comfortable saying that other changes are more pressing. That said, I do want to talk about a spreading disease that does not seem to be related to climate change.
Five people, four in Florida and one in Texas, have caught malaria, and crucially, they caught it locally, meaning that there is some presence within the local mosquito population:
Four cases were identified in southwest Florida and one in southern Texas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The five cases are the first in 20 years to be caught locally in the United States.
“Malaria is a medical emergency and should be treated accordingly,” the CDC said. “Patients suspected of having malaria should be urgently evaluated in a facility that is able to provide rapid diagnosis and treatment, within 24 hours of presentation.”
Malaria is a serious disease transmitted through the bite of an infective female anopheline mosquito, according to the CDC. Although malaria can be fatal, the CDC said, illness and death from the disease can usually be prevented.
There is no evidence the five cases in the two states are related, the CDC said. The four cases in Florida were identified in Sarasota County, and the Florida Department of Health issued a statewide mosquito-borne illness advisory Monday.
Only one case was identified in a Texas resident who spent time working outdoors in Cameron County, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Malaria is rare in the U.S. because during the mid-20th century there was a sustained extermination campaign using insecticides – mainly DDT – that successfully eradicated the disease. This has been good for the general population, especially given the for-profit healthcare system burdening that country, but it does mean that climate is no barrier to malaria’s return. The mosquitoes that spread the Plasmodium parasite already live in much of the US, so all it takes is for an infected person to get bitten, for it to start spreading.
In that light, it’s honestly impressive that the US has been able to keep it from returning for this long, and I honestly hope that record continues. It’s a miserable disease (are there any that aren’t?), and it’s a huge burden on the economies of most if not all nations in Africa. The best way to ensure that the US keeps its mosquitoes nice and malaria-free, would be to invest some of its vast wealth into eradicating it in other parts of the world.
There are efforts to eradicate malaria, with some even saying that we could get very close to that goal by 2050, but it seems like we’re well behind meeting that goal:
Malaria will not be eradicated in the foreseeable future even though it is achievable and would save millions of lives, according to World Health Organization (WHO) experts following a three-year review.
The WHO remains committed to the “disappearance of every single malaria parasite from the face of the planet”, as it has been since the UN organisation was launched in 1948, said Dr Pedro Alonso, the director of its global malaria programme.
But the experts warned in their review that there must not be a repeat of past disasters. The WHO’s first global malaria eradication programme that lasted from 1955 until 1969 rid several countries of the disease, but was not implemented in sub-Saharan Africa, the region most badly affected.
“Falling short of eradication led to a sense of defeat, the neglect of malaria control efforts and abandonment of research into new tools and approaches,” the review stated. “Malaria came back with a vengeance; millions of deaths followed. It took decades for the world to be ready to fight back against malaria.”
Support by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has led to the distribution of millions of insecticide-impregnated bednets, new drugs and a vaccine. Alonso said that, though these tools substantially reduced the numbers of malaria cases and deaths, they are not enough to rid the world of the disease that disproportionately kills small children and pregnant women.
The review was commissioned in 2016 to investigate how eradication could be achieved. It found that there are no biological or environmental barriers to eradication and that global development will probably mean less malaria in the future.
“However, even with our most optimistic scenarios and projections, we face an unavoidable fact. Using current tools, we will still have 11 million cases of malaria in Africa in 2050,” said the review. “In these circumstances, it is impossible to either set a target date for malaria eradication, formulate a reliable operational plan for malaria eradication or to give it a price tag.”
Drug resistance in the malaria parasite has made it harder, but even without that, the bednets and the new vaccine are only 40% effective, said Alonso. “Smallpox had a very safe, highly effective vaccine,” he said. “So does polio, which is close to eradication.
“We will always fall short of eradication because our tools are imperfect,. They have allowed us to make huge progress over the last 15 years, but they are far from being a silver bullet in any shape or form.
The US government can and should be spending more to help with that global effort. It’s partly because it has chosen not to do that, that there will always be a risk of malaria returning to that country. That said, the vast majority of the population has zero chance of getting it right now, so unless you’re in Sarasota County, this probably isn’t something for you to worry about.
I spent today catching up on housework, so today’s post is a video about the Strid at Bolton Abbey. This is a section of the River Wharfe where the river basically turns on its side. It becomes very narrow, and very, very deep. It’s often called the most dangerous river in the world, and while the sheer number of dead probably doesn’t support that, the history of the river does. Basically, if you fall in, you do not come out alive, and you’re not guaranteed to come out at all. The current is strong, and flows through caves as well as the main channel, and it has historically been difficult to get a clear notion of the Strid’s depth. This fellow on Youtube got a little sonar ball to see what he could find, and his equipment measured the Strid at 65 meters deep. For my fellow USians, that’s about 213 feet. That’s the height of a 20-story building, while being a couple meters wide.
I really hope, some day soon, someone is able to make a digital model of the Strid, because I’d love to see what it actually looks like down there.
Edit: I had missed a later video by the same fellow, which gave a slightly shallower reading of 56 meters, which is still astonishingly deep, for such a narrow bit of water.
As most of you are no doubt aware, Wagner Group, a private Russian army claiming to have 25,000 troops, has attacked Russia. The Group’s leader hasn’t declared war on Putin, per se – he’s claiming to be after corrupt leaders in the military. That said, I think it’s a distinction without a difference, at least right now. As usual, I think Beau has a good take on this – the outcome will probably depend on the Russian people, and whether or not they decide to get involved. Given the Wagner Group’s cuddly relationship with neo-Nazis, it seems unlikely to me that their rule would be much different than Putin’s, so it’s not a change that I’d personally be willing to fight for.
I was hanging out with some neighbors the other night, and the subject of gaming came up, along with the fact that the first guild I was in, playing WoW in my college years, was called “Ataxia”; my neighbors, being doctors, did a bit of a double-take. For those who don’t know, ataxia is basically a set of neuromuscular symptoms associated with a few different neurological conditions. I don’t remember why the guild’s founder had chosen that name. The term covers balance issues, coordination issues, sensory problems, and more. It’s pretty broad, and from what I can tell, even if the underlying condition isn’t especially dangerous, those symptoms that are called ataxia are a problem all by themselves. That means that being able to make them go away can be a huge victory – it lets the patient regain control of their body.
I mention all of that, because researchers from the University of California – Irvine have found that plant extracts used by the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations in the Pacific Northwest are a viable treatment, specifically for type 1 episodic ataxia. This is something that could help people all around the world, and it’s a good reminder of the importance of biodiversity, Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous rights. I’ll get into that stuff a little, but first, let’s hear from the researchers:
“Episodic Ataxia 1 (EA1) is a movement disorder caused by inherited mutations in the human KCNA1 gene, which encodes Kv1.1, a voltage-gated potassium channel essential for normal function of the human nervous system,” said Geoffrey W. Abbott, PhD, vice dean of basic science research and professor in the Department of Physiology & Biophysics at the UCI School of Medicine. “We found that extracts of stinging nettle, bladderwrack kelp and Pacific ninebark can all correct function of the mutation-carrying proteins causing a specific form of ataxia.”
Abbott’s research team also found that two compounds contained in these plants, tannic acid and gallic acid, are each able to rescue activity of the EA1-linked mutation-carrying ion channel proteins.
“The plant compounds are the first known compounds to rescue the activity of Kv1.1 carrying EA1-linked loss-of-function sequence variants,” said Abbott. “Gallic acid in particular is of therapeutic interest because it is already available over the counter as a nutritional supplement and is very well tolerated in toxicity studies.”
Individuals with ataxia exhibit abnormal gait, slurring, eye movement abnormalities, difficulties with balance and walking, tremors, and disruption of fine motor skills.
“These mutations can cause other disorders, including epilepsy, and so there is therapeutic potential for those conditions as well,” said Abbott. “We have discovered that where modern synthetic drug development techniques have failed to produce a drug that directly rescues EA1-linked mutant channel function, traditional botanical medicine developed by North American First Nation peoples has succeeded.”
Further research is now needed to explore the efficacy of the plant-derived compounds in preclinical and clinical studies.
“We have made a mouse model of a relatively severe form of human EA1 so that we can test the efficacy and safety of gallic acid and also whole plant extracts,” said Abbott. “If the preclinical studies go well, our goal is to move to clinical trials. Concurrently, we are synthesizing and testing other plant compounds and derivatives to discover other compounds with potential for treating EA1 and related disorders.”
This is really neat, and I hope clinical trials go smoothly and quickly, for the sake of everyone this could help. I also hope, if this bears out, that the researchers get due credit.
That said, I have a couple thoughts. The first is that, as I said earlier, this underscores one of the many reasons why biodiversity is important to us, as humans. There are lots of those reasons, but the fact that we keep discovering new medicines in our fellow organisms is nothing to sneeze at. That is also why Indigenous rights and Indigenous land management practices are so important. As with biodiversity, this isn’t the only reason those things are important. It shouldn’t need to be said, but these days, it feels like it’s better to be explicit, so: Indigenous people deserve rights and autonomy because they are people. Beyond that, Indigenous land management practices tend to shape ecosystems to be beneficial to humans, while actively maintaining and promoting ecosystem health and biodiversity.
This is also why it is absolutely fucked that this discovery will probably end up being the private property of some pharmaceutical corporation, for the prescription version, and some big supplement corporation for the herbal version. I feel like I should apologize for always coming back to capitalism, but it’s hard to talk about big problems in this world without mentioning the economic system that dominates most of the planet.
And so, in addition to biodiversity and Indigenous rights, this is also a good reason to end capitalism. This knowledge comes, in part, from people who were nearly erased in support of capitalism, and the medicine comes from wild plants, and the ecosystems they inhabit. I have no problem with the notion of some sort of socially born price for the work that goes into turning plant into medicine, but that should never be a barrier to access for those who need it. Likewise, capitalism has proven to be disastrous for biodiversity and ecosystem health. We will never know exactly what we’ve lost, in the wanton, profit-driven destruction of so many ecosystems, but looking at discoveries like this, it seems certain that it’s not nothing. This world has so much to offer us, and we can enjoy its bounty, as well as marvels of our own invention, without destroying everything in the process. The path we’re on will lead us to lose everything, but if we have the courage to take a new, and different path, we stand to gain everything despite how close we stand to oblivion.
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