[PEN-L:7302] Re: Re: Harvey, Leibniz & Marx

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ken Hanly wrote:

>In some respects modern industrial type farmers are more conscious of the
>environment than earlier farmers and certainly
>the quality of food and its safety has increased rather than decreased. Surely
>as farms have modernised
>and industrialised the average life expectancy has gone up rather than
>down and
>consumer protection ensuring cleanliness and safety of food.
>has increased rather than decreased.

These facts are, of course, relevant to the larger argument, which draws on
truths truer than mere facticity itself.

There's a very interesting article by J. Donald Hughes on the Mayan
collapse in the March 1999 issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism. (For a
journal edited by a "confused old man," CNS is pretty damn sharp.) Well
before the arrival of the Europeans, the Mayans were living in cities and
massively altering the landscape  with irrigation, quarrying, and the
manufacture of ceramics. For all the Mayans old reputation of pacifism -
derived from pre-1950s archeology, which studied only the upper classes and
their mythmaking - they were furious warriors. And apparently they did
themselves in by creating an ecological catastrophe - overfarming,
excessive waste production, deforestation, extinction of forest species,
and energy shortages (because of the increasing scarcity of wood, which
they consumed at the rate of one ton per person per year). Starvation and
social collapse set in, and by the year 1000, the population had declined
by 75-85% from its peak.

Doug