History of Environmental Economics, continued

Revenons à nos moutons.

In medieval times in Europe, the catholic church got really powerful and said usury was evil, which made them pretty much anti-growth. Humans go back to a deeper dependency with their environment and we're looking at lots of small pretty self-sufficient villages over big cities. Use of money goes down, and global trade slows way down, apart from a few Venetians who keep traveling to Asia. {Side note, this only holds for western Europe — the middle ages are also when the Islamic Golden Age flourished and China had a giant navy to trade all over the Southeast Pacific and Indian Ocean with Hindu, Islamic, and East African spheres of the world...} Anyway, western europe's economy is contracting and there's a huge loss of knowledge and know how compared to empire days. Since interest is outlawed for good catholics, the only people who can lend at a gain are Jewish people and rich Bourgeois merchants of a variety of faiths who lent mostly to nobles who rarely paid anyone back (in cash) anyways, though sometimes lenders could negotiate better titles or advantages with their leverage. According to Prof Levrel, not much happens to environmental economics until capitalism starts forming in the 14th & 15th centuries in the city states of present-day Italy (Venice, Genova, Pisa, etc — but not Rome, who was still in its post imperial slump.) They revived the former empire's colonial trade routes for commerce, setting up comptoirs aka trading ports and start lending to other countries (and former colonized territories) like Spain who "needs" the money for its reconquista. {It is very hard to type these notes without falling down a million wikipedia rabbit holes, so just noting that I'm not verifying any of this right now but that I have doubts about these historical narratives.}

Anyway! Growth comes back as an idea, and the printing press gets invented. It's getting culturally acceptable to take huge losses for the chance of some gain, because the gains might be gigantic, so nobles and rich lenders start gambling with their gains to to finance colonial expeditions, arming boats and making port cities like Saint Malo and Nantes and Bordeaux super rich off trade (but let's be real, it's really theft). In 1602, we get the first corporation = the Dutch East India Company, selling shares on a stock market. Protestants are all about it, saying money is actually reward for hard work that's earned and deserved, not this amoral horrible thing :/

From then on, the centers of capitalism shift every other century from Italian city states to the 7 Dutch provinces (16th-17th c), to the UK (18-19th) to the USA (20th) to probably China (21st). All of this is fueled by the evil fuckery of the triangular trade (Europeans abduct people from Africa to sell their labor in the Americas to bring back sugar and gold and expensive commodities back to Europe). On a plant level, it's also when Europeans start classifying their pillaged goods and Buffon and Linneus start organizing a very anthropocentric catalog of plants to make sure the colonizers are trading the same stuff worldwide. This is also when Jardin d'Acclimatations start appearing to try and grow plants from elsewhere in Europe, to massive failure but a few key successes: potatoes, potatoes and corn (my fav, but a huge problem to grow worldwide since it's a tropical plant that needs a fuckton of water.)

In 1658, Charlton writes about animal economy. In 1714 Carl von Carlowitz (what a name!) first uses the term sustainability — Nachhaltigkeit in German and here's more for the German speakers on the 300th anniversary of the term — when writing about mining optimization over time, noticing that we need to let forest regenerate if we want to keep exploiting them. Some ancient romans had also noticed that, and nobles sort of practiced it with exclusive forest rights so that they could keep all the forest bounty for themselves (hence, Robin Hood) but again, knowledge loss leads to repeated mistakes for biodiversity.

It's also getting apparent that there's a pattern, what humans want is not really in agreement with what the planet needs.


Environmental Economics, Part I

This class is taught by the very awesome Harold Levrel, who likes to welcome us back from breaks with little quizzes on animals. He very rightly pointed out that even most people steeped in environmental issues don't always know how to recognized the birds, plants and creatures around us {side note: this is sometimes called plant neglect and there's been some scary studies about how the average kid can recognize way more Pokémon that living things...}

The first quizz was on the cutie accenteur mouchet (dunnock in english).

History of Environmental Economics

Economics is the the optimal management of scarce resources, and environmental economics is the sum of interactions between humans and our environment. It's basically about survival, how we organize ourselves around the material we need to reproduce our societies. There's a ton of ways to do this — capitalism works through private property and salaried labor and markets — but the ones we prefer are trading, bartering, gifting and returning favors, and all the other alternative ways to share our resources.

In the Pleistocene (which started 2.5 million years ago and went till 11,700 years ago, also known as the Ice Age brrrrrr) humans were part of the food chain, as both predator and prey. Collective organizing and alliances (with wolves for example) for hunts, which varied seasonally along with the berries, nuts, and plants gathered. They already were using exosomatic tools {exosomatic is a fancy word that means outside of the body, endosomatic is part of our body — so hands are endosomatic tools, hammers are exosomatic} and if they ran out of food, they moved to a different spot. They used fires to move herds of prey into ravines, and likely hunted a bunch of big animals to extinction, since the arrival of humans onto the continents now known as the Americas and Australia coincides with mass disappearances of ancient elephant-like gomphotheres (though a warming climate might have also been a factor, archeologists are pretty much currently in agreement that humans where the key accelerator of their demise, though the cool thing with archaeology is that new sites are found all the time that constantly update our timelines and understandings of all this!)

In Neolithic times, our ancestors get started on horticulture, encouraging the growth of some edible plants in forests, and figuring out how to plant stuff in fertile river beds after seasonal floods (hence the Fertile Crescent.) They also start domesticating animals (or more likely, they domesticated themselves) and we slowly started getting ourselves off the food chain. We start making stuff (pottery! clothes! weapons!) and exchanging stuff. There's probably some notion of shared ownership given that people want to reap what they sow, and have some guarantee that the effort put in bears fruit. It's debated that domestication followed the decline and extinction of megafauna, as a way to get meat without having to go super far, which would make it the first adaptation to a planetary limit. Adapting allows us to control variability in the environment, and irrigation to augment soil fertility looks like it starts around then too. This happened simultaneously all over the world with different plants and animals, usually around rivers, coasts and estuaries. Also, boats! Cool invention. And proto-currencies like shells. These experiments in sedentarisation make reserves logical, since they can help tide over shortage spells during winters to avoid having to migrate.

Where our favorite foods were first tamed. Thanks China for the millet and Mexico for the corn <3

By 200 BCE, we're got religions - shared beliefs amongst distant peoples - and Rome has one million people. Cities of that scale won't come back for another 20 centuries, so this is pretty huge. Globalization is really kicking off, we're getting super specialized regions making just one thing (olives) and we've got roads and sea routes to move all that stuff around.

side note: school is pretty eurocentric and franco-français but here's a rare world map about what was happening elsewhere

now back to Rome, where they extracted wine and wheat from colonizing Gaulle. ils sont fous ces romains

Empires start minting coins and giving themselves a monopoly on violence to administering armies/cops to levy taxes. The economy gets itself out of a direct link to the environment, and you don't really need to know or care how things got from A to B or who made them out of what and when, as long as you have enough coins to get a widget at the market. Social classes start to stratify, and we get philosophy (yay) and philosopher Xenophon names Oikos {home} Nomos {management} aka economics aka home ec. Relatedly, the word ecology from the name root, and it means home knowledge <3.

From the get go, Aristotle marks the difference between finance (the science of money, and making money for money's sake, amoral usury, wasteful decadence etc etc) and economics (managing means.) This gets us back to the key notion of capacity, and the inherent limits to our ecosystems. If we fuck around with our home management oikos nomos, we find out we're out of a home. Bad management leads to crisis and collapses of all kinds, often in the form of diminishing returns like when you deforest all of your empire to make cereal fields until you can't feed your growing empire. Then people get mad at the emperor, especially if he's behaving ostentatiously and conspicuously consuming lavish ridiculousness. Plus there was a heat wave that led to more desertification in North Africa, and the endless conquests to enslave more people and grab more resources was getting more and more costly. Also, no new technology miraculously appeared to save them. And speaking of, I'm at 8% battery and it's late, so we'll get to feodal times later.

ciao Romans arrivederci


Day Two ~ first real day of class

09.07.2023

Everyone in this Masters program is studying Biodiversity, Ecology and Environment (BEE) and then there's seven subdivisions (spanning health to paleontology to museum studies to urban planning). I'm in Société and Biodiversité (SeB) joining in for the 2nd year of Socio-Ecological Transitions and Transformations track (TTSE). This program is only in its 5th year, and of the 15 of us, more than half are going back to school after really fascinatingly varied life paths — my classmates include doctors, architects, activists, engineers, biologists, actors, farmers and social workers, to name just a few. Everyone is super friendly (probably because very few of us are Parisian :)

We'll have classes in econ, methodology, ecology, law, a bunch of field work, and more specialized smaller classes TBC. Some of our classes are shared with the other SeB students who are on the urbanism (BAT) or cultural anthropology track (DCDB).

We're starting with environmental economics, which covers history, accounting and modeling. I'll sort my notes as cleanly as possible, with the big caveat that ecologists love acronyms, and they usually get flipped between languages (ex: GMOs are OGMs in French). First up is environmental economics!

the garden of plants


Day One

09.06.2023

Louis XIII built the Jardin des Plantes as his private medicinal plant stash in 1635. It's also a (literal) zoo, where they put the king's menagerie after beheading him during the revolution. That's also when the French revolutionaries turned the Louvre from a palace to a public museum (vive la révolution!)

The Jardin des Plantes is also the home of the Natural History Museum, which was a school since the start, and was one of the first schools to teach in French (not Latin). It's only a grad school and all the teachers are also researchers and/or work at the museum. We're still waiting on our student IDs but once we have those, more on all the cool things we get to visit.

For now, most of our classes are in Césure, a very cool temporary Tiers Lieu (Third Space) run by Plateau Urbain in university buildings that need to get de-asbestos'd and renovated. More on them later!

Caricature of a giraffe who lived in the Jardin des Plantes (she got there via a boat ride to Marseille and a long walk to Paris after a Sudanese lord gave her to the Egyptian Viceroy, who regifted her to the king of France. She died of bovine tuberculosis, because giraffes shouldn't drink cow's milk )


Hello World

09.06.2023

This is a test. J'espère que vous allez bien.

Je m'apelle Kira and I'm studying Biodiversity & Socio-Ecological Transformations and Transitions at the Natural History Museum in Paris this year. And so can you :)

This blog is my notes. I'll try to keep it tagged by themes:

SCIENCE :: LAW :: CITIES :: DIY :: BOOK :: MOVIES :: ART :: MEMES :: RECIPES :: PLANTS :: SLUGS :: ???

... though it'll probably be messy (and hopefully useful?)

When I'm wrong about something, please tell me nicely.

Hope you enjoy it,

K.

PS: French translations to be brought to you by l'Académie Francis, on French timing.

it's always a good time to go to climate school