It's funny that you mention Cuba because they actually do take care of preserving their soils, unlike most of the Caribbean which has completely degraded soild due to centuries of sugarcane plantations with no regards to the environment whatsoever.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/08/sustainable-technologies-safe...

Thanks for pointing that out. Do you know when they began with the program to better manage their soil?

I still feel land management / mismanagement is independent of economic system. One does not intrinsically offer to protect natural resources over another, but i could be wrong.

After the Special Period in Cuba which began in 1989 with the collapse of the soviet union Cuba was forced to become substantially more self-sustaining. Previously they were able to farm in much more extractive ways and offset their agrictultural output from trade with the USSR. Once the USSR disappeared it was extremely difficult to import agricultural chemicals and import food. Food in Cuba isn't great today, but it's pretty sustainably created.

I would argue that an economic system that concentrates power has the ability to create and enforce a monopoly on land usage. Political or economic systems that allow for a minority control of usable land are much more inclined to use that land for the benefit of the controlling minority, and so far that seems maximizing profits in the short term. When we speak of land management what do we mean? The best "returns"? What is being returned to us? I'm inclined to agree that the values used inland management _can_ be independent of economic system, but an economic system that brings with it a predefined value-set based around extracting profit via exploitation is going to manage the land according to those values. Until we have values that supersede the values of the economic system then the econmic's system's values with be the dominating ones.

While I find his philosophy a bit lacking, Derrick Jensen has some great writing on how we value and manage land. https://www.amazon.com/Language-Older-Than-Words/dp/19314985...

Communism is bad at short term and long term allocation. I should have explicitly said that; my comment was misleading without it. (Cuban exception aside: they are indeed good at soil management, but they were more or less forced into learning to be good due to total economic collapse + lack of inputs required for intensive/destructive agriculture. In general communism was an ecological disaster)

I'm actually not sure we can easily include some externalities in capitalism, and I've worried it's an achilles heel of the system. I say this as a capitalist.

Specifically, the transaction costs of including small externalities are too high. By small, I mean that if I burn a litre of gasoline, I have harmed every human on the planet by an incredibly small margin. Too small to properly charge.

In that specific example, a carbon tax could fix it. But, there are many such externalities. Many harder to measure than carbon burning (which is hard in itself).

Other things equal, if it is cheaper to ignore an externality, the system will gravitate to those solutions. And with computers, globalization and cheap container shipping, it has become much easier and much faster to optimize the system. Such optimizations are mostly excellent (I am a capitalist), but we're also optimizing the system in ways which produce negative externalities as well.

In my understanding Cuba has shown remarkable development in it's land stewardship after the collapse of their trade with the the USSR. They developed local and sustainable food distribution systems that don't rely on industrially produced herbicides and fertilizers.

Is that because they had nowhere to sell sugar anymore, nor money to afford herbicides and fertilizers?

Do you have anything to support your claim?

You can search for and read up on Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege.