Intro

One of my biggest podcasting regrets is not having been able to interview the anthropologist Dr. James C. Scott before he died in 2024. We had corresponded by email, but he'll forever be one of the ones who got away... Rest in peace, James. Your scholarship is still making people think.

Today's show serves as an introduction to anthropology, and to some key Scottian concepts like "legibility" that Grant Faber and I apply to the carbon removal and carbon offsetting spaces.

Why do states prefer straight lines? Why do more organic shapes take place seemingly everywhere else? How can creating legibility be simultaneously great for transparency and order but perilous for justice and truth? When complexity is often so much more accurate, what is it within us that yearns to abandon it? What is in us that desires to make everything legible to our gaze even if it creates a wasteland and calls it peace?

If that's a soupy theoretical mess for you, you'll probably enjoy this episode. It's a doozy!

“A language is a dialect with an army and navy."

— Max Weinreich, attributed

"[The Romans] create a desert and call it peace."

— Tacitus

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Resources

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Grant Faber's Carbon-Based Commentary on Substack

James C. Scott's Wikipedia page

James C. Scott's posthumous In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings

Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance by James C. Scott

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by Jame C. Scott

"Not 'gay' as in 'happy' but 'queer' as in "f**k you'." is a line I've heard that is maybe informative here.

"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" by Friedrich Nietzsche

William of Ockham

Nominalism

Michel Foucault

Jacques Derrida

Postmodernism

Hauntologies of carbon removal—w/ Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University of Buffalo: RCC S3 bonus

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher

Edmund Burke

Thomas Paine

Zhou Enlai

Michael Oakeshott, though I wonder if I have potentially overstated his position...

Precautionary principle

Br'er rabbit

Fordism

Sloanism

333: Coproduction & Additionality: How Do We Draw the Line for Carbon Removal?—w/ Grant Faber, Carbon-Based Consulting

"A primer on additionality and carbon removal" by Grant Faber

350: Robert Höglund Presents: The Many Perils of Being Catalytic in a Carbon Accounting World

David Graeber's Wikipedia page