Oceans and Landless Farms: Linking Southern and Northern Shadow Places of Industrial Livestock (1954–1975)

Author(s):  
Floor Haalboom

This article argues for more extensive attention by environmental historians to the role of agriculture and animals in twentieth-century industrialisation and globalisation. To contribute to this aim, this article focuses on the animal feed that enabled the rise of ‘factory farming’ and its ‘shadow places’, by analysing the history of fishmeal. The article links the story of feeding fish to pigs and chickens in one country in the global north (the Netherlands), to that of fishmeal producing countries in the global south (Peru, Chile and Angola in particular) from 1954 to 1975. Analysis of new source material about fishmeal consumption from this period shows that it saw a shift to fishmeal production in the global south rather than the global north, and a boom and bust in the global supply of fishmeal in general and its use in Dutch pigs and poultry farms in particular. Moreover, in different ways, the ocean, and production and consumption places of fishmeal functioned as shadow places of this commodity. The public health, ecological and social impacts of fishmeal – which were a consequence of its cheapness as a feed ingredient – were largely invisible on the other side of the world, until changes in the marine ecosystem of the Pacific Humboldt Current and the large fishmeal crisis of 1972–1973 suddenly changed this.

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-194
Author(s):  
Peter Leman

The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern law. It argues, through a reading of Shaaban Robert’s Kiswahili parable Kusadikika: A Country in the Sky (1951), that the models of oral jurisprudence offered by East Africa’s many writers who touch on, investigate, or otherwise sing about the legacies of colonial law and the crisis of modernity may ultimately offer new ways of thinking about modern law itself. More specifically, these models reveal how “modern law” is not an invention of the West, but a product of a long, complex, and often violent collaboration between the Global North and Global South.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Slocum

The collective politics of climate justice makes the important claim that lowering emissions is not enough; society must also undertake radical transformation to address both the climate and inequality crises. Owing to its roots in the environmental justice movement, addressing systemic racism is central to climate justice praxis in the United States, which is a necessary intervention in typically technocratic climate politics. What emerges from US climate justice is a moral appeal to ‘relationship’ as politics, the procedural demand that communities of color (the ‘frontline’) lead the movement, and a distributive claim on carbon pricing revenue. However, this praxis precludes a critique of racial capitalism, the process that relies on structural racism to enhance accumulation, alienating, exploiting, and immiserating black, brown, and white, while carrying out ecocide. The lack of an analysis of how class and race produce the crises climate justice confronts prevents the movement from demanding that global north fossil fuel abolition occur in tandem with the reassertion of the public over the private and de-growth. Drawing on research conducted primarily in Oregon and Washington, I argue that race works to both create and limit the transformative possibilities of climate politics.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 84-100
Author(s):  
Angharad Valdivia

In this article I explore the Half the Sky (HTS) phenomenon, including the documentary shown on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network in 2014. I explore how the girls in whose name the HTS movement exists are represented in relation to Nicholas Kristoff and six celebrity advocates. This analysis foregrounds Global North philanthropy’s discursive use of Global South girls to advance a neoliberal approach that ignores structural forces that account for Global South poverty. The upbeat use of the concept of opportunities interpellates the audience into participating in individualized approaches to rescuing girls. Ultimately girls are spoken for while celebrities gain more exposure and therefore increase their brand recognition.


1994 ◽  
Vol 30 (5) ◽  
pp. 111-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Holmes

Water pollution has been a steadily growing challenge to many rapidly industrializing regions of the Pacific Rim. Governments have typically responded in the same way as those of the world's older developed countries, by piecemeal development of sewerage, leading ultimately to huge sewage disposal infrastructures in the public sector where resources have not been too scarce. The bureaucratic management of these services is not always perceived as effective by those whom it exists to serve. The paper examines the phenomenon of public bureaucracy, and critically reviews the benefits of the leading alternative, private sector involvement in the management of water pollution control. Using the history of institution building in Hong Kong as an example, it traces the development of an organizational style in response to water pollution issues. It suggests awareness of organizational characteristics and behaviour can help to improve service, but concludes that research into organizational effectiveness in pollution control is needed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Scully

<p>Guy Standing is among the most provocative and influential analysts of the rise of precarious work around the world. His writing is part of a wave of global labour studies that has documented the spread of precarious work throughout the Global North and South. However, this article argues that by treating precarity around the world as a single phenomenon, produced by globalisation, the work of Standing and others obscures the different and much longer history of precarious work in the Global South. This article shows how many of the features that Standing associates with the contemporary “precariat” have long been widespread among Southern workers. This longer history of precarity has important implications for contemporary debates about a new politics of labour, which is a central focus of Standing’s recent work.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 69 (6) ◽  
pp. 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Waitzkin

We have entered a period of history fraught with danger but also rich with revolutionary potential. It is time to move beyond our illusions that electoral politics and reforms of the capitalist state can achieve the revolutionary changes that we all know are urgently needed. As we begin to reorient our struggles there are important lessons to be learned from the recent history of the global South.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


Author(s):  
Sarah Robertson

This chapter charts the long history of travel writing about the US South and explores the continued fascination and simultaneous repulsion with its poor whites. It discusses neo-colonial approaches to the region and poverty in the work of writers including Pamela Petro, V.S. Naipaul, and Paul Theroux, and the cosmopolitan perspectives advanced by writers such as Bill Bryson and Eddy L. Harris. It compares representations of Atlanta as the embodiment of the New South with romanticized accounts of rural poverty and proposes that the realities of contemporary poverty either go unrecognized or are aligned with the economics of the Global South rather than with US economics that shape the Global North. It critically examines stereotyping, appeals to authenticity and questions the impact of tourism on the region.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-141
Author(s):  
Anna Cristina Pertierra

Metaphors of family play a particular part in representing and justifying the public role of elite families and media empires in Mexico and the Philippines, two countries on opposite sides of the Pacific that feature linked histories of Spanish colonial heritage and intimate connections to the cultural and economic history of the modern United States. The media industries of Mexico and the Philippines share some important characteristics: powerful commercial television networks are operated by prominent elite family companies, whose multimedia empires wield political and economic influence nationwide. An industry model of elite family dominance is reflected in the ways that contemporary television programs, hosts, and viewers understand themselves as belonging to sorts of ‘television families’. The nature of Mexican and Philippine television industries as family businesses writ large merits more extensive comparative historical exploration. These parallel cases draw attention to how media may be productively compared and studied across the Pacific regions of Asia and the Americas.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nicholas Hoare

<p>The recent resurgence of interest in the ‘other side’ of New Zealand’s colonial history has reaffirmed the need to view the nation’s history in its Pacific context. This historiographical turn has involved taking seriously the fact that as well as being a colony of Britain, New Zealand was an empire-state and metropole in its own right, possessing a tropical, Oceanic empire. What has yet to have been attempted however is a history of the ‘other side’ of the imperial debate. Thus far the historiography has been weighted towards New Zealand’s imperial and colonial agents. By mapping metropolitan critiques of New Zealand’s imperialism and colonialism in the Pacific (1883-1948), this thesis seeks to rebalance the historiographical ledger. This research adds to our understanding of New Zealand’s involvement in the colonial Pacific by demonstrating that anticolonial struggles were not only confined to the colonies, they were also fought on the metropolitan front by colonial critics at once sympathetic to the claims of the colonised populations, and scathing of their own Government’s colonial policy. These critics were, by virtue of their status as white, metropolitan citizens, afforded greater rights and freedoms than indigenous colonial subjects, and so were able to challenge colonial policy in the public domain. At the same time this thesis demonstrates how colonial criticism reflected national anxieties. The grounds for criticism generally depended on the wider social context. In the nineteenth-century in particular, critiques often contained concerns that New Zealand’s Pacific imperialism would disrupt the sanctity of ‘White New Zealand’, however as the twentieth-century wore on criticism bore the imprint of anti-racism and increasingly supported indigenous claims for self-government. By examining a seventy year period of change, this thesis shows that at every stage of the ‘imperial process’, New Zealand’s imperialism in the Pacific was a subject open to persistent public debate.</p>


Author(s):  
Jason M. Colby

Since the release of the documentary Blackfish in 2013, millions around the world have focused on the plight of the orca, the most profitable and controversial display animal in history. Yet, until now, no historical account has explained how we came to care about killer whales in the first place. Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean's greatest predator. Historically reviled as dangerous pests, killer whales were dying by the hundreds, even thousands, by the 1950s--the victims of whalers, fishermen, and even the US military. In the Pacific Northwest, fishermen shot them, scientists harpooned them, and the Canadian government mounted a machine gun to eliminate them. But that all changed in 1965, when Seattle entrepreneur Ted Griffin became the first person to swim and perform with a captive killer whale. The show proved wildly popular, and he began capturing and selling others, including Sea World's first Shamu. Over the following decade, live display transformed views of Orcinus orca. The public embraced killer whales as charismatic and friendly, while scientists enjoyed their first access to live orcas. In the Pacific Northwest, these captive encounters reshaped regional values and helped drive environmental activism, including Greenpeace's anti-whaling campaigns. Yet even as Northwesterners taught the world to love whales, they came to oppose their captivity and to fight for the freedom of a marine predator that had become a regional icon. This is the definitive history of how the feared and despised "killer" became the beloved "orca"--and what that has meant for our relationship with the ocean and its creatures.


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