Lost Biodiversity

A study published in Science by lead author Tim Newbold of the United Nations Environment Programme and University College London finds that 58 percent of the land area has undergone a loss of biodiversity beyond the "safe" boundary. Chris Mooney explains.

As a conservative or precautionary standard, the researchers therefore assumed that a decline of more than 10 percent of species abundance in a given area (compared with what that abundance was before human interference) represented crossing into a danger zone for biodiversity. But their study found that overall, across the globe, the average decline is already more like 15 percent. In other words, original species are only about 85 percent as abundant (84.6 percent to be precise) as they were before human land-use changes.

The Privilege of Ignorance

The title is a phrase that stuck with me from Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. From my (limited) experience, white people don't examine our privilege too often or at all. I imagine many would deny any such thing. It feels like a personal failing to not understand better or do more. It's so much easier to sit around doing this thing for no-one than actually get involved.

But maybe it can lead to ... somewhere. Michael Eric Dyson tries to get through.

We all can see the same videos. But you insist that the camera doesn’t tell the whole story. Of course you’re right, but you don’t really want to see or hear that story. 

At birth, you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead when the encounter is over.

Those binoculars are also stories, bad stories, biased stories, harmful stories, about how black people are lazy, or dumb, or slick, or immoral, people who can’t be helped by the best schools or even God himself. These beliefs don’t make it into contemporary books, or into most classrooms. But they are passed down, informally, from one white mind to the next. 

The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you know. Your knowledge of black life, of the hardships we face, yes, those we sometimes create, those we most often endure, don’t concern you much.

Update (September 12):  Natalia Khosla and Sean McElwee examine the lack of acknowledgement and the significance of white privilege.

Acknowledging white privilege could present an opportunity for making progress on racial justice. But the problem is that when most pundits talk about race in America, they don’t focus on the complicity of whites in creating racial inequality or the equal stake of whites in eliminating it. They focus instead on nonwhites, so that race gets portrayed as a “people of color” issue instead of as everyone’s shared issue. ... [R]ace problems aren’t people of colors’ problems; they are white people’s problems with people of color, and they are the negative effects of this on everyone through racism and inequality in society.

Update (February 25, 2018):  John Feffer explains the dangers of majoritarianism and a "besieged majority".

After the victories of the civil rights movement and other social movements, some white people have acquired the mentality of a besieged majority: They fear that they will lose their remaining privileges, like members of an elite frequent flyer program forced to sit back in economy class. Perhaps only a minority of white people — mostly white men — feel like a besieged majority. But for the next decade or so, before demographics decisively downgrade white status, this group will continue to flex its political muscle.

Endless Cycle

In apparent retaliation for two more shooting deaths of black men by police, an "ambush-style" attack at a Dallas protest killed five officers and wounded seven.

Is this what the second amendment is for? They shoot you and so you shoot them? How do more guns help when trained officers can't stop an attack? But, of course, now is not the time to talk about regulation. Heather Digby Parton:

[T]he NRA had nothing to say about police officers killing black citizens who were legally carrying guns this week. Their minions in the GOP have refused to do anything about the ongoing gun violence after mentally ill people shot up college campuses and movie theaters and elementary schools and night clubs. Thousands of children dying in gun accidents every year doesn’t move them. They cannot even bring themselves to regulate the semi-automatic weapons which are responsible for at least 65 out of 81 mass shootings since 1982.

So I’m not going to suggest that a mass shooting of [12] police officers will move them to end the slaughter either. They’ll just say the police need more and better guns. That’s their answer for everything. And we’ll all adjust and go on until the next one and the one after that. I have no idea what it will take to break this cycle.

Update (July 10):  Leonard Pitts considers the "madness" of these recent events.

There is a sickness afoot in our country, my friends, a putrefaction of the soul, a rottenness in the spirit. Consider our politics. Consider the way we talk about one another — and to one another. Consider those two dead black men. Consider those five massacred cops.

Deny it if you can. I sure can’t. Something is wrong with us. And I don’t mind telling you that I fear for my country.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article88403142.html#storylink=cp

Socialism or Barbarism

In his collection of essays, How Did We Get Into This Mess?, George Monbiot notes that corporate power tends to overwhelm any opposition.

So few are the countervailing voices ... that the dominate forms of power remain almost unchallenged.

Take, for example, the ideology that now governs our lives. Not only is it seldom challenged; it is seldom even identified. ... What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Monbiot goes on to identify our time as the Age of Loneliness and offers solace to his fellow travelers.

So if you don't fit in; if you feel at odds with the world; if your identity is troubled and frayed; if you feel lost and ashamed, it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.

Neal Gabler argues that technology is not producing polarization so much as the segmentation of society.

Social media have helped create an America in which there is not only very little national conversation, common experience, sense of community or even very much desire to cross the boundaries that divide us; they have helped create an America of 300 million separate entities, each chronicling its own individual activities. You don’t have to imagine what this does to our politics. You’re living it. 

Under these circumstances, a healthy political system cannot really exist. I am not sure healthy individuals can either. [Virginia] Heffernan ... say[s] that in this digital age of non-stop communication, “we’re all more alone than ever.” That may be the most profound and enduring effect of the media on our politics. We are now so divided we may not be able to unite; we are so divided we live within an aching metaphysical malaise of unconnectedness. We have more “friends” than ever, but feel more friendless. 

Ours is an extremely discontented country today, and a seemingly discontented world, too. We usually chalk it up to economic stress, inequality, globalization, disempowerment — the usual suspects. But that media-induced malaise that afflicts us, may be the anxiety of loneliness at a time when not only we have lost one another, we’ve lost our sense of self, the one anchor that might root us in the storm. We are adrift — some from the digital world and some within that world — and so are our politics.

Out of this fragmentation comes a need for answers -- a need for someone who can speak for those who feel left behind in what John Feffer calls America B.

Falling behind economically and feeling betrayed by politicians on both sides of the aisle, America B might have moved to the left if the United States had a strong socialist tradition. In the 2016 primary campaign, many of the economically anxious did, in fact, support Bernie Sanders, particularly the younger offspring of America A fearful of being deported to America B. ... [H]owever, America B has always been more about rugged individualism than class solidarity. Its denizens would rather buy a lottery ticket and pray for a big payout than rely on a handout from Washington (Medicare and Social Security aside). [The Republican nominee], politically speaking, is their Powerball ticket.

Above all, the inhabitants of America B are angry. They’re disgusted with politics as usual in Washington and the hypocritical, sanctimonious political elite that goes with it. They’re incensed by how the wealthy have effectively seceded from American society with their gated estates and offshore accounts. And they’ve focused their resentment on those they see as having taken their jobs: immigrants, people of color, women. They’re so desperate for someone who “tells it like it is” that they’ll look the other way when it comes to [the nominee’s] inextricable links to the very elite who did so much to widen the gap between the two Americas in the first place.

Feffer says this year's election, with an expected Democratic win, won't resolve these issues.

The real change will come when a more sophisticated politician, with an authentic political machine, sets out to woo America B. Perhaps the Democratic Party will decide to return to its more populist, mid-century roots. Perhaps the Republican Party will abandon its commitment to entitlement programs for the 1%. 

More likely, a much more ominous political force will emerge from the shadows. If and when that new, neo-fascist party fields its charismatic presidential candidate, that will be the most important election of our lives.

 All the more reason, according to Daniel Denvir, to insist on a socialist alternative.

If nobody knows who the bad guys are, the left’s job is to name them. Clinton will likely defeat [the Republican nominee] in November. Defeating [neo-fascism], however, will require a powerful vision for transformative change. Instability will only increase as global warming disrupts the ecological foundation of people’s lives and millions of refugees and migrants flee a swath of disintegrating nation states stretching from Africa through the Middle East to South Asia. Racist and xenophobic hate can’t be defeated unless the cresting anger is organized to fight the super-rich and not one another.

Highest Income Inequality

Emmanuel Saez uses IRS data to show that the top one percent of earners is doing better than ever while the bottom 99 percent are marginally better off since the recession.

Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson use historical data to show that U.S. income inequality is nearing the highest point in U.S. history.

Also, despite some gains, a Pew Research Center study shows that race and gender income gaps persist.