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chemanalystdata · 19 hours

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Glycine Prices Trend, Database, Chart, Index, Forecast

Glycine Prices: For the Quarter Ending March 2024

Glycine prices are a critical factor in various industries, impacting sectors ranging from pharmaceuticals to food and beverages. As an essential amino acid, glycine serves multiple purposes, including its role as a building block for proteins and its function as a neurotransmitter. Given its significance, fluctuations in glycine prices can have widespread ramifications across diverse markets.

One of the primary drivers influencing glycine prices is its demand within the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical companies utilize glycine in the manufacturing of drugs and supplements due to its properties that aid in protein synthesis and neurotransmission. Consequently, any shifts in demand for pharmaceutical products can directly impact the price of glycine. Factors such as changes in healthcare policies, advancements in medical research, and fluctuations in consumer health trends all contribute to the demand for pharmaceutical-grade glycine, consequently affecting its pricing dynamics.

Get Real Time Prices of Glycine: https://www.chemanalyst.com/Pricing-data/glycine-1571

Furthermore, the food and beverage industry also play a significant role in determining glycine prices. Glycine serves as a food additive, enhancing flavor profiles and acting as a stabilizer in various processed foods and beverages. As consumer preferences evolve towards healthier and more natural ingredients, there is a growing demand for glycine as a food additive derived from natural sources. This trend towards clean label products, coupled with the increasing global population, places pressure on the supply of glycine, thereby influencing its pricing.

Another factor affecting glycine prices is its production and supply chain dynamics. Glycine can be synthesized through various methods, including chemical synthesis and extraction from natural sources such as gelatin. The availability of raw materials, advancements in production technologies, and regulatory frameworks governing production practices all impact the cost of manufacturing glycine. Additionally, geopolitical factors and trade policies can disrupt the supply chain, leading to fluctuations in glycine prices.

Moreover, environmental considerations play an increasingly significant role in shaping glycine prices. As sustainability becomes a focal point for industries worldwide, there is a growing emphasis on environmentally friendly production processes and sourcing practices. Manufacturers are under pressure to adopt sustainable practices, such as utilizing renewable energy sources and reducing carbon emissions, which can affect the overall cost of producing glycine. Additionally, concerns regarding animal welfare and the use of animal-derived raw materials in glycine production contribute to the pricing dynamics, as companies explore alternative sources and production methods.

In the context of global markets, currency fluctuations and trade dynamics also influence glycine prices. As a globally traded commodity, glycine prices are subject to currency exchange rates, trade tariffs, and geopolitical tensions. Shifts in currency valuations can impact the cost of importing and exporting glycine, thereby affecting its pricing in different regions. Trade policies and agreements between countries can also create trade barriers or facilitate market access, consequently influencing glycine prices on a global scale.

Furthermore, technological advancements and innovations in glycine production could disrupt traditional pricing models. Research and development efforts aimed at improving production efficiency, reducing costs, and discovering alternative sources of glycine could lead to significant shifts in pricing dynamics. For instance, the emergence of biotechnological methods for producing glycine through fermentation processes offers potential cost advantages over conventional production methods, potentially impacting glycine prices in the future.

In conclusion, glycine prices are influenced by a multitude of factors, including demand from pharmaceutical and food industries, production and supply chain dynamics, environmental considerations, global market trends, and technological advancements. Understanding these factors and their interplay is essential for businesses operating in industries reliant on glycine, enabling them to navigate market fluctuations and make informed decisions regarding pricing strategies and supply chain management. As the global economy continues to evolve, glycine prices will remain subject to dynamic forces, necessitating adaptability and strategic foresight from industry stakeholders.

Get Real Time Prices of Glycine: https://www.chemanalyst.com/Pricing-data/glycine-1571

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#Glycine Prices

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fursasaida · 3 years

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the thing about learning a language formally is the vocabulary you learn is extremely classed, not just within that language’s context (however big or small) but geopolitically across languages. (I mean, even if you learn it informally/by immersion, what version of it you learn will still be classed, raced, and otherwise shaped by the context in which you learn it, but that will be more idiosyncratic and is inevitable in a different kind of way.)

for example, when you take Arabic in a US university, you learn a lot of political vocabulary very early. some of this seems relatively innocuous, like “United Nations” and “president.” but you also learn “army,” “explosion,” “clashes,” “demonstration,” “terrorist,” “refugee,” etc. not all in your first semester or anything, and you learn lots of normal, everyday words too. but i think it’s really telling that some of the words i’ve known longest in Arabic and never forget or confuse are these kinds of words, whereas I can never keep straight which is which between “fried” and “grilled.” and this is not only down to US universities--for example, part of why I’ll never forget “vote,” “coup,” and “clash” is due to living in Cairo in 2012-2013; those were everyday words you used to talk to people because of what was going on. but in general, your formal US Arabic education will assume that you are learning this language for political reasons and you want to be able to read that kind of news and talk about violence and formal politics. I think the one and only time I’ve ever been assigned an article to read in Arabic that was about the US was in the class I took this past summer, because that teacher is a very smart, critical guy and I find it very likely he did it on purpose. (it was awesome!)

Spanish education here, on the other hand (in my experience), assumes your interest is cultural and you will probably be a tourist at some point. I learned a lot of words about, e.g., art, literature, history, and food. like, have I ever needed the word for “Visigoth”? no! but I sure did learn it and I will remember it till I die! you do not get the same sort of political vocabulary at all. the closest I ever came to that was when I was taking not a Spanish class, but a linguistics class about Spanish, taught in Spanish, so we were discussing the politics of different dialects etc. but obviously the assumptions and interests built into that class were very different from “Spanish education.”

this is all by way of saying: I’m reading a Spanish article right now about shipwrecks from Senegal, and it only now dawned on me, having studied or spoken Spanish for 26 years, why “pescado” is a past participle. I learned that word (”fish”) in isolation, as a food word, with no connection to labor or production or anything else. and I learned it early enough that I’ve never really thought about it. but this article is talking about the death of the fishing industry that pushes people to migrate, and so of course it used the verb pescar and the noun for the action of fishing (pesca). and I was like, oh my god. the literal word for “fish” is just “that which is fished.” it’s derived from the verb, not the other way around. that is 1) ontologically a different concept of “fish” from English (and Arabic), which is diverting in itself, and 2) BLAZINGLY OBVIOUS through the basic morphology of pescado, but something that the classed assumptions through which I was taught Spanish made all but un-noticeable.

anyway commodity fetishism extends to formal language instruction, is what I’m saying. the assumption in this case is that a student might want to say “fish” to refer to an animal or to order a meal, and that she has no reason to think about fishing.

here’s the article by the way, if anyone wants. it’s really good. Viaje a Mbour, la costa senegalesa de los naufragios olvidados: “Este lugar está muerto”

#obviously i was going to click on a headline that included #''forgotten shipwrecks'' and ''this place is dead''#btw the only reason i know ''shipwrecks'' is bc i know the latin word nobody taught me that in spanish either #tourists don't like to think about those things!#just jibbin'#language

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bimboficationblues · 6 years

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I'm technically new to all this political stuff, so I hope you can help me out! - How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad? Why is the US also bad, and how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a "free country" and that we "at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest", etc. I'm very bad with words, I'm just a dumb kid. Sorry for bothering, and thank you. (:

I will answer these questions, but first off, I would say - read, listen, think. Ultimately it’s better if you can develop your own conclusions through a mutual dialogue and learning process with others rather than getting your talking points entirely from others, especially on a social media platform. But if you want resources or recommendations from others, Tumblr can be useful, and I’m happy to provide if you want.

As for answering your questions, it really depends: who is the person you’re talking to, and what do you want out of the conversation? Not everybody has the same interests or concerns or values, and sometimes they’re intractable for whatever reason. So there are other factors that should be taken into account. If you’re just trying to “win” a discussion, I don’t personally think that’s a worthwhile use of time - but if you are trying to convince someone interpersonally or just get better at clarifying your own perspective for the future, that could be valuable.

So, answering your questions under the cut:

How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad?

A) Capitalism stifles human freedom, and does so in both passive and active forms. This seems counterintuitive because capitalism is peddled as the fulfillment of human freedom (by way of innovation and freedom of choice - Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have claimed that so-called “economic freedom” is a necessary condition for political freedoms), so bear with me.

Passive forms: In order to live under capitalism, most people have to work - and for that matter, they have to tailor skills and interests to be rewarded on the labor-market. Furthermore, since capitalism is predicated on the principle of private property, some kind of state is necessary to enforce that principle through the law, and the state and law are blatantly forms of social control (see David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism for more info on this). As a Christian myself, this is the essence of idolatry. The capitalist world-system was made by humans, ostensibly to serve human needs, but is both bad at serving those needs in many ways (for reasons to be explained below) and uses us as the fodder for its self-perpetuation!

And this generates alienation. There is nothing necessarily “wrong” with depending on other people - humans are social creatures and are themselves influenced by the conditions under which they live no matter what those conditions are. But when your labor and the product of your labor benefits others far better than it sustains you, when you are pushed to view all other people as competitors, when you are subjected to various forms of interpersonal and structural domination (detailed below), this produces quite a bit of psychological distress. (Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Deleuze & Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia touch on these in different ways.)

Active forms: Historically, in order to get people to be wage laborers, they had to be forced to do so - in England, which is generally regarded as the birthplace of capitalist modernity, laws were established to oblige people to work for a certain period and punish them if they didn’t. Similar legislation cropped up in Germany and France. And, of course, there was also the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the abuse and exploitation of indigenous populations throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, the confinement of women to the household for free labor. Though not all contemporary evils are the result of capitalism, they have all been shaped by capitalism. Primordial prejudices and mistreatment of “aliens” has been around for a long time, but anti-black racism and “scientific” racism developed out of the economic functions of slavery and capitalist development; though patriarchy predates capitalism considerably, it has been absorbed and reproduced by capitalism’s dynamics.

One of the common selling points for capitalism is the voluntary character of the contracts, but again, I don’t think it’s a meaningful choice when your other options are “starve” and “beg.” But let’s grant that people enter into voluntary employment contracts to sustain themselves. Within those contracts, bosses behave like dictators, and this is a pattern of both small businesses and large corporations precisely because they want to get as much work and value out of you as they can in order to make a profit. (Vivek Chibber’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, while not about interpersonal domination by capitalists and employers, has a great chapter on the subject - “Capital’s Universalizing Tendency.”)

Now, although the standard of living and wages for American workers has been rising for a long time (only recently stagnating despite the growth in productivity, again the result of the neoliberal turn in the 70s and 80s), we have seen the most brutal forms of exploitation and domination displaced to other places - Southeast Asia, China, India, and Latin America being the most prominent cases. And still, as the article linked above demonstrates, there are lots of forms of interpersonal domination still going on in an American context.

B) Capitalism is anti-democratic. The concentration of wealth into a select few hands, and the associated political and social power that has become attached to greater social wealth, means that wealthier people have greater access to political power and influence. The Koch Brothers are probably the best example of this, though lobbying in general is an expression of this function. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one because I think it’s the least compelling argument personally even though I agree with it, but it is a popular and common one!

C) Capitalism is also fundamentally irrational. I think this is true in the way that we think about value and the way capitalism generates regular crises, but I’ll just use one example.

The convenient thing about money, as both Locke and Marx point out, is that it is potentially infinite unlike other resources. There is the possibility of limitless growth, of maximum expansion - which is why the capitalist mode of production began in Western Europe and the United States and has since spread around the world. (There is, of course, no such thing as limitless growth for anything, except perhaps cancer.) But capitalism takes this possibility as gospel and as a result, will do anything to maximize growth.

Sometimes those things are good for working people (farm subsidies enabling cheap food - though without those subsidies there would probably be a famine from capitalists not investing capital in food production). More often they aren’t, whether that’s mistreatment of workers, lowering or stagnating wages, destruction of the environment, or outright warfare. Plus, because there is a limit to natural desires or even luxury desires, capitalists have to constantly concoct new desires for us to latch onto, which is why so much money is sunk into advertising.And this is not merely the result of the ethical whims or personal behaviors of individual capitalists (though those do factor in), but the necessary and logical result of a mode of production that has an internal logic of constant, endless reproduction.

Why is the US also bad? how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a “free country” and that we “at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest”, etc.

This is, paradoxically, an easier argument to make empirically but a harder case to sell because American nationalism and American exceptionalism are pretty ubiquitous, and they’ve only gotten more intractable in the past four or five decades. It really depends on what you mean by “bad,” anyway. On one level, the United States is not that different from any other state historically (since they are usually founded through violence and domination) or contemporarily (since they all act in their own geopolitical interests, and that often means fucking other people over undeservedly).

But, on another level: The United States- were built on indigenous and later African slavery- regularly violated treaties or used duplicitous means to gain access to Native American land for investment and expansion purposes- deployed genocidal tactics and sexual violence against Native Americans throughout the expansion process (especially in California and the Southeast)- fabricated a reason to wage war on Mexico to seize territory from it- botched Reconstruction after the end of formal slavery while still allowing black Americans to be abused and exploited and criminalized en masse- had racial policies that the Nazis found inspirational- engaged in imperialist warfare in the Caribbean at the turn of the century- overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii for economic reasons- nuked a Japanese civilian target (TWICE) when their surrender was already in the cards- used its new hegemony to start launching coups against (mostly democratically elected and socialist-leaning) governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile)- held the rest of the world in a hostage situation alongside the Soviet Union by threatening nuclear annihilation- waged war on Vietnam after violating the agreement to allow democratic elections and unification to take place- illegally bombed Cambodia and enabled the Khmer Rouge to gain traction- financed Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union that were the precursors of al-Qaeda- engaged in Iran-Contra, basically the shadiest thing in existence, and failed to deliver any real consequences to the people involved - supported and continues to support dictators (Batista, Saddam Hussein, etc.) as well as death squads (right-wing paramilitaries in Latin America)- has the highest incarceration rate in the world- has massively expanded the surveillance and police apparatuses since 9/11- invaded Iraq under false pretenses and let Islamic State develop out of the chaos

This is just a minor selection. And to top it all off, the Constitution of the United States is designed to make government as dysfunctional and anti-democratic as possible. The powers of the President have been perpetually expanding for a long time, and the Supreme Court is such a shamelessly broken, unaccountable institution that I cannot believe we take it seriously. The Supreme Court’s rulings on free speech have been up-and-down, often determined by war and nationalism, and the social backlash and hostility to political protest every time the United States goes to war suggests that even with the freedom of assembly granted by the Constitution, nationalism takes priority over freedoms.

This post is long enough, but if you (or anyone else) want me to elaborate on anything I’ve said here, feel free to ask.

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ogxref · 7 years

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ON THE STACK / Mckenzie Wark

Computation → a planetary-scale infrastructure that transforms what governance might mean

“The continuing emergence of planetary-scale computation as meta-infrastructure and of information as an historical agent of economic and geographic command together suggest that something fundamental has shifted off-center.”

The stack generates its own kind of geopolitics → one less about competing territorialities and more about competing totalities.

Perhaps the stack has a new kind of sovereignty, one that delaminates geography, governances and territory.

Bratton thinks infrastructure as a stack platform with six layers, treated in this order: earth, cloud, city, address, interface, user → I think of it more as the four middle layers, which produce the appearance of the user and the earth at either end...

USER Layer :

A user → a category of agent, a position within a system that gives it a role.

“We like to think we are in charge, but we might be more like the Apollo astronauts, i.e. “human hood ornaments.”

The User layer of The Stack is not where the rest of the layers are mastered by some sovereign consciousness; it is merely where their effects are coherently personified.

User is a position not only through which we see The Stack, but also through which The Stack sees us.

“… anthropocentric humanism is not a natural reality into which we must awake from the slumber of machinic alienation; rather it is itself a symptomatic structure powered by (among other things) a gnostic mistrust of matter, narcissistic self-dramatization, and indefensibly pre-Copernican programs for design...”

Debate about user ‘rights’ has been limited to the human, and limited to a view of the human merely as endowed with property and privacy rights. → Rather like Lefebvre’s right to the city, one needs a right to the stack that includes those without property. One could even question the need to think about information and its infrastructures in property terms at all… (GU)

Bratton is not keen on the discourse of oedipal fears about the bad stepfather spying on us, resulting in users wanting no part in the public, but to live a private life of self-mastery, paranoia and narcissism. “The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kills you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even a discrete thing to know.”

INTERFACE Layer :

The interface layer → mediates between users and the technical layers below. Offers a kind of protocol, or generic threshold.

ADDRESS layer :

Address is a formal system, independent of what it addresses, that denotates singular things through bifurcators such as names or numbers, that can be resolved by a table for routing.

Addressing creates generic subjectivity, so why not then also generic citizenship?

If we are all users (humans and inhumans), then a right to the stack is also a right to address, as only that which has an address can be the subject of rights in the “virtual geographic order” of a stack geopolitics… → Therefore “address” is no longer just a matter of discrete locations in a topography.

Address vs. Deep Address:

Address designates a place for things and enables relations between things

Deep address designates also the relations, and then the relations among those relations.

Deep address is to address as a derivative is to a contract. Its endless metadata: about objects, then metadata about the metadata about those objects, and so on.

The financialization of addressability may also be a kind of fetishism, mistaking the metadata about a relation for a relation.

CITY layer :

In the city layer absorbed into the stack → mobilization is prior to settlement, and the city is a platform for sorting users in transit.

Cities are platforms for users rather than polities for citizens. (and as Keller Easterling might concur, their form is shaped more by McKinsey or Haliburton than by architects or planners)

Architecture becomes at best interface design, where cement meets computation.→ It is now a laminating discipline, creating means of stabilizing networks, managing access, styling interfaces, mixing envelopes. Cities are to be accessed via mobile phone, which afford parameters of access, improvisation, syncopation…

CLOUD layer :

It may also be a layer that gives rise to unique kinds of conflict:

First Sino-Google War of 2009: where two stacks, built on different kinds of cloud with different logics of territory and different imagined communities of user collided. → That may be a signal moment in an emerging kind of geopolitics that happens when stacks turn the old topography into a topology

The cloud layer is a kind of terraforming project – here on earth. Clouds are built onto, or bypass, internet. They form a single big discontinuous computer. They take over functions of the state (cartography being just one example). There are many kinds of clouds, however, built into quite different models of the stack, each with their own protocols of interaction with other layers. Google, Apple and Amazon are stacks with distinctive cloud layers, but so too are WalMart, UPS and the Pentagon.

Some cloud types:

FACEBOOK, which runs on the captured user graph. It is a rentier of affective life offering a semi-random newspaper and cinema, strung together on unpaid non-labor, recognition and social debit…

Then there’s APPLE, who took over closed experience design from Disney, and offer brand as content. As a theology, Apple is an enclave aesthetic about self-realization in a centralized market. It’s a rentier of the last millimeter of interface to its walled garden…

On the other hand, AMAZON is an agora of objects rather than subjects, featuring supply chain compression, running on its own addressing system, with algorithmic pricing and micro-targeting…

But even Amazon lacks GOOGLE’s universal ambition and cosmopolitan mission, as if the company merely channeled an inevitable quant reason. It is a corporation founded on an algorithm, fed by universal information liquidity, which presents itself as neutral platform for humans and inhumans, offering ‘free’ cloud services in exchange for information.

“Google Großraum delaminates polity from territory and reglues it into various unblendable sublayers, weaving decentralized supercomputing through increasingly proprietary networks to hundreds of billions of device end-points.”

“The Cloud polis draws revenue from the cognitive capital of its Users, who trade attention and micro-economic compliance in exchange for global infrastructural services, and it in turn provides each of them with an active, discrete online identity and the license to use that infrastructure.” → Maybe this is “algorithmic capitalism”, or maybe (as I argue) it’s not capitalism any more, but something worse. (GU)

EARTH layer :

There is no Stack without a vast immolation and involution of the Earth’s mineral cavities → The Stack terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices and spitting up mobile phones…

The Stack is a landscaping machine → combs and twists settled areas into freshly churned ground, enumerating input and output points and re-rendering them as glassy planes of pure logistics.

Particularly where the earth is concerned, “Computation is training governance to see the world like it does and to be blind like it is.” But the stack lacks a bio-informational skin that might connect ecological observation to the questioning of resource management. Running the stack now puts more carbon into the atmosphere that the airline industry. If it as a state it would be the fifth largest energy suck on the planet. → “Even if all goes well, the emergent mega-infrastructure of The Stack is, as a whole, perhaps the hungriest thing in the world, and the consequences of its realization may destroy its own foundation.”

Hence the big question for Bratton: “Can The Stack be built fast enough to save us from the costs of building The Stack?”

BEYOND the layers :

What provides the interesting angle of view in Bratton is thinking geopolitics as a design problem. → “We need a geopolitics of design that is comfortable not only with computation but also with vertical systems of designation and decision.”

“The more difficult assignment for design is to compose relations within a framework that exceeds both the conventional appearance of forms and the provisional human context at hand, and so pursuing instead less the materialization of abstract ideas into real things than the redirection of real relations through a new diagram.”(GU!)

It’s not a romantic vision of a return to an earth before the Stack. (“…the design of food platforms as less about preserving the experiential simulation of preindustrial farming and eating… and more like molecular gastronomy at landscape scale.”)

But it is not a naïve techno-utopianism either. While I don’t think it’s a good name, Bratton is well aware of what he calls cloud feudalism, which uses the stack to distribute power and vale upwards. And it is fully aware that the “militarized luxury urbanism” of today’s vectorialist class depends on super-exploitation of labor and resources. At least one novel observation here however is that the stack can have different governance forms at each level. The stack is not one infrastructure, but a laminating of relatively autonomous layers.

This might mean however an exit from a certain residual humanism → “the world may become an increasingly alien environment in which the privileged position of everyday human intelligence is shifted off-center.”

#benjamin #bratton #mckenzie #wark #stack #newnormal #gu #platfomrs

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nebris · 6 years

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How climate change and disease helped the fall of Rome

At some time or another, every historian of Rome has been asked to say where we are, today, on Rome’s cycle of decline. Historians might squirm at such attempts to use the past but, even if history does not repeat itself, nor come packaged into moral lessons, it can deepen our sense of what it means to be human and how fragile our societies are.

In the middle of the second century, the Romans controlled a huge, geographically diverse part of the globe, from northern Britain to the edges of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. The generally prosperous population peaked at 75 million. Eventually, all free inhabitants of the empire came to enjoy the rights of Roman citizenship. Little wonder that the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon judged this age the ‘most happy’ in the history of our species – yet today we are more likely to see the advance of Roman civilisation as unwittingly planting the seeds of its own demise.

Five centuries later, the Roman empire was a small Byzantine rump-state controlled from Constantinople, its near-eastern provinces lost to Islamic invasions, its western lands covered by a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms. Trade receded, cities shrank, and technological advance halted. Despite the cultural vitality and spiritual legacy of these centuries, this period was marked by a declining population, political fragmentation, and lower levels of material complexity. When the historian Ian Morris at Stanford University created a universal social-development index, the fall of Rome emerged as the greatest setback in the history of human civilisation.

Explanations for a phenomenon of this magnitude abound: in 1984, the German classicist Alexander Demandt catalogued more than 200 hypotheses. Most scholars have looked to the internal political dynamics of the imperial system or the shifting geopolitical context of an empire whose neighbours gradually caught up in the sophistication of their military and political technologies. But new evidence has started to unveil the crucial role played by changes in the natural environment. The paradoxes of social development, and the inherent unpredictability of nature, worked in concert to bring about Rome’s demise.

Climate change did not begin with the exhaust fumes of industrialisation, but has been a permanent feature of human existence. Orbital mechanics (small variations in the tilt, spin and eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit) and solar cycles alter the amount and distribution of energy received from the Sun. And volcanic eruptions spew reflective sulphates into the atmosphere, sometimes with long-reaching effects. Modern, anthropogenic climate change is so perilous because it is happening quickly and in conjunction with so many other irreversible changes in the Earth’s biosphere. But climate change per se is nothing new.

The need to understand the natural context of modern climate change has been an unmitigated boon for historians. Earth scientists have scoured the planet for paleoclimate proxies, natural archives of the past environment. The effort to put climate change in the foreground of Roman history is motivated both by troves of new data and a heightened sensitivity to the importance of the physical environment. It turns out that climate had a major role in the rise and fall of Roman civilisation. The empire-builders benefitted from impeccable timing: the characteristic warm, wet and stable weather was conducive to economic productivity in an agrarian society. The benefits of economic growth supported the political and social bargains by which the Roman empire controlled its vast territory. The favourable climate, in ways subtle and profound, was baked into the empire’s innermost structure.

The end of this lucky climate regime did not immediately, or in any simple deterministic sense, spell the doom of Rome. Rather, a less favourable climate undermined its power just when the empire was imperilled by more dangerous enemies – Germans, Persians – from without. Climate instability peaked in the sixth century, during the reign of Justinian. Work by dendro-chronologists and ice-core experts points to an enormous spasm of volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE, unlike anything else in the past few thousand years. This violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’, when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years. This phase of climate deterioration had decisive effects in Rome’s unravelling. It was also intimately linked to a catastrophe of even greater moment: the outbreak of the first pandemic of bubonic plague.

Disruptions in the biological environment were even more consequential to Rome’s destiny. For all the empire’s precocious advances, life expectancies ranged in the mid-20s, with infectious diseases the leading cause of death. But the array of diseases that preyed upon Romans was not static and, here too, new sensibilities and technologies are radically changing the way we understand the dynamics of evolutionary history – both for our own species, and for our microbial allies and adversaries.

The highly urbanised, highly interconnected Roman empire was a boon to its microbial inhabitants. Humble gastro-enteric diseases such as Shigellosis and paratyphoid fevers spread via contamination of food and water, and flourished in densely packed cities. Where swamps were drained and highways laid, the potential of malaria was unlocked in its worst form – Plasmodium falciparum – a deadly mosquito-borne protozoon. The Romans also connected societies by land and by sea as never before, with the unintended consequence that germs moved as never before, too. Slow killers such as tuberculosis and leprosy enjoyed a heyday in the web of interconnected cities fostered by Roman development.

However, the decisive factor in Rome’s biological history was the arrival of new germs capable of causing pandemic events. The empire was rocked by three such intercontinental disease events. The Antonine plague coincided with the end of the optimal climate regime, and was probably the global debut of the smallpox virus. The empire recovered, but never regained its previous commanding dominance. Then, in the mid-third century, a mysterious affliction of unknown origin called the Plague of Cyprian sent the empire into a tailspin. Though it rebounded, the empire was profoundly altered – with a new kind of emperor, a new kind of money, a new kind of society, and soon a new religion known as Christianity. Most dramatically, in the sixth century a resurgent empire led by Justinian faced a pandemic of bubonic plague, a prelude to the medieval Black Death. The toll was unfathomable – maybe half the population was felled.

The plague of Justinian is a case study in the extraordinarily complex relationship between human and natural systems. The culprit, the Yersinia pestis bacterium, is not a particularly ancient nemesis; evolving just 4,000 years ago, almost certainly in central Asia, it was an evolutionary newborn when it caused the first plague pandemic. The disease is permanently present in colonies of social, burrowing rodents such as marmots or gerbils. However, the historic plague pandemics were colossal accidents, spillover events involving at least five different species: the bacterium, the reservoir rodent, the amplification host (the black rat, which lives close to humans), the fleas that spread the germ, and the people caught in the crossfire.

Genetic evidence suggests that the strain of Yersinia pestis that generated the plague of Justinian originated somewhere near western China. It first appeared on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and, in all likelihood, was smuggled in along the southern, seaborne trading networks that carried silk and spices to Roman consumers. It was an accident of early globalisation. Once the germ reached the seething colonies of commensal rodents, fattened on the empire’s giant stores of grain, the mortality was unstoppable.

The plague pandemic was an event of astonishing ecological complexity. It required purely chance conjunctions, especially if the initial outbreak beyond the reservoir rodents in central Asia was triggered by those massive volcanic eruptions in the years preceding it. It also involved the unintended consequences of the built human environment – such as the global trade networks that shuttled the germ onto Roman shores, or the proliferation of rats inside the empire. The pandemic baffles our distinctions between structure and chance, pattern and contingency. Therein lies one of the lessons of Rome. Humans shape nature – above all, the ecological conditions within which evolution plays out. But nature remains blind to our intentions, and other organisms and ecosystems do not obey our rules. Climate change and disease evolution have been the wild cards of human history.

Our world now is very different from ancient Rome. We have public health, germ theory and antibiotic pharmaceuticals. We will not be as helpless as the Romans, if we are wise enough to recognise the grave threats looming around us, and to use the tools at our disposal to mitigate them. But the centrality of nature in Rome’s fall gives us reason to reconsider the power of the physical and biological environment to tilt the fortunes of human societies. Perhaps we could come to see the Romans not so much as an ancient civilisation, standing across an impassable divide from our modern age, but rather as the makers of our world today. They built a civilisation where global networks, emerging infectious diseases and ecological instability were decisive forces in the fate of human societies. The Romans, too, thought they had the upper hand over the fickle and furious power of the natural environment. History warns us: they were wrong.

Kyle Harper is professor of classics and letters, and senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. His latest book is The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017).

https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome

#ancient rome #climate change

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anniekoh · 7 years

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american sociological association 2017 (fri & sat)

Having promised to defend my dissertation in (gulp) 2 months, I did not tag along with the spouse to ASA in Montreal. Being a giant nerd who adores academic conferences, I looked through the program anyway.

FRIDAY

Fri, August 11, 5:30 to 7:00pm The Indignity of Reconciliation: The Experience of First Nations in Canada, Audra Simpson - Opening Plenary Session. Dignity and the Bridging of Group Boundaries

Reconciliation” has achieved a seemingly unquestioned status in Canada as the good thing that is to usher in the better thing that will be. That “better thing” is a repaired past, a better future, and an ethical and balanced present. This notion emerged from three decades of overt and unambiguous Indigenous foment, resistance, and refusal in the face of neoliberal and dispossessive settlement and statecraft, embodied by the former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. His government introduced simultaneously official “reconciliation” and violent resource extraction. The discourse of repair was inaugurated by an official apology for one state violence, that of Indian residential schools. It now finds its way into legal decisions on land rights (Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, 2014) and institutionalized spaces of listening (The Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2008-2014). It also circulates through various publics with different meanings. Although multi-vocal, this discourse seeks to harmonize and balance a fundamental disjuncture between a sovereign state, unwilling to rescind its (false) claims to Indigenous land and life, and Indigenous struggles for land and life (as sovereignty). I examine the ways in which “reconciliation” seeks to repair or perhaps subvert and mask the problem of historical and ethical impasse and injury. I illustrate my argument with ethnographic conversations conducted with those who stand in active critical, ethical, and political relationship to the project of reconciliation.

SATURDAY

Sat, August 12, 10:30am to 12:10pm Black Women and the Subversive Occupation of Digital Space, Leslie Jones in - Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology. Race, Social Movements and Digital Media Technologies

On Twitter, Black women are influencing the way that massive audiences think about the role of race in society, the relationship between race and gender, and the ownership that Black women have over their own intellectual labor. Their ideas are incorporated into mainstream media, where they have the potential to influence the discourse surrounding these issues beyond the individuals who have self-selected into their networks of influence. This chapter provides a brief topography of the ecosystem of Twitter, an online social networking website where Black women have carved out space to publicly cultivate their ideas. It also provides insight into the ways that these women engage in public intellectual work, one-hundred forty characters at a time.

Sat, August 12, 10:30am to 12:10pm Who Owns the Co-op? Race, Class, and Symbolic Boundaries at a Food Co-operative, Sonia Moss - Section on Consumers and Consumption. Race, Ethnicity and Inequality in Consumer Culture

Rising public interest in alternative agrifood systems like farmers’ markets and food cooperatives, has led to studies examining the stratification of access to and engagement with these movements. Some scholars conclude that many urban food spaces ultimately appeal to white elites. However, there is a gap in the literature examining the micro-processes that contribute to racially and economically homogenous consumers. This ethnographic case-study draws up ten months of participant/observation and in-depth interviews with members of a food co-operative in a large, Northeastern city to understand the mechanisms which reproduce a majority white and middle-class clientele in a majority black and mixed-income neighborhood. The study found that symbolic boundaries are deployed institutionally, materially, and interpersonally to privilege access and experience of white, middle-class shoppers. These findings suggest that inattention to symbolic and material racialized dynamics will result in exclusion of marginalized groups.

Sat, August 12, 2:30 to 4:10pm Bringing Citizenship to Market: How to Sell a Quasi-Sacred Status, Kristin Surak in Regular Session. Citizenship: Shifting Grounds of Entitlement

What explains the rapid rise of citizenship by investment programs and what are the implications for citizenship more broadly? Moving beyond the largely theoretical economic and normative scholarship on the sale of citizenship, this article draws on two years of fieldwork to explain how citizenship has become marketized. The analysis situates citizenship by investment programs within a broader field encompassing immigrant investor visas and discretionary economic citizenship. It shows how this field conditioned the development and spread of formal programs, and the role of industry actors, geopolitical inequalities, and extra-territorial rights in this transformation. Service providers retooled murky discretionary channels in the Global South into formal citizenship by investment schemes, which could be offered as residence planning tools alongside the investor visas available in core countries. A drive for legitimation has kept pace with the rise of the industry because the product’s value is contingent upon the privileges it secures in third countries, which hold significant power over the programs. The paper concludes by discussing two implications for our understanding of citizenship more broadly: the role of strategic action in making choices about a quasi-sacred status, and the role of third-party actors in both bringing citizenship to market and legitimating its commodification.

Sat, August 12, 2:30 to 4:10pm Walking through Memory: An Architectural Phenomenology of Collective Memory at Memorials, Stephanie Pena-Alves in Regular Session. Collective Memory II: The Aesthetics and Materiality of Memory

In this study, I employ an architectural phenomenology of memorial sites to examine how the physical structure of memorials shapes individual experiences of remembering a collective past. I explore four sites to ground my investigation: the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, La Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves) in Dakar, Senegal, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., and the National September 11 Memorial in New York City. Drawing on photographs and publicly available online visitor testimonies, I analyze the ways in which mnemonic experiences are effectively enabled and constrained both physically and symbolically by the structural characteristics of openness and closure at memorials. Analyzing the physical design alongside visitor narratives allows me to theorize what I term "mnemonic trajectories," physical designs that facilitate particular movements, experiences, and meanings in memorial spaces, while simultaneously denying others. I find that the physical structure of memorials not only shapes the grounded experience of remembering at the site, but that particular structures – be they walls, doors, tunnels, or holes, to name but a few – also serve as metaphorical structures around which individuals narrate their collective past. Ultimately, my comparative approach reveals that materiality, while an important element of collective remembering, is not sufficient to convey mnemonic meanings; social groups shape meanings of material structures at memorial sites. Thus, no structural feature necessarily signifies the same concepts in all contexts.

Sat, August 12, 2:30 to 4:10pm Author Meets Critics Session. Legalizing LGBT Families: How the Law Shapes Parenthood (NYU Press, 2015) by Amanda K. Baumle and D’Lane R. Compton,

In this book, Baumle and Compton examine how LGBT individuals use the law when making decisions about family formation and parenting. They draw on interview data with 137 LGBT parents from across the United States to examine the many, varied ways in which the law is embraced, manipulated, modified, and rejected by those seeking to create and protect families within a heteronormative legal system. Given the inconsistency of state and local laws, few groups encounter as much variation in access to everyday rights as they pertain to the family. This variation allows for a nuanced examination of the manner in which legal context affects the ways in which individuals come to understand the meaning and utility of the law for their lives. Baumle and Compton develop a theory of legal consciousness in which LGBT parents are active recipients of cultural schemas about legality, including those of being before, with, and against the law. Which schema prevails is determined by a complex interplay between legal context, social networks, individual characteristics, and familial desires. This author meets critic panel beings Baumle and Compton into conversation with several prominent scholars working at the intersections of family, sexuality, and the law.

Sat, August 12, 2:30 to 3:30pm Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements

#sociology

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