Author Archives: Carol Joo Lee

What Is Lost? What Remains? Assessing Climate Rupture Through Funerary Art

A Summary of Conference Paper by Carol Joo Lee

Summary of Topic and Argument

Losses abound in the age of Climate Crisis. Faced with science that irreversible chain of events beyond human control is imminent if status quo remains, humans race to mediate and minimize the permanent disappearance of species and habitable places. These ecological and environmental disappearances, losses of our companion species and homes, are an impetus for recognizing mourning as an ethical and political response in the presence of a profound loss. In the paper, I examine the object and function of memorializing grief in relation to the ruptures in our ecosystem and biosphere through examples of contemporary “funerary art”: “Ontological turn” and new materialism offer ways in which artists are reimagining the body as a container of violent history and pollutants; and interpretations of disaster represent displacement of time and the local. In assessing artworks that respond to the urgency of these climate ruptures, I ask whether art as activism can overcome aestheticized objectification to be useful in a world defined by an existential crisis.

Summary of Research and Claims

Through examples of contemporary artworks that address climatic and environmental disharmonies head on, I demonstrate mourning as an ethical and political response to ecological loss and memorializing as visualization of mourning encompassing multifaceted functions and potentials – a space for collective healing (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial); a site of recalling and confronting uneasy history (the Holocaust Memorial, “Candy Spill,” “Malinche” & “Cortés”); a point of departure for rethinking the human body in relation to nonhuman, derealized species (“States of Inflammation,” “Mushroom Burial Suit”); a template for transposing one’s own memory (“Abschlag”); and a localized cautionary tale (“Into Taihu” & “Out of Beichuan”). 

Not satisfied with widely used terms for describing our current climatic condition, I leaned into Climate Rupture to describe a breach of a harmonious relationship with the ecosystem and biosphere; ecological and environmental degradation and disappearance with implications of another mass extinction; and a culmination of disharmonies found in habits, habitats and weather. Disaster is another impetus to mourning and memorializing with additional dimension – a discombobulated time. A nexus of suddenness with permanence is one of disaster’s principal characteristics and a temporal and environmental displacement is another, as such disaster exists in the future and the present is cannibalized by the past. Anticipation of disaster is a perpetual conditioning of existing marked by anxiety of time as we race to limit global warming below 1.5°C.

Artists Thomas Hirschhorn and Liu Xiaodong confront the complex web of effects and affects of disaster directly in their work by constructing disaster as an imminent and generic phenomenon in its anywhere-ness and at once mundane and pernicious presence in the form of polluted waterway and devastating earthquake told as a localized cautionary tale. In both Hirschhorn’s and Liu’s work, a discombobulated time is woven in as an integral part of disaster: the past shows itself in the ruins of the present and resettles in the future. 

In more internalized works, novel philosophical approaches such as new materialism, speculative realism and object-oriented ontology play an important role in artists’ conscious shift away from anthropocentric orientation to incorporate nonhuman perspectives and interconnectedness of natural, social and spiritual worlds. Ane Graff and Jae Rhim Lee, through their widely divergent interpretations, situate the human body as one part of the larger natural system and as both the emitter and the host of toxins with deleterious effects on nonhuman, derealized species. In Jimmie Durham’s sculptures history, ancestors and spirits are implicated (and perhaps even felt) in the heterogeneity of materials that represent the uneasy interpenetration of natural and manmade worlds, and indigenous and Western cultures. 

In assessing Climate Funerary Art, I framed mourning as an ethical act (Sontag) that is constitutive, rather than depreciative, with the potential to be animated for hopeful politics (Eng and Kazijian ), and the “work of mourning” as an expression of empathy “for those whom we do not know, for those whom we will not know” (Cunsolo). I argued that Climate Funerary Art in the face of large-scale losses due to climate volatility and ecological and environmental ruptures holds agency and utility, and mediates collective recognition of the loss and facilitates space for mourning and memorializing. It also enables communication between us and with the future generation. 

Funerary art by definition is companion art to the body and the spirit of the dead and serves a dual function of utility and art. This allows Climate Funerary Art to escape the Groysian aestheticization conundrum and in its capacity to mourn, memorialize and accompany the dead, I argue, makes itself useful and furthermore its “being in the world” contributes to the larger discourse and visibility of the ruptures in the environment and ecosystem. Climate Funerary Art in its multitude of forms asks that we contemplate loss, what is being lost, what is being implicated in this loss and chaos, and how to care for what remains. If Max Ernst’s image of Europe after the war is a cautionary tale for the future generation, it behooves us to heed the lesson and reassess our priorities.

Top image: Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain II, 1940-1942

Examples of Climate Funerary Art

Thomas Hirschhorn, Abschlag, 2014
Liu Xiaodong, Out of Beichuan, 2010
 (l-r) Jimmie Durham, Malinche, 1988-1992; Jimmie Durham, Cortés, 1991-1992
Ane Graff, States of Inflammation, 2019
Jae Rhim Lee, Mushroom Burial Suit, 2008

Sources

  1. Cunsolo, Ashlee. “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning.” Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, edited by Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ethicsenviro.17.2.137
  1. Demos, T.J. “Rights of Nature: The Art and Politics of Earth Jurisprudence.” Nottingham Contemporary, 2015, https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/0/196/files/2015/10/Demos-Rights-of-Nature-2015.compressed.pdf
  1. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://books.google.com/books?id=JkNoeXNopDQC&pg=PR5&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
  1. Groys, Boris. “On Art Activism.” e-flux, June 2014, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/56/60343/on-art-activism/
  1. Lee, Jae Rhim. “My Mushroom Burial Suit.” July 2011, https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee_my_mushroom_burial_suit
  1. Solnit, Rebecca. “’The Impossible Has Already Happened’: What Coronavirus Can Teach Us About Hope.” The Guardian, April 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit?
  1. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard

Core Text

Ballard, J.G. The Crystal World. Jonathan Cape, 1966

Summary

The Crystal World was J.G. Ballard’s fourth novel in what has come to known among his devotees as the “disaster series.” Written in 1966 before “global warming” and “climate change” became common parlance and a genre dedicated to such phenomena was born, the ensuing years and ominous climatic discoveries have elevated Ballard as the godfather of “cli-fi.” The book begins with Dr. Sanders on the bow of a steamer that has delayed disembarkation for unknown reasons at Port Mattare, and, already, Ballard alerts the reader to pay attention to the environment: “…surface of the water was still gray and sluggish, leaching away the somber tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks”; “…the dark green arbors towering into the dull air like immense cypresses, somber and motionless, touched only by faint gleams of light.” The location of the port is somewhere in the Republic of Cameroon, which “was still recovering from an abortive coup ten years earlier, when a handful of rebels had seized the emerald and diamond mines at Mont Royal…” Along with ecological details that signal unease, signifiers crowd the first few paragraphs: Sanders, a doctor who treats leprosy; Father Balthus, a priest in dark soutane; Ventress, a Belgian architect dressed in a white suit who tells Sanders, “This is a landscape without time.”; and the letter from Suzanne, the wife of Sanders’ colleague and his lover, which ends with at once luminous and ominous line, “The light touches everything with diamonds and sapphires.” 

Suzanne is the reason for Sanders’ journey. She and her husband had disappeared into the forest in Mont Royal to found a leprosy clinic. Balthus, Ventress, Suzanne, along with Thorensen, the director of the diamond mine, are all characters Sanders would encounter again as he ventures deeper into the jungle and realizes the “faint gleams of light” are in fact emanating from the mysterious crystallization of the forest and its living creatures, and each of them functions as a moral catalyst for Sanders. The scientific reasoning behind the efflorescence of crystal Ballarad gives is lacking but useful: an infinite atomic duplication of itself, capable of filling the entire universe and whose behavior is closest to cancer. As crystallization spreads and consumes every organism in its path, Sanders’ interior journey reverses course and the objective becomes running away from the forest in order to escape the fate of turning into a crystalline form. Along the way, Sanders finds out that crystallization is not an isolated phenomenon but is occurring in Florida and Russia also. In Ballard’s fossilized world, the crystal is a stand-in for time: Crystallization process requires “leaking time” and fossilization evinces time frozen. It’s also human’s race against time in the face of nature’s transgression – to run from being fossilized within the crystal or to embrace it. Sanders and company, in the end, come to a revelation that running is futile, so they remain or return to the forest to live in timelessness, to exist between death and life, which for them is some kind of utopia. 

Teaching Resources

  • Heller, Jason. “These Cli-Fi Classics Are Cautionary Tales For Today.” NPR, July 26, 2019. Heller starts this “beach reads” recommendation by injecting an ominous climate anecdote – “As yet another record-breaking summer heats up…” – and goes on to offer summaries of five cli-fi titles. He praises The Crystal World as a work that surpasses Ballard’s previous books – The Burning World, The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere – in his “disaster series.” Heller also draws a parallel with Heart of Darkness, an influence Ballard dismissed based on the fact that he hadn’t read it at the time of writing The Crystal World. Still, it is unmistakable that in both fictions, post-colonial malaise is manifested as geological transgressions which in turn engenders extreme human reaction to them.   
  • O’Connell, Mark, “Why We Are Living in JG Ballard’s World.” New Statesman, April 1 2020. With the pandemic very much in the foreground, this essay makes a convincing case that our current mysophobic existence owes more to Ballard’s dystopian vision than to any realms prognosticated by other postmodern authors. Indeed, Ballardian world is the one we occupy now – uneasy and distanced: “The rapid transition, under the new viral order, into further extremes of technological alienation has only made it more so.” Ballard’s short stories like “Having a Wonderful Time” (1982) and “The Intensive Care Unit” (1977) speak more directly to quarantine, human-weariness, and invisible captor. His “World” series encapsulates another set of mental stressors, anxiety and psychological displacement induced by environmental entropy. O’Connell is well aware of Ballard’s complicated early life – a White British settler family in Shanghai forced into internment camp under Japanese occupation during WWII – and draws a connection between Ballard’s experience with imperialism with upended-ness that often undergirds his characters’ psyche and the environment that occupies them. 
  • Clark, Jim, “Reading Climate Change in J.G. Ballard.” Critical Survey, Vol. 25, No. 2, Berghahn Books, 2013, pp. 7-21. Clark, in his prismatic analysis, does a great job linking climate change post hoc to The Drowned World (1962) and The Crystal World (1966), and critiquing the post-cli-fi hermeneutics of climate dystopias in these texts. Clark’s thesis is most persuasive when drawing out the inner world, the psyche, of Ballard’s characters when faced with environmental upheaval, as the locus of transformation: “The outer environment is subordinated to inner space, and what action or response it requires is primarily internal and transformative.” Time is another essential thematic component. Clark asserts that “Ballard conflates environment and time” and equates climatic disruption to temporal disruption. Timelessness of the crystal is a metaphor for the end of time, or surrender to time, which then is rendered as the end of environment. Expounding on the ways in which Ballardian climatic transgressions have been prescient of the environmental malaise to come, Clark also draws an analogy between the efflorescence of crystal and a viral infection prefiguring a pandemic narrative that became familiar in later cli-fi genre and eerily apropos of the current viral pandemic. 

Discussion Questions

  1. In planting a white doctor who presumably treats African leper patients amidst diamond and emerald mines then setting him off into a forest that turns him into the very element of seduction and exploitation, does Ballard’s post-colonial duality subvert the “resource curse”?
  2. Ballard has said that his central characters in his “climate” novels see the “system of imaginative possibilities represented by the disaster,” which Clark infers as follow, that “if Ballard conflates climate with time, he also conflates it with psyche.” Both insinuate that by confronting the disaster on an existential level, one can then harness the inner capacity for transcendence. This seems like a bit of channeling an utopian outcome in a dystopian situation, which is essentially what many of the climate accords are. In reality, when so many seem to have gone back to life as “normal” even after facing an existential threat of climate catastrophe, can individual psychical transformation be a real catalyst for “profound personal change” as Clark argues?
  3. In climate discourse and science, human anxiety is intrinsically tied to time, which acts as a simultaneously passive and aggressive omnipresent element. The race to keep the rise of global temperature below 1.5°C  to avoid the irreversible chain of events is itself a race against time’s irreversibility. Ballard seems to suggest that surrendering to time, therefore reaching a form of utopian timelessness, is a noble, even a moral thing to do. How does this square with the psyche being the catalyst for profound change?

Memorializing Loss: The Convergence of Funerary Art and Climate Change

An Art Review by Carol Joo Lee

To talk about Climate Change is to lament what we have lost – land, water, air, and the species that depended on them, human and non-human. The onset of the sixth mass extinction looms large over our collective minds – at least those who don’t deny the indisputable data – and it creates existential conditioning that vacillates from dread to despair. Throughout history artists have been moved to memorialize the losses and traumas that have been inflicted upon humanity: a 14th century illustration depicts Black Death; Poussin’s “The Plague of Ashdod” records the horrors of the plague outbreak of the 17th century; and Picasso’s 1937 “Guernica” captures the inhumanities of Nazi bombing. In the face of tragedies of epic scale, art can universalize the unimaginable and humanize the incomprehensible. Contemporary artists of the Anthropocene, for many decades now, have tried to contextualize, eulogize and memorialize the losses/deaths stemming from ecological and environmental collapses. Essentially, the losses spurred by the Climate Crisis is the loss of home – literal and metaphorical, biological and geological, material and immaterial, multitude and one. 

An early illustrated manuscript depicts the Black Death (Credit: Courtesy of Louise Marshall/ Archivio di Stato, Lucca)
Poussin’s The Plague of Ashdod in 1630-31 (Credit: DEA / G DAGLI ORTI/ De Agostini via Getty Images)
© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

“I control the pain. That’s really what it is.” – Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘s works do not explicitly speak of the climate. Nonetheless, they exemplify governmental negligence and political inertia during the AIDS epidemic, which began in the 1980s, thus in the wake of the woeful bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic on the part of the federal government and the continuing denialism of Climate Crisis, it seems apt to re-examine his most famous piece “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” from 1991 in our current context. Commonly referred to as “candy spill,” this participatory work, a mound of wrapped candies weighing approximately 175 pounds, the healthy weight of his lover before succumbing to AIDS, spill out from one corner of the room. As visitors take candy from the pile, the artwork shrinks then eventually disappears altogether. The candy has a twin function – representing the body and the placebo. In taking the candy, the audience becomes complicit in the erasure and masking. The site of the installation becomes an in-situ memorial to his lover and all who perished during the AIDS epidemic. It is sweet and heartbreaking. It is also a foretelling of Gonzalez-Torres’s own life, who died 5 years later of the same disease. We can very well imagine the mound of candies as our home, Earth, and the work, already powerful, begins to take on a whole new meaning.

How, when, and why do we invest culturally, emotionally, and economically in the fate of threatened species? What stories do we tell, and which ones do we not tell, about them?
– Ursula Heise

What Is Missing?

“What Is Missing?” is an interactive web project spearheaded by artist and architect Maya Lin, who’s most well-known work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. No stranger to liminal sites where the dead and the living collapse to create a third space, Lin’s “What Is Missing?” is a portal of remembrance, reacquaintance and resurgence that works on several levels: a digital tribute to the now extinct species; an anthropogenic record of places; and a depository of people’s personal biocentric memories of “what is missing.” Flickering dots of various colors and shapes indicating different categories like disaster, conservation, timeline and stories across the darkened map of the world bring to mind constellations in the night sky. One can click on East Asian Cranes (coming back) or Heath Hens of Martha’s Vineyard (extinct) and get an overview of their survival history dating all the way back to 600 in the cranes’ case and 1620 for the hens. Launched in 2009 and updated up to 2018, the site itself feels like a digital relic given the further exacerbation of the planetary conditions under which all living species struggle to survive, and losses of an untold number of species from our biosphere since the site’s launch. 

© 1982 Agnes Denes

In 1982, Hungarian American land artist Agnes Denes transformed 2 acres of landfill in lower Manhattan into a wheat field. Created at the foot of the World Trade Center and a block from Wall Street, the golden patch of agriculture, titled, “Wheatfield – A Confrontation,” on the land valued at $4.5 billion, which has since become Battery Park City, was “an intrusion of the country into the metropolis, the world’s richest real estate.” Denes and volunteers cleared the piles of trash brought in during the construction of the Twin Towers, then dug furrows and sowed seeds by hand. In four months time, the land yielded 1000 pounds of wheat. The harvest became horse feed for the city’s mounted police and the rest traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.” The seeds were also given away in packets for people to plant them wherever they may end up in. Denes, in her prescient ways, was calling attention to what she deems as our “misplace priorities”: “Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns.”

© 1982 Agnes Denes
© 1982 Agnes Denes

The harvest also marked the end of the physical artwork but the idea lives on through the visual documentation which offers a surreal angle and an uncanny audacity imbedded in the work. It is a rather strange coincidence that the work happened 19 years before the destruction of the World Trade Center and we are now 19 years out from the 9/11 attacks. In 1982, the field was a living, breathing counterpoint to the unbounded appetite for capitalism. Today, the work, at least the photographs with the towers in the background, function as a memorial for both. 

Whether imbued with soft activism like Lin’s digital project or offering interventionist criticism like Dene’s wheat field, art under the umbrella of environment and climate challenges may not offer solutions but by showing and making us confront the losses and our lost ways, art does what it has always done throughout history, it reveals the nature of our time. 

Top Image: Plaque Memorializes First Icelandic Glacier Lost to Climate Change
(Dominic Boyer/Cymene Howe)

The Other Side of Petro-masculinity: We Don’t Have to Engage in the Coal Culture War

A Post-class Followup by Carol Joo Lee

As much of the talk around combatting Climate Crisis pivots on “net-zero global emissions,” the phase-out efforts for fossil fuels vis-a-vis coal industry have become a flashpoint for a culture war. Part of the reason is the genuine reaction at the loss of income, family history and sense of community, but the other part, as Cara Daggat points out in “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” is more cynical and drummed up by PR campaigns to associate coal with “traditionally aggressive masculine symbols,” such as football and military, and working-class trope of a family provider while appealing to white nostalgia. During the in-class discussion on the criticality of top-down approaches to mitigate climatic and environmental challenges, I became curious to find out if there’s an alternative script to the petro-masculinity narrative and what that might look like. Surely, on the ground, not every man, family, who’s been affected by the coal industry blight is holding on to the “coal is king” mantra and participating in “rollin’ coal” when they’re economically pinched and layoffs abound all around them regardless of how much Trump professes to love “beautiful, clean coal” and slashes EPA regulations. 

Rethinking, reimagining, reinventing and retraining are the words that are most often used to describe the economic future of the Appalachia, signaling a new era – a death of the old way and a dawn of the unknown – and as such there’s a lot of fear and resistance around the transition and most certainly it won’t happen overnight. During the Obama years, there were efforts to ease the transition from coal-based economy through programs such as, POWER Initiative, ARC (Appalachian Regional Commission) and TechHire. Unfortunately, the “war on coal” became the more dominant narrative and drowned out any good intentions. Incremental success was found in more regionally based organizations like SOAR (Shaping Our Appalachian Region) and Appalshop in Kentucky and UMWA (United Mine Workers of America Career Center) in West Virginia, which proved to be more effective in direct communication, resonance and engagement. 

A 2015 WIRED magazine piece recounts how after attending a SOAR conference, Rusty Justice (a fitting name if there ever was one), owner of a land-moving company, was inspired to co-found BitSource, a tech startup, in Pikeville, KY, that recruited coal miners to code out of an old Coca-Cola bottling plant. Another motivating factor was Michael Bloomberg. Justice heard Bloomberg say, “You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code” in a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and was incensed by his patronizing attitude. Justice and his partner received 900 applicants for 10 openings. The whittling down process included a test that evaluated three criteria: “Were they logical? Were they technical thinkers? And could they actually sit in a chair for eight hours a day?” The new tech job after training brings in about $18 an hour which is lower than an average miner salary of between $60,000 – $80,000. But the article points out that among the recruited there’s hardly any nostalgia, one of the BitSource employees, a former coal mechanic, tells the reporter, “No, I don’t miss this at all… I didn’t like the work, I liked the people.” 

A former Coca-Cola bottling plant is the new home to BitSource. Photo: Philip Scott Andrews
BitSource coders work on troubleshooting two of their current projects. Photo: Philip Scott Andrews
Homes clustered together are seen out a second story window at BitSource. Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

There are other ways of reinventing work in the coal country besides coding, which is only viable to a small segment of the coal population. There has to be. It’s no secret that coal jobs have been on a steep decline for decades and employment is at an all-time low since the late 1800’s. In Kentucky alone, in 2016, the number of jobs dropped by nearly 1,500 during just the first three months leaving an estimated 6,900 employees in the industry. The 2020 pandemic accelerated the loss: Over 6,000 coalmining jobs were lost in March and April 2020. In West Virginia, UMWA Career Center helps laid-off coal workers find jobs in commercial driving, electrical technology, chemical processing and medical jobs providing $5,000 toward retraining and $20 for each day they attend classes. While many ex-miners look for skill-based work, some are turning to farming. With the help of Community Farm Alliance, a group of multi-generation Kentuckians have started growing heirloom tomatoes and hemp on reclaimed surface mine. 

An old coal processing plant in Hazard, Kentucky. Photo: Robert Hall/SmoothPhoto
Nathan Hall, left, and Todd Howard checked a field of hemp, one of six sites the pair manages. Instead of a silver bullet, Mr. Hall said, “We want to be a part of the silver buckshot that’s going to hopefully transform this region.”
Photo Credit Mike Belleme for The New York Times

In February 2019, the Washington Examiner published an article titled, “Green New Dealers look to support miners while killing coal.” Against the pushback the GND received from coal lobbyists – “They are wrong. The coal industry is not dead. It can come back, and will, when prices become favorable;” “They are getting ready to disrupt the lives of folks who want to live in Appalachia…” – the conservative news site outlined the coal decline in stark terms for its readership: “[Even before the Green New Deal] more coal plants shuttered in President Trump’s first two years than were retired during former President Barack Obama’s first term.” Greg Carlock, GND research director at Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, describes the intended approach as follow: “You overcome the perception about the Green New Deal by engaging in conversation on where they see themselves in the energy transition… You honor the culture and the role coal communities have played in making the American economy a strong, energy-rich country.”

As illustrated above, there are promising examples for life post-coal in the Appalachian regions. However, the anti-clean energy campaign will intensify before it withers and other logistical challenges impede a new technology driven industry to take hold, such as lack of high-speed internet due to rough terrain and remoteness. Logistics aside, there are other problematic areas with focusing so intently on the people of coal work: Politically and culturally, coal mining has been a shorthand for a dignified white blue-collar job and is given an imbalanced amount of priority because of the narrative associations given to the work and the geography – the backbone of American industry, American heartland, when America was great, etc. – and when we’re tapping into the rage of coal miners, we’re tapping into white rage, discounting and erasing the history and existence of Black miners in America. So while the work towards converting the minds of the people who are most resistant to actions towards Climate Change is essential, it is also equally paramount that every vulnerable group is given the care, attention and funding. 

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The Rug Has Been Pulled Out: Distributional Failure’s Fallouts

A Topical Analysis & Sort of Reading Response by Carol Joo Lee

One of the most indelible images of this unprecedented time of Covid-19 is of a dismayed farmer in a field littered with his rotting crop. Another is a line of cars stretched on the highway beyond the frame of the picture outside a food bank – the location could be Anywhere, USA – awaiting hours for a box of groceries. As we witnessed these two heartbreaking, non-intersecting worlds, we saw clearly, among the many systemic vulnerabilities the 2020 pandemic has exposed, the limits and dangers of our current ways of distributing food. As crop and dairy farmers across the country faced the grim reality of having to dump their produce, milk and eggs as schools, hotels and restaurants shut down, millions of Americans, laid off due to no fault of their own, were on the precipice of going hungry. Neither food waste nor hunger is a new phenomenon. However, it is something else to see them side by side, interlinked and unresolved. Many wondered upon seeing these two realities juxtaposed against each other, why can’t this food reach the hungry in an advanced country like ours? It was hard to argue with Rebecca Solnit, that “We are a country whose distribution system is itself a kind of violence.” 

Hank Scott, president of Long & Scott Farms, stands in a field of rotting cucumbers that he was unable to harvest due to lack of demand on April 30, 2020 in Mount Dora, Florida. Joe Raedle | Getty Images
The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank distributes food in Carson, California, on April 18. Getty Images
Dairy Farmers in West Bend, Wisconsin. Copyright 2020 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc.

The pandemic put the strains of centralized food distribution systems under a microscope – we saw the failures plainly. It pulled the rug out from under our feet and as Bruno Latour asserts, the challenge became “much more vital, more existential… also much more comprehensible, because it is much more direct.” We were forced to “be concerned with the floor.” But Climate Change has been wreaking havoc on the status quo modes of food distribution for decades yet the government has done little to improve the situation. According to EarthIsland.org, In New York City, most of the 5.7 million tons of food that arrives in the city annually passes through Hunts Point Distribution Center, the largest wholesale market in the United States, which sits on the edge of the Bronx River, surrounded on three sides by water. Almost all this food comes by truck – nearly 13,000 semis each day. 

The structure was spared during Hurricane Sandy but traffic restrictions and road damages in other parts of the city caused a major disruption. The hurricane also triggered power outage causing refrigeration and payment systems failures. This is just one example of how a perfect storm of long-distance transportation, centralized wholesale markets, the concentrated food production under a natural disaster can paralyze food distribution affecting a large scale food waste and insecurity, especially to the already vulnerable population. In another instance, the severe drought of 2012 led to near-record low water levels of Mississippi River, a major transcontinental shipping route for Midwestern agriculture, forcing barges to carry lighter load and increasing shipping costs, which resulted in significant food and economic losses.

This map indicates the amount of freight moved across portions of the United States via different modes of transportation in 2007. (US Climate Resilience Toolkit)

Distributional failure amplifies the obscene problem of food waste. Yale Climate Connections reports, 30% of the food produced globally is wasted every year. In the US, that number jumps to a whopping 40%. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China and the U.S., according to the World Resources Institute. These numbers are not entirely surprising, yet, nonetheless shocking and disturbing. The main factor in this scandalous amount of waste is over-production which also contributes to unnecessary GHG emissions. Add to these already grievous facts, unforeseen distribution breakdowns as we witnessed on the onset of Covid-19 lockdowns compound the food waste problem, which compounds the food insecurity problem. When I look at the faces of the people lined up for food in much circulated photographs during this pandemic, I suspect that I will see almost the same makeup of people in the near-certain future climate-related catastrophes that disrupt access and means to food – largely BIPOC, elderly and low-income. 

Nelly Avila, wearing personal protective equipment, waits in a line for a pop-up food pantry in Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17.   REUTERS/Brian Snyder
People queue to pick up fresh food at a Los Angeles Regional Food Bank giveaway of 2,000 boxes of groceries in Los Angeles, April 9.  REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

The 2018 IPCC Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C filed “the impacts of global and regional climate change at 1.5°C on food distribution” under Knowledge Gaps and Key Uncertainties. It now seems, in the wake of a pandemic, the outlines that weren’t so clear two years ago have been brought into sharper relief. Though we may be lacking definitive data, on a visceral level, the impacts are and will be widespread, panic-inducing and life-threatening. As we strive for mitigation and adaptation to 15°C pathways, alternate and equitable modalities of food distribution systems are critical in reducing poverty and inequalities, as well as GHG emissions. In a larger sense, in Solnit’s words, Climate Change is not suddenly bringing about an era of equitable distribution. But surely, without concerted efforts to change the broken ways and redirect our climate and moral trajectories, there will be no rug and no floor to land on.