Do anyone have that new article that was like, accusing them of genociding a desert because they turned it into a forest or some shit? I remember it form a year or so back. The reforested an area of desert and this journalist was losing him mind over it.
The biggest criticism I've seen is that the planting project ended up being a huge monoculture of poplar trees, but that was kinda the norm back then in reforestation.
The last I heard the forest they planted was dying from a beetle infestation, and they were going to attempt a redo with a lot more species of trees.
That is a valid concern. One of the largest problems with the project was that they planted massive monocultures of single trees. Something that is extremely dangerous as a single parasite, disease, or pest could annihilate hundreds of thousands of square kilometers.
Plus monocultures limit biodiversity to an extreme capacity as the entire forest is suitable only to a very limited number of species. It’s not that the animals aren’t there to begin with, it’s that not many can survive in the mass monoculture forest.
One of the few good pieces of legislation put forth have curtailed the reach and power of the logging industry and development industries significantly. This is why capitalists in the US hate the EPA.
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.