#also i've been with melanie since like 2015 so

[fatehbaz]

Hi, your blog is great, a very good resource and useful. I was wondering if I could ask, have you ever read a book/article about the life cycle of product, I mean an examination of the resource extraction/labor/factory/transport process and how each stage is damaging to people/environment? I've been looking and nothing is useful. Sorry if my English is not great. Thank you for your blog!

Hello. Thank you for such a supportive and kind message. You are always welcome to send me messages. I know that I’m often annoying, so I’m happy if anything I’ve shared/posted has provided an interesting resource.

Thank you for trusting me enough to send me this message, but I don’t think I’m qualified to answer it too well. I think that some of my friends on this site would be better able to provide some recommendations for you. For example, I don’t know anything about the transportation stage of products, or how providers/corporations eventually come to move, say, edible produce from the agricultural source, across borders, and into a grocery store (though I’m mostly-sure that colonial/imperial/corporate powers have obscured these mechanisms of food production, in many/most cases purposely, in order to absolve metropolitan consumers of any potential realization of guilt or complicity in violence). But I don’t know anything about product life cycles generally. So I don’t think I’m a great person to ask, y’know? For example, in the case of, say, lithium production, I’ve not found or read any, like, comprehensive book or singular text that, like, follows the entire process from extraction, through refinement, to use, and then eventual disposal. But I’m sure there are books/articles/texts out there which do describe this process. And that’s why I’d invite someone else, one of my friends or whomstever, to offer recommendations, since I can’t.

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That said, I’ve got a couple of recommendations. I’m relatively more interested in plantations; the life cycle of some few very specific products (rubber; palm oil; uranium; lithium); more broad discussion of the damage wrought from industrial-scale resource extraction and development (Anthropocene and Plantationocene concepts; planetary urbanization); or the violence of the first/initial stages of the product life cycle (wastelanding; colonial/imperial institutions dispossessing people of land; poisoning/contamination from mining). So I’ve got some resources here related to these concepts.

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The concept of “planetary urbanization” or “planetary urban fabric” basically refers to how, at least in the past two or three centuries, there is no corner of the planet that has been spared ecological damage by or escaped the resource extraction cycles of industrial development and major urban areas. This is the idea that every corner of Earth, no matter how apparently “remote” or “wild”, is altered by and implicated in industrial resource extraction. (For example, even “remote” Siberia hosts pipelines and giant mines that service major urban areas. Ice-loss in Greenland and algae blooms in the open ocean are related to anthropogenic climate alteration. Isolated forests of the Great Bear Rainforerst are still penetrated by logging roads. Industrial cropland disrupts the soil of the West African Sahel, and then Saharan dust storms sweep into the Caribbean; etc.)

Some introductions to the concept: Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “What World? Reframing the World as One City.” December 2016. ////////// Lindsay Bremner. “The Urban Hyperobject.” Geoarchitecture. 24 August 2015. ////////// Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw. “Radical urban political-ecological imaginaries.” Derive. May 2014. ////////// And here’s a compilation post I put together, with short excerpts from several articles about planetary urbanization.

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Anyway, seems like this might be more closely related to what you’re looking for. These are some recent things I’ve read that seem related to the violence of the product life cycle.

-- I wrote a post about the violence of the life cycle of uranium (including initial extraction and mining; refinement; and disposal, imposing violence at every stage of production) in Navajo Country and the Colorado Plateau (includes maps of uranium mines; radioactive fallout zones; and radioactive waste disposal sites).

-- Andrea Knutsen. “Scarcity and the Suburban Backyard.” Edge Effects. 1 September 2020. [This article is about food and grocery store supply chains in North America during crises and how British imperialism in the Caribbean in recent centuries relied on the imposition of artificial scarcity and the maintinence of a racialized economic hierarchy which still influences contemporary food supply chains.]

-- Gaston Gordillo. “The Metropolis: The Infrastructure of the Anthropocene.” In: Infrastructures, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene. Edited by Kregg Hetherington. 2019. [This article is about the stages of dispossession, policy, and marketing that support massive soy agriculture/extraction in Latin America, and how soy is an example of how contemporary products involve dispossession at multiple scales in multiple regions driven by forces that transcend national boundaries. This article also describes planetary urbanization.]

-- Martin Arboleda. “Financialization, totality, and planetary urbanization in the Chilean Andes.” December 2015. [This article is about lithium in Latin America, how lithium extraction relates to the mass “financialization of life” in the neoliberal era, and how local dispossession in Chile is driven by investors and companies from North America.]

-- Yanis Iqbal. “The Ravages of Lithium Extraction in Chile.” 15 July 2020. [This article is about “lithium imperialism” and how so-called “sustainable” electric cars in European and North American markets rely on dispossession and ecological/human violence in Latin America.]

-- Gregg Mitman. “Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia’s Plantation Economy.” Environmental History. December 2016. [Article about the early-20th-century extraction and production of rubber via corporate plantations in West Africa and how US medical institutions and Harvard doctors relied on plantations for access to research; also discusses coffee and fruit plantations in Latin America.]

-- Post I wrote about the difference between a forest and a tree plantation, focused on resource extraction on Mapuche land in the Valdivian temperate rainforest region of “Chile.”

-- Mongabay has done consistent work covering palm oil plantations which service European and North American food markets, especially focused on plantations in Indonesia, which appear to be dependent on Indigenous dispossession in Borneo and Papua. One example of the initial stages of violence: Sophie Chao. “In the plantations there is hunger and loneliness: The cultural dimensions of food insecurity in Papua.” Mongabay 14 July 2020.

-- On a related note, here’s a long and comprehensive look at palm oil: Human Rights Watch. “When We Lost the Forest, We Lost Everything”: Oil Palm Plantations and Rights Violations in Indonesia. September 2019.

-- Melanie K. Yazzie. “Decolonizing Development in Dine Bikeyah: Resource Extraction, Anti-Capitalism, and Relational Futures.” Environment and Society. September 2018. [This article is about the connections between Navajo Country and US border policies; connections between coal mining, uranium, and land dispossession; and ecological/human damage of wastelanding in the region.]

-- Post I wrote about fossil fuel refineries; environmental racism; high c0vid death rates; cancer rates; toxic air; state violence; and local zoning policy in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley (with a bunch of maps, photos, and graphics).

-- Inspired by a good article Mongabay did about the history of one particular major land-owning company, here’s a post I wrote about how a Gilded Age company founded by friends of King Leopold in the infamous rubber plantations of the Congo eventually came, today, to establish and own the major rubber plantations of Southeast Asia which service Euro-American markets, while the same company still maintains many “neo-colonial” land holdings in Africa.

-- Nicholas Jahr. “Workers Organize at Firestone, Liberia’s ‘State Within a State’.” The Nation. 8 July 2010. [Article about contemporary rubber plantations in West Africa and how Firestone -- “official tire of Major League Baseball” -- functions and rules as a de facto colonial/imperial state.]

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Let me know if anyone wants links to read these articles for free.

Thank you for reaching out. Thanks again for being so kind.

[wouldnt-it-be-hilarious-if-i]

6:31 AM

currently listening to: smother by daughter

i remember when i was a teenager, listening to daughter for the first time. i used to stay up super late on my computer, wide-eyed just scrolling through youtube and tumblr in search of comfort. it didn't have to be much, honestly. just something real, authentic, and human.

i discovered postsecret this way, and givesmehope and a rainbow of wordpress and blogspot blogs and tumblr diaries.

now, i'm thinking about how my late night music tastes have changed since i was younger. my favorite artists/songs to listen to at 4 am were

daughter

nicole dollanganger

seafret

modern baseball

a fine frenzy

paramore

all time low

mayday parade

birdy

melanie martinez

marina and the diamonds

death cab for cutie

i actually forgot how absolutely unhinged melanie's music videos were. i loved them when i was younger and still do but it's been a while since i've watched one lol i had very bubblegum suicide tastes. dark but still bright and cheerful enough to fool you. i think melanie and marina are probably the best examples of that. you can't listen to nicole willingly and not have some degree of trauma that connects you to her music lol same goes for daughter.

if you like pretty and semi-haunting voices, birdy was where it was at in 2012. but there was also janet devlin (i wanted to steal her entire style when i first saw her on the x factor). my favorite part about janet is her irish charm, and how you can hear her adorable accent in her voice when she sings. i think it really adds to it. she really rocked that voice cracky, indie sound before grace vanderwaal did (five years later). i honestly think the main difference was there was a different voice trend going on in 2011 than 2015, and because when janet devlin went on the x factor, they immediately tried to restyle her into like...this sexed-up edgy teen? she had this super cute elfish style that really fit her and made you like her, and then they got her to dye her hair, change her whole look, and sing songs that really didn't match her.

they did a pretty good job of keeping grace very much herself the entire way through, and i think that's a big part of what got her popular. that----and social media. anyway, back to my original point, here are my 3 am favorites rn:

phoebe bridgers

umi

lizzy mcalpine

leanna firestone

francis and the lights

king princess

leon bridges

harry styles

herizen

maggie rogers

siena liggins

this one is huge throwback but i loved mac miller then and love him now

i'd describe a large portion of my music tastes now as a mixture of that bubblegum suicide music i loved when i was a teenager and neo-soul. i grew up with a strong connection to r&b and jazz, but also a lot of indie, singer/songwriter, and country. i feel like you can find so much of that in the neo-soul genre and more. i still listen to all the music i listened to as a teenager, but i definitely have incorporated more artists of color as well.

i love leon bridges, phoebe bridgers, umi and maggie rogers the most. i'd say that my tastes have changed but not really. it's still the same deep, lowkey depressing vibe. like warm red velvet but in music form. i love artists with a unique sound, but also artists that have a sound you wouldn't expect. i love being wrong about what's going to happen next.

like when i first heard siena liggins, i'm not joking when i say i expect something along the lines of young m.a. (the linked song is one of my favorite hoe songs bc i've never listened to it and not laughed the entire time). i did not expect that girly, flowery voice that she has! and i love that because i makes me confront a bias i don't realize i have.

or like when you see king princess, you see like a moderately feminine woman and then you listen to her and like idk it's not exactly what i expect? it's masculine and feminine and everything in between. i love that.

and then harry styles, like come on, okay. i was a huge one direction fan but when his music started coming up on my spotify playlists, i was like wait, what?

i think i listened to his new stuff for a full year before it occurred to me that this was the same harry styles i had grown up reading/writing fanfics about (harry and niall haha). i just like didn't know his work was entirely my vibe. and it has that same gender bent feel to it that king princess has. like it's clearly masculine (i mean, come on lol watermelon is literally about puthy) but it has this girly, riding with the top down in the summer vibe to it as well.

and something i love about maggie rogers specifically is not just her voice but the way she creates her music!! her sound is strongly rooted in nature, and she literally samples sounds from nature and real life and puts them into her songs, sometimes you hear buzzards, rattlesnakes, bird whistles, etc. at least she did with alaska. in the opening, you can clearly hear buzzards. in dog years, there are chimes, bird calls, and other sounds. i'm obsessed with it. as someone grew up avidly outdoors and playing in the woods, her music brings me back to something so integral to my structure. like it's so beautiful listening to her and going back to the years of standing in the middle of the woods with your eyes closed and feeling the birds and wind and squirrels around you, just listening to nature. it's incredibly fresh and beautiful to listen to.

*steps off soapbox* thanks u for coming 2 my tedtalk