#Institute of Ecology

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[fatehbaz]

"defending civilization against bugs"

lol the mosquito sculpture

see Pratik Chakrabarti's Medicine and Empire: 1600-1960 (2013) and Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (2012)

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Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and in December 1899 he gave a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce [...]. [H]e argued that "in the coming century, the success of imperialism will depend largely upon success with the microscope."

Text by: Rohan Deb Roy. "Decolonise science - time to end another imperial era." The Conversation. 5 April 2018.

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[A]s [...] Diane Nelson explains: The creation of transportation infrastructure such as canals and railroads, the deployment of armies, and the clearing of ground to plant tropical products all had to confront [...] microbial resistance. The French, British, and US raced to find a cure for malaria [...]. One French colonial official complained in 1908: “fever and dysentery are the ‘generals’ that defend hot countries against our incursions and prevent us from replacing the aborigines that we have to make use of.” [...] [T]ropical medicine was assigned the role of a “counterinsurgent field.” [...] [T]he discovery of mosquitoes as malaria and yellow fever carriers reawakened long-cherished plans such as the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) [...]. In 1916, the director of the US Bureau of Entomology and longtime general secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejoiced at this success as “an object lesson for the sanitarians of the world” - it demonstrated “that it is possible for the white race to live healthfully in the tropics.” [...] The [...] measures to combat dangerous diseases always had the collateral benefit of social pacification. In 1918, [G.V.], president of the Rockefeller Foundation, candidly declared: “For purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples, medicine has some decided advantages over machine guns." The construction of the Panama Canal [...] advanced the military expansion of the United States in the Caribbean. The US occupation of the Canal Zone had already brought racist Jim Crow laws [to Panama] [...]. Besides the [...] expansion of vice squads and prophylaxis stations, during the night women were picked up all over the city [by US authorities] and forcibly tested for [...] diseases [...] [and] they were detained in something between a prison and hospital for up to six months [...] [as] women in Panama were becoming objects of surveillance [...].

Text by: Fahim Amir. "Cloudy Swords." e-flux Journal Issue #115. February 2021.

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Richard P. Strong [had been] recently appointed director of Harvard’s new Department of Tropical Medicine [...]. In 1914 [the same year of the Canal's completion], just one year after the creation of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine, Strong took on an additional assignment that cemented the ties between his department and American business interests abroad. As newly appointed director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work of United Fruit Company, he set sail in July 1914 to United Fruit plantations in Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. […] As a shareholder in two British rubber plantations, [...] Strong approached Harvey Firestone, chief executive of the tire and rubber-processing conglomerate that bore his name, in December 1925 with a proposal [...]. Firestone had negotiated tentative agreements in 1925 with the Liberian government for [...] a 99-year concession to optionally lease up to a million acres of Liberian land for rubber plantations. [...]

[I]nfluenced by the recommendations and financial backing of Harvard alumni such as Philippine governor Gen. William Cameron Forbes [the Philippines were under US military occupation] and patrons such as Edward Atkins, who were making their wealth in the banana and sugarcane industries, Harvard hired Strong, then head of the Philippine Bureau of Science’s Biological Laboratory [where he fatally infected unknowing test subject prisoners with bubonic plague], and personal physician to Forbes, to establish the second Department of Tropical Medicine in the United States [...]. Strong and Forbes both left Manila [Philippines] for Boston in 1913. [...] Forbes [US military governor of occupied Philippines] became an overseer to Harvard University and a director of United Fruit Company, the agricultural products marketing conglomerate best known for its extensive holdings of banana plantations throughout Central America. […] In 1912 United Fruit controlled over 300,000 acres of land in the tropics [...] and a ready supply of [...] samples taken from the company’s hospitals and surrounding plantations, Strong boasted that no “tropical school of medicine in the world … had such an asset. [...] It is something of a victory [...]. We could not for a million dollars procure such advantages.” Over the next two decades, he established a research funding model reliant on the medical and biological services the Harvard department could provide US-based multinational firms in enhancing their overseas production and trade in coffee, bananas, rubber, oil, and other tropical commodities [...] as they transformed landscapes across the globe.

Text by: Gregg Mitman. "Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia's Plantation Economy." Environmental History, Volume 22, Number 1. January 2017. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity and context.]

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[On] February 20, 1915, [...] [t]o signal the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), [...] [t]he fair did not officially commence [...] until President Wilson [...] pressed a golden key linked to an aerial tower [...] whose radio waves sparked the top of the Tower of Jewels, tripped a galvanometer, [...] swinging open the doors of the Palace of Machinery, where a massive diesel engine started to rotate. [...] [W]ith lavish festivities [...] nineteen million people has passed through the PPIE's turnstiles. [...] As one of the many promotional pamphlets declared, "California marks the limit of the geographical progress of civilization. For unnumbered centuries the course of empire has been steadily to the west." [...] One subject that received an enormous amount of time and space was [...] the areas of race betterment and tropical medicine. Indeed, the fair's official poster, the "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules," [the construction of the Panama Canal] symbolized the intertwined significance of these two concerns [...]. [I]n the 1910s public health and eugenics crusaders alike moved with little or no friction between [...] [calls] for classification of human intelligence, for immigration restriction, for the promotion of the sterilization and segregation of the "unfit," [...]. It was during this [...] moment, [...] that California's burgeoning eugenicist movement coalesced [...]. At meetings convened during the PPIE, a heterogenous group of sanitary experts, [...] medical superintendents, psychologists, [...] and anthropologists established a social network that would influence eugenics on the national level in the years to come. [...]

In his address titled "The Physician as Pioneer," the president-elect of the American Academy of Medicine, Dr. Woods Hutchinson, credited the colonization of the Mississippi Valley to the discovery of quinine [...] and then told his audience that for progress to proceed apace in the current "age of the insect," the stringent sanitary regime imposed and perfected by Gorgas in the Canal Zone was the sine qua non. [...]

Blue also took part in the conference of the American Society for Tropical Medicine, which Gorgas had cofounded five years after the annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Invoking the narrative of medico-military conquest [...], [t]he scientific skill of the United States was also touted at the Pan-American Medical Congress, where its president, Dr. Charles L. Reed, delivered a lengthy address praising the hemispheric security ensured by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and "the combined genius of American medical scientists [...]" in quelling tropical diseases, above all yellow fever, in the Canal Zone. [...] [A]s Reed's lecture ultimately disclosed, his understanding of Pan-American medical progress was based [...] on the enlightened effects of "Aryan blood" in American lands. [...] [T]he week after the PPIE ended, Pierce was ordered to Laredo, Texas, to investigate several incidents of typhus fever on the border [...]. Pierce was instrumental in fusing tropical medicine and race betterment [...] guided by more than a decade of experience in [...] sanitation in Panama [...]. [I]n August 1915, Stanford's chancellor, David Starr Jordan [...] and Pierce were the guests of honor at a luncheon hosted by the Race Betterment Foundation. [...] [At the PPIE] [t]he Race Betterment booth [...] exhibit [...] won a bronze medal for "illustrating evidences and causes of race degeneration and methods and agencies of race betterment," [and] made eugenics a daily feature of the PPIE. [...] [T]he American Genetics Association's Eugenics Section convened [...] [and] talks were delivered on the intersection of eugenics and sociology, [...] the need for broadened sterilization laws, and the medical inspection of immigrants [...]. Moreover, the PPIE fostered the cross-fertilization of tropical medicine and race betterment at a critical moment of transition in modern medicine in American society.

Text by: Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Second Edition. 2016.

[ki1ldeer]

Little doodle thing of older Them™️ because I think about them sometimes (and it’s Finn’s canon birthday today. Happy canon birthday Finn)

[othmeralia]

Let's play a game!

This board game is Ecology: The Game of Man and Nature.

The object of the game is to lead a population through four ages of Civilization, Hunting, Agricultural, Industrial, and Atomic, to reach an ideal Environmental Age.

Urban Systems, Inc. was a consulting and research firm, whose president, Richard H. Rosen, was an ecologist and environmental engineer. While teaching undergraduate air pollution classes at Harvard, Rosen produced a number of anti-pollution board games for educational purposes.

There are a few more photos on our digital collection site, so please click here to check them out!

Image citation: Science History Institute. Ecology: The Game of Man and Nature. Photograph, 2022. Science History Institute. Philadelphia.

[jammerskrik]

super tempted to take a three month gig as an oyster farmer just to shake things up 🦪

[queering-ecology]

Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ. Tapestry Institute. https://tapestryinstitute.org/mitakuye-oyasin/. Referencing Sicungu Lakota Elder Albert White Hat.

Their website defines itself thusly: Tapestry Institute weaves Indigenous Knowledge to life through activities and publications that use Indigenous ways of knowing, learning about, and responding to the natural world. The particular post I am referencing is about the Lakota phrase ‘Mitakuye Oyasin’ (also spelled as Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, mitákuye oyásʾį). “The Lakota phrase Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ describes Reality by addressing it as “All My Relations.” All humans, all animals, all plants, all the waters, the soil, the stones, the mountains, the grasslands, the winds, the clouds and storms, the sun and moon, stars and planets are our relations and are relations to one another. We are connected to each other in multiple and vital ways. When one is in pain, all are harmed. When there is justice for one, there is more justice for all.” 

This quote is important as it confirms the idea that ‘Mitakyue Oyasin’ is more than merely a meaningful phrase, but is a way of describing Reality. It also helps describe the sheer scope of what the words mean. What is also important to recognize is the belief in pain and justice also being interconnected as this can be connected to feminist ideas expressed within much queer ecology. But, the post also emphasizes that even though ‘All our Relations’ is the most common translation of the words, “the phrase actually bears within it rich layers of additional meaning that cannot be easily translated into English. It’s important to point this out because words and ideas, stories and rituals, are bound together into a single reality that must be respected, not misappropriated”. 

Finally, the video interview with Albert White Hat adds even more complexity: the wisdom in these words are not “merely a collection of historical ideas or words” but “ a system of powerful knowledge applicable to the lives and struggles of people right now”. This ultimately supports my thesis; that indigenous worldviews (in this case, Mitakuye Oyasin) can be in symbiosis/symbiopoesis with queer ecology--the concept is a tool (a much more besides) that can be applied to the struggle we face in healing our planet.

-- Symbiosis is any type of a close and long-term biological interaction between two biological organisms of different species

-- ‘Symbiopoesis’ or “how organisms can be intimately involved in each other’s development” (squid and light emitting bacteria, bees and pollination, acacia trees and ants, wasps and figs). (Rahder)

[gd-rd-me-of-gd]

A few other updates: -I joined this study group and I’m excited to learn about Walter Benjamin! -Check out the Ka album. It’s every bit as phenomenal as they say. -Gal pals

[a-modernmajorgeneral]

It takes an hour to drive from Tórshavn all the way up north to Hvannasund, a fishing village of 248 people. Marshfield and Østrem won’t tell me if someone tipped them off, or if there’s another way they heard about the hunt. But they do share their plan: to document everything, even if it means breaking the law by flying a drone over the site of the hunt.

The roads are drilled straight through mountains to save the trouble of climbing up or around, and each time we exit a tunnel, I catch my breath. Waterfalls flush down emerald hills, dotted with small sheds for sheep, and tumble into glittering fjords. Marshfield talks about how nervous he is. It’s his first grind; he’s unsure how he’ll handle the blood.

Østrem has more experience with it. He was here for a couple of months in 2022 after several years of volunteering with other animal rights organizations in Oslo, Norway. He’s horrified by the way people treat animals around the world, including at fish farms in Norway. To him, the grind is just one example of the way humanity abuses other beings.

Marshfield is similarly resolute. He got involved with Sea Shepherd about eight years ago, after seeing an online photo of a slaughtered whale that left him deeply upset. His activism gradually scaled up; he started by donating, then sharing things on Facebook and selling T-shirts. Eventually, he joined Sea Shepherd campaigns in Sicily and Iceland. Now, he’s here. He grows more solemn as we drive, steeling himself to see a dead whale in person.

Watson’s followers have a long history of fighting the grind. Activist groups, including Sea Shepherd, first started protesting the tradition back in the 1980s, putting the archipelago under global scrutiny. “People were telling us it didn’t look nice,” says Bjarni Mikkelsen, marine mammal specialist at the Faroe Marine Research Institute.

According to Mikkelsen, environmentalists grew troubled over whether the hunt was hurting pilot whale populations. “People walked around with banners, saying it was unsustainable,” he says. Around the same time, sighting surveys were launched to estimate population levels. The North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, a body comprising the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, and Norway, has since carried them out every six years.

Using standard international sampling techniques, surveyors most recently estimated the population of pilot whales in the Faroes–Iceland area to be around 380,000. Survey to survey, this number changes, depending on timing and coverage. But scientists consistently report abundances that can sustain the Faroese catch. “The population is high compared to other species in the North Atlantic,” Mikkelsen says, and there’s no significant downward trend.

Greenpeace eventually abandoned their opposition. But Sea Shepherd held firm. In 2014, under Watson’s leadership, around 70 volunteers descended on the islands for Operation GrindStop, donning black hoodies stamped with Sea Shepherd’s distinctive Jolly Roger insignia and physically intervening in hunts by jumping into the bay. The following year, the organization returned with the same conduct, resulting in fines, arrests, and court cases.

Resentment for the disturbances lingers among many of the Faroese, especially since Sea Shepherd Global continues to fight the hunt, though in softer ways. “Sea Shepherd’s history with the Faroe Islands has been quite aggressive and colorful,” says Valentina Crast, the group’s current Stop the Grind campaign coordinator. Now, she’s working on a tamer strategy, focused on building a local community of supporters.

Watson’s new foundation, meanwhile, wants to maintain the same level of pressure Sea Shepherd once brought. “We’re living in a world where there is no enforcement of international conservation laws,” Watson says. “The high seas are the Wild West. And we’re sort of vigilantes.”

The 73-year-old self-proclaimed pirate (a title confirmed by a United States Court of Appeals in 2013) is against the killing of whales on moral grounds, no matter who does it, or how. He has carried out his brand of vigilantism for nearly 50 years. Talking to him is like talking to a buccaneer who shares stories of sirens and sword fights, except Watson’s tales consist of ramming Portuguese whaling vessels, sinking Icelandic ships, and tricking Soviet soldiers. He’s been criticized for targeting Indigenous peoples over their traditional subsistence hunting practices, including seal hunters in Canada and teenage whalers in Alaska.

After the crackdown by the Faroese government, protests quelled for a while. But in recent years, social media and an increase in tourism have put the grind back in the spotlight. The Faroe Islands now receive about 100,000 visitors a year, and the nation is often included on top destination lists for its dramatic landscapes. During the summer when seabirds breed, bird lovers flock to spot puffins, guillemots, and other species that nest by the thousands on the steep cliffs. Hilton opened a hotel here in 2020, and the local airline is testing out a weekly direct route from New York. Unaware tourists might encounter a whale hunt occurring in the harbor, as those on a docked cruise ship did last summer; in that instance, most were not happy about the spectacle. Such stories, along with rather gruesome photos of the hunt itself, can be shared worldwide. The Captain Paul Watson Foundation seeks to capitalize on this.

Seizing its moment after splitting from Sea Shepherd, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation sent its first vessel—the John Paul DeJoria, registered in Jamaica and named after the cofounder of John Paul Mitchell Systems hair products—to the Faroe Islands in July 2023 to stop the whale hunts. But the Faroese government barred the ship’s entry to the archipelago via executive order. Ultimately, Watson made only two brief, albeit dramatic appearances, entering the nation’s waters once in an unsuccessful attempt to reach a grind and again 10 days later at news that someone had spotted a pod.

After the second breach, Jamaica stripped the ship’s registration at the request of the Faroese government, and the John Paul DeJoria was ported in the United Kingdom. Land crew, including Marshfield and Østrem, remained in Tórshavn to document what they could.

[fshoulders]

Putting the cosmos in a sack

I'm transcribing quotes from David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years before returning it to the library, and there are a lot of block paragraphs I agree very strongly with. This one touches (unexpectedly perhaps for a book about the concept of money?) on one of my preoccupations: the pathological cultural belief that humans are not part of an ecosystem.

He is expanding on his argument that the reduction of everything in our lives to market value is originally the product of violence -- only a looting army, a debt collector, or a burglar would see everything in your life as what they can get for it -- and requires a system of coercive violence to uphold.

Even more, by turning human sociality itself into debts, they transform the very foundations of our being-since what else are we, ultimately, except the sum of the relations we have with others-into matters of fault, sin, and crime, and making the world into a place of iniquity that can only be overcome by completing some great cosmic transaction that will annihilate everything. Trying to flip things around by asking, “What do we owe society?” or even trying to talk about our “debt to nature” or some other manifestation of the cosmos is a false solution — really just a desperate scramble to salvage something from the very moral logic that has severed us from the cosmos to begin with. In fact, it’s if anything the culmination of the process, the process brought to a point of veritable dementia, since it’s premised on the assumption that we’re so absolutely, thoroughly disentangled from the world that we can just toss all other human beings — or all other living creatures, even, or the cosmos — in a sack, and then start negotiating with them.

[oysterie]

I just need to find someone working in my field and just ask them like specifics w degree etc thats all i need i dont understand how masters work

[bywandandsword]

The idea that people are separate from the Earth has it's roots in colonialism, colonial exploitation, and the Enlightenment. Western science originated in this period and, because nothing exists in a vacuum, was influenced by the ideas of racial/cultural superiority, the idea that the land and those that lived on it were an extractive resource, and the idea that Western, mostly upper-class society were the default and superior, and therefore above the resources (land/people/animals/ect.) they sought to exploit. All these became justifications of colonial power and blended into early western science's development, and even now, there in an insistence in science, especially the hard sciences, that the researcher is an unbiased force, when in reality, everything from what is studied, the way a study is conducted, to the conclusions the researcher draws are all influenced by the culture the researcher lives in.

The persistent idea that any part of this country was uninhabited or had an unmanaged landscape is directly a result of colonial powers trying to strip the legitimacy of indigenous peoples from their sovereignty and open that land up to colonial settlement and/or resource exploitation. Most of the National Parks were formed in this way. But the western mindset of nature and the land being separate is at the basis of a lot of how western environmental movements operate, which then immediately comes into contention with indigenous communities who point out that that has never been the case and who are trying to reassert their land and resource rights.

If you want to read more, "As Long as Grass Grows" by Dina Gilio-Whitaker is a really accessible and in depth look at a lot of this

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Two historians (Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz) and a sociologist (Wang Feng) at the University of California's Irvine campus* wrote landmark books arguing that whatever we look at – ecology or family structures, technology and industry or finance and institutions, standards of living or consumer tastes – the similarities between East and West vastly outweighed the differences as late as the nineteenth century.

*Wong left Irvine in 2005, but moved only 40 miles, to the University of California's Los Angeles campus; and Wang had a co-author, James Lee, but he, too, teaches just forty miles from Irvine, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris

[craigtowens]

Links & Quotes

Some links and quotes that caught my eye this week.

We are to love the sinner but hate the sin. This is hard to do, especially when the sin they are doing is directed at us and making us angry! Jesus gave us a great example in these times of high anger: withdraw. Check out my full message “A Christlike Response to Skeptics.” I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel. “In many pagan religions the purpose…

[fatehbaz]

was thinking about this

To be in "public", you must be a consumer or a laborer.

About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.

"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being a laborer.

Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts (factory labor, poverty, etc., increase), the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 establishes full-time police institution(s) in London. The "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The Irish Constabulary of 1837 sets up a national policing force and the County Police Act of 1839 allows justices of the peace across England to establish policing institutions in their counties (New York City gets a police department in 1844). The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)

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"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.

Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by the outlawing of loitering which de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations.

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"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.

Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to the land dispossession, poverty, and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion" (Scramble for Africa, US "American West", nation-building, conquering "frontiers"), as agricultural "revolutions" of imperial monoculture cash crop extraction resulted in ecological degradation, and as major imperial infrastructure building projects required a lot of vulnerable "mobile" labor. This coincides with and is facilitated by new railroad networks and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.

All of this in just a few short years: In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's policing institutions exponentially expand surveillance and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide, later used by US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan based its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduced "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, the racist expulsion of the "Tacoma riot".

Punished for being Algerian in France. Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. Arrested for whatever, then sent to do convict labor. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during a catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya.

Mobility and confinement, the empire manipulates each.

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"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view". Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.), you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app.

Too ill, too poor, too exhausted, too indebted to move, you are trapped. Physical barriers (borders), legal barriers (identity documents), financial barriers (debt). "Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. "Vagrancy" since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Concretizing and weaponizing caste, corralling people, anchoring them in place, extracting their wealth and labor.

You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.

[marcelogardinetti]

Ecorium de Seocheon

[gsasustainability]

Keeping in mind that buildings are our built habitats; They would embody resilience and resourcefulness if collectively envisioned

An Academic Research Project for the Advanced Research Centre of the University of Glasgow under the Glasgow School of Arts and in association with the Centre for Sustainable Solutions of the University of Glasgow and GALLANT, by Shravya Dayaneni. Supervisor: Dr Simon Beeson

As cities grapple with environmental challenges ranging from dwindling resources to climate change, the need for sustainable socio-ecological inhabitation has never been more pressing. But what if, instead of merely sustaining, we aim to regenerate? The article highlights a comprehensive project intervention, through a collaboration with ‘the Advanced Research Center’ of the University of Glasgow. This project not only aims to address social, economic and environmental challenges but also enriches conventional retrofitting methods with a holistic solution for introducing interdependence and ecological democracy into organisational/ institutional spheres. It is possible to promote regeneration through the seamless integration of science, technology, fiscal prudence, and biomimicry with regenerative design. This paradigm shift to ‘Regerative Design’ requires us to look at buildings merely as built habitats, like a microdiverse environment or a nest that must solve for all of its needs.

Keywords: Ecological Integration, Biomimicry, Social Innovation, Symbiocene Adaptation, Ecosystem Services, Interdependence, Institutional Buildings, Regeneration, Design Thinking, Fiscal Mindfulness, Social-Identity Theory, Behavioral Modeling, Strategic Visualization, Resiliency, Dynamism, Holistic Design, Ecological-Social-Economic Convergence, Design Emergence

Regenerative Design; The most fascinating ‘Bio-reflective Design Paradigm’

Conventional views often perceive regenerative design goals as impractical or utopian. This project dispels such notions by marrying financial viability, environmental efficiency, and social well-being. It aims to reintroduce the principle of interdependence into modern structures, a concept illustrated by Martin Avila (2022) in his book ‘Designing for Interdependence - A Poetics of Relating’. Inspired by Bill Caplan's "Buildings Are for People - Human Ecological Design" (2016) has been invaluable in focusing attention on the human experience and in recognizing challenges as opportunities for creativity, rather than obstacles. Overall, the idea of interdependence and human-ecological design emphasizes the idea of collaboration, and how people and their environment are connected. It's about creating a relationship between people, their environment, and the structures created by them, and how they all interact to create a system that works for everyone. By reintroducing the concept of interdependence, the aim is to create a system that is more equitable, and that accounts for the human experience.

The Participatory Approach: Why Stakeholder Involvement is Crucial? Buildings are for people

Given the complexity of real-world challenges, a participatory approach involving diverse stakeholders ensures that the project stays grounded and effective. Initial consultations have set the stage for a long-term commitment to ‘ecological democracy’ as defined by Hester, R.T. (2006) and sustainable practices. It was important to delve deep into participatory methodologies, crafting a simulator tool (image in the next section) enriched with contextual theories like utilizing occupants’ motivations and socio-cultural relationships of users with the buildings such as ‘Social-Identity Theory’ Hogg (2006) as an opportunity to drive eco-responsible practices in our conventional built-environments.

A Versatile Tool: The Eco-systematic and Bio-mimetic Simulator

Developed through design synthesis, this tool serves as both a practical guide and a framework for understanding the larger ecological and social implications of built environments. The tool employed a unique "eco-systematic innovations deck," a curated set of cards containing innovative ecological concepts to service interventions thoroughly researched and colour-coded for different user personas, and a 'bio-mimetic library' for ecological visual inspirations. These elements could be laid out on a canvas that includes spaces for notes, challenges, and evaluative measures, offering a versatile tool for stakeholders. The goal was to enable the co-creation of the possible synergies for a problem or a scenario with a socio-economic-ecological convergence for all the stakeholders including, University estate management, building management, funders, users-occupants, and visitors and make it inclusive for all types of workplace-minority-groups like ‘parents’, ‘the differently-abled’ and even ‘the pet-owners’.

There are three pillars to the project

1. Navigate Opportunities: Investigate practical avenues for embedding ecosystem services within built frameworks and aligning human structures with ecosystems.

2. Maximize Benefits: Forge integrative solutions that cater to both human and non-human species, all the while respecting financial limitations, to establish a model of regeneration.

3. Visualize Possibilities: Employ design thinking to facilitate the visualization of ecological integration and civic innovation to drive informed choices for all stakeholders' management.

Toward a New Standard in Building Design

This project aims to position the ARC Building as a paradigm of ecological-social-economic convergence, laying down a blueprint for future developments in institutional architecture. We are at an inflection point where our buildings can either continue to be part of the problem or can become part of the solution. The conceptualization of this project takes a bold step in the latter direction, and it sets the stage for similar initiatives across the globe. By forging an environment where the ecological, social, and economic dimensions are considered as a unified entity, the goal is to lead the change in creating a new standard for what our built habitats could and should be.

Practical Implementation for Building Investors as well as Managers

For practical application with building owners and managers, addressing their concerns and highlighting the long-term benefits of regenerative design is crucial. It's recognized that some solutions may involve initial investments, and emphasis should be placed on how these investments can yield significant returns, not only in terms of sustainability but also in staff recruitment, welfare, happiness, productivity, and retention.

1. Emphasizing Benefits to Building Owners and Managers:

   - Staff Recruitment and Retention: The implementation of regenerative design can enhance a building's appeal as a workplace, fostering a healthier, more engaging environment that can attract and retain talented employees.

   - Productivity and Well-being: A regenerative building promotes the well-being and productivity of occupants. Improved indoor air quality, access to green spaces, and a connection to nature within the workplace are factors that enhance employee satisfaction and performance.

2. Managing Risk:

   - Quick Return on Investment: It's understood that building owners and managers may have concerns about financial implications. Many regenerative solutions offer a quick return on investment by reducing operational costs, such as energy consumption and maintenance expenses.

   - Budget and Financial Synergies: The regenerative approach aligns with budget and financial requirements, aiming to provide cost-effective solutions that don't strain financial resources but, instead, contribute to long-term savings and sustainability.

3. Realistic Expectations and User Involvement:

   - Setting Realistic Expectations: It's important to manage expectations realistically, acknowledging that not all ideas may be immediately implemented, and some may require ongoing evaluation and adaptation.

   - Inclusivity for All Users: The approach considers all users of the building, including employees from diverse backgrounds, parents, differently-abled individuals, and even pet owners. The aim is to create an inclusive environment that benefits everyone.

By addressing these concerns and emphasizing the tangible benefits of regenerative design, the adoption of these principles becomes not only practical but also highly rewarding for building owners and managers. Together, the creation of environments that are not just sustainable but truly regenerative contributes to a more resilient and prosperous future.

What Lies Ahead

The future of this project includes rigorous testing of the 'Eco-systematic and Bio-mimetic Simulator' tool, refinement based on stakeholder feedback, and eventually scaling it for broader applications. With looming climate crises and dwindling resources, it is projects like these that offer a glimmer of hope for taking the best solutions possible and a roadmap for building resilient, nurturing, and sustainable communities for the future.

Measuring Success is a crucial part

Based on stakeholder meetings with experts like Dr Jaime Toney, the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Solutions, the project intends to set forth measurable objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be evaluated in two years' time.

By incorporating a holistic view that synergizes ecological, social, and economic dimensions, this project promises not just to build but to regenerate and revive built environments, making a compelling case for a more resilient and sustainable urban society and development.

Acknowledgements

A special thanks to all our stakeholders, including the Centre for Sustainable Solutions, the University of Glasgow, the GALLANT project, ARC Building Management and the Glasgow School of Arts for their invaluable insights, collaboration and ongoing commitment to Responsible Development. And a shoutout to Dr Simon Beeson and Dr Michael Pierre Johnson for guiding the project.