Planting Trees
This (Saturday) morning I completed a 36-hour fast with a breakfast of bacon and eggs. So, a combination of Intermittent Fasting and Keto. For a while. This evening I'm going to have a burger that will probably include a bun, ketchup, mustard, and a pickle. Then another shorter fast until about lunchtime tomorrow.
After breakfast I had a Zoom call with my Obsidian Book Club friends. We discussed the third chapter of Piketty's new book, A Brief History of Equality. The chapter was about colonialism and (Atlantic) slavery. It was a good chapter and our discussion lasted about an hour and 45 minutes, which is a bit longer than planned. Piketty leans heavily in this chapter on Kenneth Pomeranz's 2000 book, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, which I read for my Comprehensive Exams about ten years ago. Pomeranz's goal was to decenter Europe by emphasizing “reciprocal comparisons between parts of Europe and parts of China, India and so on that seem…to have been similarly positioned within their continental worlds” (p. 10). His point was that the European culture and economy were "largely unexceptional", so he wanted to understand whether there were reasons it "wound up as the privileged center of the nineteenth century’s new world economy" (p. 297) or whether this was just lucky contingency.
Pomeranz believed the opportunity to colonize the Americas provided Europe an opportunity to avoid moving into the type of labor-intensive, land-scarce economic path taken by India and China. He points to (and Piketty cites) the depletion of natural resources such as forests in Europe on the eve of American colonization, suggesting for example that the Chinese had a different relationship with their forests. But he misses the fact that the Chinese forests of the sixteenth century were largely a legacy of the Ming Dynasty's reforestation efforts. Their first emperor, Hongwu, had planted a billion trees during his thirty-year reign. The Mongols, whom he overthrew, had tried to make North China look more like their ancestral steppes.
Piketty seems to draw some questionable conclusions from Pomeranz and a more general description of early mercantilism. I'll go into more detail about them in the next day or so.
After the Zoom session, I began planting trees. I bought a dozen white pines, a dozen tamaracks, and two dozen red pines from a mail-order nursery this spring. The trees are four years old, so I got a pretty good deal. The downside is it will be a few years probably, before they really get established and take off growing. But I plant a couple of dozen trees each year we live here, so in time, I'll see results. If we stay here long enough. Trees I planted in Keene are nearly full-grown, but I missed seeing them grow up. The maple I planted in the front yard of a house in Minneapolis is really big — but the ancient elm in the backyard is gone. It’s interesting how temporary I’ve been in any particular place, relative to the trees I’ve planted.