/lit/ - Literature

What are some good books about environmentalism/conservation from the 1980's or earlier, back when 'population growth' was the biggest fear? This stuff is interesting in retrospect, like a time-capsule of postwar western anxieties. I've already read Ehrlich's 'Population Bomb' as well as 'Desert Solitaire' and other collected essays by Edward Abbey.

>>17719811
For me, it's Edward Abbey. He was considered to be on the political left in the US of his era. Hard to imagine a leftist writing something like this today:

>Immigration and Liberal Taboos

>>In the American Southwest, where I happen to live, only sixty miles north of the Mexican border, the subject of illegal aliens is a touchy one. Even the terminology is dangerous: the old word 'wetback' is now considered a racist insult by all good liberals; and the perfectly correct terms illegal alien and illegal immigrant can set off charges of xenophobia, elitism, fascism, and the ever-popular 'genocide' against anyone careless enough to use them.

>The only acceptable euphemism, it now appears, is something called undocumented worker. Thus, the pregnant Mexican woman who appears, in the final stages of labor, at the doors of the emergency ward of an El Paso or San Diego hospital, demanding care for herself and the child she's about to deliver, becomes an "undocumented worker." The child becomes an automatic American citizen by virtue of its place of birth, eligible at once for all of the usual public welfare benefits. And with the child comes not only the mother but the child's family. And the mother's family. And the father's family. Can't break up families can we? They come to stay and they stay to multiply.

>What of it? say the documented liberals; ours is a rich and generous nation, we have room for all, let them come. And let them stay, say the conservatives; a large, cheap, frightened, docile, surplus labor force is exactly what the economy needs. Put some fear into the unions: tighten discipline, spur productivity, whip up the competition for jobs. The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause. (Neither group, you will notice, ever invites the immigrants to move into their homes. Not into their homes!)

>Both factions are supported by the cornucopia economists of the ever-expanding economy, who actually continue to believe that our basic resource is not land, air, water, but human bodies, more and more of them, the more the better in hive upon hive, world without end - ignoring the clear fact that those nations which most avidly practice this belief, such as Haiti, Puerto Rico, Mexico, to name only three, don't seem to be doing well. They look more like explosive slow-motion disasters, in fact, volcanic anthills, than functioning human societies. But that which our academic economists will not see and will not acknowledge is painfully obvious to los latinos: they stream north in ever-growing numbers.

(1/3)

>>15967619
The modern western left supports globalisation whole-heartedly through mass-immigration. I don't think that an 'anti-immigration'/nativist left even exists anymore. The last holdouts were probably some of the French communists, who have traditionally had a more regionalist outlook than other leftist groups. But for the most part, all of the immigration sceptics have been thoroughly purged from the modern left. You'd have to go to Asia or elsewhere to find an anti-immigration leftism.

>>13879132
Here's a famous quote from an oldschool leftist related to the topic. How many leftists today abide by the same principles?

What are some good books about ecology/environmentalism? Other than Desert Solitaire.

>>13432939
This is incoherent, because modern 'SJWs' want to throw open the borders, while oldschool leftists (including pic related) correctly argued that this would be dumb and injurious to the recipient nations. What I have noticed in the past few years is that when I describe myself as a closed-borders/nativist leftist, the SJW faction flips out and replaces that description with "Nazi," which is a genuinely low-IQ way of interpreting things.

>>12739293
Desert Solitaire. It unironically turned me into a closed-borders anti-immigration zealot despite otherwise being a leftist.

>>12679891
>Anyway the establishment is still pretty fucking conservative.

In what sense? "The establishment" in 2019 has congealed into a weird mix of globalist techno-oligarchs and their paid lackeys inside of "democratic" political systems. There aren't many modern artists who address the sheer weirdness of all of this stuff. Adam Curtis actually sort of does, which makes his films interesting despite their parodic aspects.

Or here's another example of the modern neoliberal blob devouring what used to be "leftism" - Edward Abbey was considered some kind of anarcho-primitivist-leftist when he wrote "Desert Solitaire" in 1968. He was considered to be on the left because his politics did not square up with what was considered "conservative" at the time. He was a staunch environmentalist, among other things. He didn't change his positions, but by the mid-1980's, he was being attacked as a racist/fascist because of his strong support for immigration restrictions. His sense was that the fragile ecology of the southwest didn't need more people trampling it, and certainly not illiterate Latin peasants with a propensity to litter everywhere.

Was he a "reactionary"? That would have been a bizarre characterization of his ideology in the late-60's, but by today's standards, leftists consider him Hitler Jr. And in this, leftists are 100% doing the bidding of the open-borders corporatist oligarchy.