Weekly Picks – February 18, 2024
Credit (from left to right): Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images; Kelly Kline; Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist; Emily Altman / Current Affairs
An assortment from the first few days of the week this time, as I am away travelling.
A confirmation of the declining diversity in species globally, from the most authoritative study of its kind. Policing’s place in our conception of safety and society. An extraordinary look at dispossession and a system of ongoing colonization of Indigenous lands perpetuated by institutions of higher education in the US. Finally, the promises, ideologies, and foibles of the managerial class.
This week’s collection:
- The World Is Losing Migratory Species at Alarming Rates
- Illusions of Safety: On freedom from policing
- Misplaced Trust: Stolen Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system. Climate change is its legacy.
- Against Managerialism
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
1. The World Is Losing Migratory Species at Alarming Rates
“Humans are driving migratory animals—sea turtles, chimpanzees, lions and penguins, among dozens of other species—towards extinction, according to the most comprehensive assessment of migratory species ever carried out.
The State of the World’s Migratory Species, a first of its kind report compiled by conservation scientists under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, found population decline, a precursor to extinction, in nearly half of the roughly 1,200 species listed under the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), a 1979 treaty aimed at conserving species that move across international borders.
The report’s findings dovetail with those of another authoritative U.N. assessment, the 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, that found around 1 million of Earth’s 8 million species are at risk of extinction due to human activity. Since the 1970s, global biodiversity, the variation of life on Earth, has declined by a whopping 70 percent.”
2. Illusions of Safety: On freedom from policing
“The United States has more than ten times the number of gun homicides than most comparable countries. Our rates of childhood gun deaths are terrifyingly high, and—even more panic inducing—they are increasing. Our health care system has gaping holes; 27.5 million people still lack health insurance. Our maternal mortality rates are more than twice as high as those of peer countries; Black maternal mortality rates are more than four times as high. Homelessness is rising. Life expectancy is falling. And the United States has had a dismal pandemic response compared to countries with similar resources.
When people are scared, they want security. Police and prisons seem like an answer. Police can arrest “bad guys” carrying firearms. They can sweep the homeless out of sight, so the general public isn’t reminded of their own precariousness. Yet even though the United States has two million people behind bars and the highest incarceration rate in the world, Americans still don’t feel safe. In fact, policing simply creates more precarity and fear, especially in marginalized communities.
. . .
To say that safety is illusory is not to say that it isn’t a valid and real need. Instead, it is to acknowledge that safety is not something that I can possess in a permanent, personal way. Safety isn’t a thing: it’s a social relation. I’m more or less safe depending on my relationship to others and to my proximity to the resources I need to survive.
. . .
Policing is touted as a solution to all insecurity. But police are themselves a threat. Moreover, police encourage us to see safety in division. They are focused on cordoning off “wrongdoers” based on race, class, sexuality, gender, and respectability. A main consequence of policing is to separate people. But separating people works to separate us from what does provide a sense of stability, and hope, as well as safety—which is the support of others.
This may seem counterintuitive. We’ve been conditioned to seeing other people as threats that need to be managed, controlled, and policed. Without police, movies and politicians constantly tell us, we would descend into a violent war of all against all.”
“Established in 1885, almost 30 years before Arizona was a state, UArizona was one of 52 land-grant universities supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from Indigenous nations to fund a network of colleges across the fledgling United States.
By the early 20th century, grants issued under the Morrill Act had produced the modern equivalent of a half a billion dollars for land-grant institutions from the redistribution of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous lands.
. . .
In combination with other land-grant laws, UArizona still retains rights to nearly 687,000 acres of land — an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles. The university also has rights to another 703,000 subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other resources underground. Known as trust lands, these expropriated Indigenous territories are held and managed by the state for the school’s continued benefit.
State trust lands just might be one of the best-kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. Those two categories, surface and subsurface, have to be kept separate because they don’t always overlap. What few have bothered to ask is just how many of those acres are funding higher education.
. . .
Over the past year, Grist has examined publicly available data to locate trust lands associated with land-grant universities seeded by the Morrill Act. We found 14 universities that matched this criteria. In the process, we identified their original sources and analyzed their ongoing uses. In all, we located and mapped more than 8.2 million surface and subsurface acres taken from 123 Indigenous nations. This land currently produces income for those institutions.
“Universities continue to benefit from colonization,” said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia and a climate researcher. “It’s not just a historical fact; the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.””
“While working-class people and those who study labor history are well aware of the violence frequently inflicted upon workers by bosses and corporations in their pursuit of profit, such history is curiously absent from introductory college textbooks on management. In these books, one will not find any mention of the Pullman strike, the labor movement, or any reference to such terms as the “working class,” “class conflict” or “class consciousness.” The consolation prize is often a perfunctory mention of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and a portrayal of unions as an anachronism and an occasional nuisance that business majors are unlikely to encounter in their future roles as managers. And, of course, the fact that corporate management—at companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, and others—has a checkered history of spending millions of dollars for anti-union campaigns and engaging in unfair labor practices is also conveniently omitted.
. . .
There is an ideology of managerialism which is propagated through the deliberate exclusion of this labor history. Managerialism, an ideology so pervasive as to seem benign, is about the glorification of an elite group of people—managers—who are said to be uniquely qualified to have power over workers and companies. On the receiving end of management—whether one is a delivery worker forced to pee in a bottle, a white-collar worker in a cutthroat industry, or in some situation in between—most workers understand that the worker-boss or worker-management relationship is fraught with conflict. Managerialism cloaks the sources of this conflict—the workplace’s undemocratic, hierarchical, and asymmetric power structures—in humanistic and benevolent terms.
. . .
Managers are romanticized as a professional class that speak a different language, wear expensive business suits (or T-shirts in Silicon Valley) and sit behind big desks in corner offices, enjoy luxurious expense accounts, and, of course, command much higher salaries. This may be the destiny of students who can afford to attend an Ivy League school. But it’s disingenuous and deceptive marketing.”