Tag: The Sixth Extinction

Marxism 2017: Biodiversity and Species Extinction (Ian Rappel and Sarah Ensor)

Ian Rappel and Sarah Ensor’s meeting on biodiversity and species extinction covered in detail. #Marxism2017

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to this post in my series about Marxism 2017. The meeting covered in this post was the second that I attended on day 1 of the festival. Most of the rest of this post will be photographs from that meeting, but before getting to the main meat I have one small thing to do relating to my previous post…

ERRATUM

In the first published version of my post about day 1 I labelled a logo as being from the front of a TEAM t-shirt. It was not, and I have corrected the original post, but I refuse to do the blogging equivalent of sneaking out a correction in 6pt type in the middle of page 27, so here is a picture showing the a TEAM t-shirt:

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BIODIVERSITY AND SPECIES EXTINCTION

Of our two speakers, Ian Rappel is a conservation biologist and was looking at the overall picture, while Sarah Ensor, author the blog Herring and Class Struggle, focused on the oceans. 

THE PRELIMINARIES

Here are the photos from before the main talks:

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The speakers and chair (centre) at the platform

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The chair introducing the meeting

PART 1: IAN RAPPEL

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Four diverse life forms – sperm whales, ants, duckweed (the smallest of all vascular plants), tardigrades

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There will be more on the Anthropocene later in this series, with an account of Ian Angus’ meeting on this subject.

PART 2: SARAH ENSOR

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The light relief – a tardigrade.

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AS followers of this blog will know I was in northwest Scotland recently, and I saw many signs of fish farms, including in Loch Alsh, as seen from above in this post: https://aspi.blog/2017/06/12/scotland-walking-from-ferry-cottage-to-kyle-of-lochalsh/

CONCLUSION

This was an important meeting, and I welcome the higher profile that nature and ecology are enjoying at this year’s Marxism (I have been to three meetings on the topic already, with another three scheduled for this final day). I cannot say that I enjoyed it, but I am glad that I attended and was glad to note that there were few empty seats. 

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