NM's blog

For those who always resign and blame 'human nature' whether it is the cause of wars, violence or obscene inequality and 'greed'. ************* A 2015 comprehensive meta-analysis of more than 2,500 twin studies between 1958 and 2012, covering almost 18,000 complex human traits, found (unsurprisingly) that identical twins are typically more similar than fraternal twins. But their personalities are certainly not identical. For the 568 traits that were descriptions of temperament or personality, the study found that 47% of differences could be attributed to genetic differences. The remaining portion, it concluded, must be accounted for by environmental influences. Other studies   seem to support this  – only around 40-50% of personality differences are genetic. But even when combining a range of different DNA variants, the effects on personality remain smaller than anticipated. Heritability estimates currently span  from 9% to 18%  for Big Five personalit...

If the arrangement of society is bad (and ours is), and a small number of people have power over the majority and oppress it, every victory over Nature will inevitably serve only to increase that power and that oppression. This is what is actually happening.  — Leo Tolstoy, On Life and Essays on Religion , 1898

Nature is man’s  inorganic  body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man  lives  on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. — Karl Marx, 1844

[C]apitalism is historically coherent—if “vast but weak”—from the long sixteenth century; co-produced by human and extra-human natures in the web of life; and cohered by a “law of value” that is a “law” of Cheap Nature. At the core of this law is the ongoing, radically expansive, and relentlessly innovative quest to turn the work/energy of the biosphere into capital (value-in-motion). If the destructive character of capitalism’s world-ecological revolutions has widely registered—the “what” and the “why” of capitalism-in-nature—there has been far too little investigation of how humans have made modernity through successive, radical reconfigurations of all nature. How capitalism has worked through, rather than upon nature, makes all the difference. —Jason Moore,  Capitalism in the Web of Life

Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis

 It sounds a very compelling book. Part of a review of Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas

Could ‘bioregions’ be the answer?

A liberal view that doesn't answer the questions: How could capitalism, a system based on profit and capital accumulation, protect nature? Could capitalist production develop technological means to maintain both: private accumulation and safe eco-systems? Could that happen without exploitation and obscene inequality, and with continuous growth? We are seeing some movement towards green transport, for example. To what an extent though such a movement could be extended to encompass the major global industries without at the same time jeopardising the rate of profit? Will states be able to impose new ways of production in a system where private owenership of such industries reign? Or, will states themselves carry out a change in investing in green and sustainable ways of how we produce, eat, and move? Coronavirus is a warning to us to mend our broken relation with nature . Who's "us"? "Us" implies that we are all responsible and we should work together...

Nature's wake-up call to complacent civilisation

"Viruses mutate all the time to be sure. But the circumstances in which a mutation becomes life-threatening depend on human actions. But the economic and demographic impacts of the spread of the virus depend upon preexisting cracks and vulnerabilities in the hegemonic economic model. Public authorities and health care systems were almost everywhere caught short-handed. Forty years of  neoliberalism  across North and South America and Europe had left the public totally exposed and ill-prepared to face a public health crisis of this sort, even though previous scares of SARS and Ebola provided abundant warnings as well as cogent lessons as to what would be needed to be done. Corporatist  Big Pharma  has little or no interest in non-remunerative research on infectious diseases (such as the whole class of coronaviruses that have been well-known since the 1960s).  Workforces in most parts of the world have long been socialized to behave as good neoliberal sub...

Only a rational economy can stop the devastation of nature An economy that abolishes the private ownership of the means of producing wealth and finance, and combines democratic production, distribution and consumption.

A book review A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (The book is currently half price on Verso website and even cheaper as an e-book)

"the void of intimacy and the powerful distraction of our tech devices."

Iran's most wild and beautiful places