Tag Archives: climate change

Violence

“Climate Change is Violence,” and Disaster Capitalism

A close reading / rhetorical analysis, by Lala St. Fleur

In the title of one particular 2014 article published in the Guardian, columnist Rebecca Solnit urges readers, audiences, and participants in the ongoing discussion about the anthropocene’s environmental crisis to “Call climate change what it is: violence.”

According to Solnit’s article, “extreme, horrific, longterm, widespread” violence “against places and species as well as against human beings” has been perpetrated against Planet Earth and its denizens by the anthropogenic institutions of modern societies, as governments and companies alike “profit off the rapid, violent and intentional destruction of the Earth.” Today’s climate change is the result and fault of mining, fracking, deforestation, urbanization, and the other related problems of modernity. From fossil fuels to world hunger, the land and its people both suffer at the hands of capitalist industrialism. We are violently killing the planet, but Solnit’s article also underlines the fact that in so doing, we are also killing each other.

Solnit points to the 2007-2010 Arab spring bread riot revolts in Africa and the Middle East as a warning of the consequences of climate change, where prolonged droughts caused crop famines that led to the cost of wheat rising, and the people to violently protest in reaction. She draws on parallels to the French Revolution, the bloodiest revolt in European history, which was similarly provoked by the wheat crop failure in 1788. However, while Solnit does acknowledge that the unequal “distribution system is itself a kind of violence,” her article tends to focus a bit too heavily on the social upheaval and “turbulent reactions” that resource scarcity would incite amongst the disenfranchised starving and homeless victims of rising food prices and sea levels, in the event of unchecked global warming and climate change.

People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy…. In every arena, we need to look at industrial-scale and systemic violence, not just the hands-on violence of the less powerful.

Solnit, 2014.

In her article, Solnit states, “I suspect people will be revolting in the coming future against what they revolted against in the past: the injustices of the system. They should revolt, and we should be glad they do, if not so glad that they need to.” In reading Solnit’s article, I found myself wishing that she would further tackle the need to people to redirect their aggravation and violence at the institutions truly at fault for systemic inequality. But for all that Solnit made a point of overemphasizing that “climate change is violence,” she focused that violence on the bottom-up responses to food and land shortages, rather than the top-down causes behind and process by which that violence was committed in the first place.

Climate change is global-scale violence…. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

Solnit, 2014.

Solnit says that we must revolt against the language that hides the brutality of climate change violence–but that is the brutality of hunger, poverty, disenfranchisement, and exploitation. Climate change is violence, sure. But I think Solnit should have just come right out and said plainly that Capitalism is Violence. Capitalism is the vehicle by which industrialization and economic inequality continue to propel themselves across the world, effectively hiding its heinous crimes against humanity behind the language of economics, profit, and neoliberal free market regulation that all allow fossil fuel companies to pump the planet full of toxic emissions with near impunity in the first place.

Over the course of this Summer 2020 semester, I have become increasingly reminded of a class on disaster capitalism I took in my Spring 2020 archaeology course. We read and responded to several pieces by Naomi Klein, David Harvey, and more, on the topic of the unequal effects of climate change and natural disasters on different socioeconomic and racial groups. I made a PowerPoint for my class presentation, which I have uploaded below in an truncated form more pertinent to this semester’s course, in regards to what climate change violence looks like:

David Harvey’s 2017 article “There’s Nothing ‘Natural’ about a Natural Disaster,” and Neil Smith’s 2006 article “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster” both underline the ways that systemic inequality and capitalism are the real acts of violence against humanity and the earth. Mother Nature has her cycles, and she’s going to do what she always does–there have been recurring greenhouse effects and ice ages since the continents formed billions of years ago. But it’s the ways people react to those changes (climate change, Katrina, Sandy, Tohoku, volcanoes, droughts, and other disasters) that reveal the real acts of violence perpetrated by and against people and the planet itself, as well as highlighting precisely who the most numerous victims of “climate change violence” truly are.

Naomi Klein’s 2014 book, This Changes Everything Capitalism vs. the Climate, highlights the need “to address the twin crises of inequality and climate change at the same time,” (Klein, 2014: 372). Multiple crises are at work, by which climate change is only one aspect of an even larger problem based on unchecked over development and capitalist exploitation of everything the earth produces, from resources to geological disasters themselves. And so, a revolt against climate change, though indeed intrinsically linked to socioeconomic inequality, cannot by itself knock the capitalist system on its ear, particularly since several aspects tied to climate change can be tackled separately and with greater efficiency as general environmental concerns or cases of socio-economic/racial inequality (the pipelines as an issue of Native American land rights; Flint, Michigan’s water crisis as an example of gross governmental negligence). As such, I am unconvinced that Solnit’s “climate change is violence” is the right declarative statement that will rally the masses.

However, I do agree that the consequences unchecked climate change will exacerbate (namely: resource shortages) will more than likely be the lynch-pin that inevitably triggers both violent and non-violent revolts against exploitative capitalist, industrialist, and imperialist systems. But the masses will need to take aim at the right target first, otherwise these circular arguments will just keep spinning, as finite Global Green New Deals only scratch the surface of the true violence against society.

Losing Glaciers, Losing Steam

Released less than a year after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, causing an estimated 1,833 deaths and $125 billion in damage, the 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, follows former Vice President Al Gore’s campaign for Earth. Gore travels around the Country and the globe to present his PowerPoint containing extensive scientific data and compelling imagery documenting the stark effects of climate change to our planet delivered in a relatable, often humorous, and profoundly emotional manner. Director Davis Guggenheim weaves the climate science with Gore’s personal history and lifelong commitment to educating environmental managers and the public on the dire consequences of human induced global warming and the resulting climate disasters that are becoming more frequent and intense.

Gore has been fascinated with climate change data since his college professor, Roger Revelle, one of the first scientists to study anthropogenic global warming, shared his long-range study of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere with the classroom. The correlation between the drastic increase of CO2 produced by human activity since accelerated industrialization, and rising average global temperatures is unequivocal: “Out of 925 recent articles in peer-review scientific journals about global warming, there was no disagreement. Zero,” Gore states in the film. Global warming is very real and exceedingly urgent. If humankind does nothing to address it, the planet may reach a “tipping point” wherein the breakdown of Earth System’s natural climate processes will cause dramatic shifts in weather and precipitation patterns, vastly altered species diversity, population and distribution, and devastating consequences to human civilization.

Time lapsed images of shorelines retreating, lakes shrinking, and glaciers disappearing depict the powerful effects climate change has already had to the environment in many regions of the world. And projection graphs and imagery indicate what our future may hold if humankind fails to take immediate action to halt and reverse the climate crisis. How can we achieve this as a global population? We need to collectively stop burning fossil fuels and make serious transitions to renewable energy sources. And according to a 2004 article in Science, by Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, “humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem.” For Gore, it is a moral issue and deeply unethical to not take the steps necessary to solve the climate catastrophe we have found ourselves in.

Although the scientific community is in “100 percent agreement” on climate change and its dangers, a small group of world leaders has sought to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact to perpetuate the reign of big oil business. The political corruption goes even as far as coercing scientists to alter reports. Al Gore, wants to know: “Do we have to choose between the economy and the environment?” He thinks not. However fast forward to about ten years later, and globally we have not made the appropriate and necessary adjustments to our carbon emissions yet.

The 2017 film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, further drives home the point that we are heating our planet to the point of irreparable damage. And Al Gore is heated too. Becoming visibly frustrated and angry in his speeches at the lack of political response to the climate change crisis that he has dedicated his life to, Gore still will not give up. He treks through flooded streets in Miami, meets with coal mine developers in China, and consoles survivors of a devastating typhoon in the Philippines bringing us with him deeper into the social and environmental justice issues that are inevitably tied to climate change. Gore evokes the words of Martin Luther King Jr. in his speech at an event wherein he compares the challenges and accomplishments of the civil rights movement to those of the climate movement. And there are some noteworthy accomplishments including huge leaps in renewable energy development.  

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference was the largest and emotionally charged hurdle overcome in the film to which Al Gore’s hard work no doubt contributed. The situation in Paris was initially looking bleak with terrorist activity two weeks prior to the conference and then the Indian Prime Minister originally unwilling to concede to the terms of the agreement. He insisted that: “energy is a basic need” and India still needs conventional energy and fossil fuel because “denying them that would be morally wrong.” This is reminiscent of Al Gore’s claim in the first film of the moral duty of humanity to act in the face of climate change but instead of from the stance of American white privilege, we are seeing the opposite prospective.    

We get a bitter-sweet ending to the film with the Paris Agreement adopted, a huge win for the Climate Movement, yet the final minutes of the movie show Al Gore grief stricken after Donald Trump is elected the 45th President of the United States. Trump’s criticism of former President Obama’s attendance at the Climate Change Conference was a foreshadowing of exactly what level of support for climate action to expect of the new administration.

While An Inconvenient Truth may have had the ability to leave viewers startled, engaged, and inspired, An Inconvenient Sequel somehow falls a bit short in comparison. Maybe it is because the audience has become numb to the exhausting problem of climate change, or perhaps the film did not push the envelope quite far enough.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ and the American ‘right’ to cheap oil

“Drill, Baby, Drill.” These words call to mind former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and the 2008 presidential election, when many Americans were outraged over $4/gallon gasoline prices, and many Republicans sought to solve this “problem” with increased drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

Palin popularized a phrase written by Michael Steele, then the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, who went on to Chair the Republican Party.  As he recounted in an interview, he was writing the speech at 2 am the morning before he was due to give it, and felt he needed something catchy. He came up with “drill, baby, drill” — which brought to mind a phrase associated with the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, “Burn, baby, burn!” — but fretted that it might not be appropriate for a nationally televised speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaNiGwhmQeo

There was no need to fret. When Steele said the words, delegates at the convention immediately broke out in a “drill, baby, drill” chant, which continued into the fall presidential campaign (even though their nominee opposed drilling in ANWR and supported cap-and-trade legislation to limit carbon emissions). The chant conveyed an argument that increased drilling would lead to the cheap gasoline prices Americans need and deserve. 

Though it would be difficult to measure cause-and-effect impact, the chant correlated with a significant shift in party platform: In 2008, the Republican platform acknowledged human contribution to carbon levels and called for “technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency, mitigate the impact of climate change where it occurs, and maximize any ancillary benefits climate change might offer for the economy.” Four years later, even after a spill discharged 4.9 billion gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the party all but adopted “Drill, baby, drill,” with a platform that opposed “any and all cap and trade legislation” and demanded that Congress “take quick action to prohibit the EPA from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations.” 

In her piece, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Cara Daggett addresses this Palin-Republican belief that Americans have a right to cheap fossil fuels:

“No wonder that access to cheap and plentiful gas and energy became the sine qua non for American well-being, and a right demanded both of the state and for the state. Even as Americans in the 21st century disagree about whether health care or food should be considered a right, there is a widespread, bipartisan assumption that Americans deserve cheap energy, and that the state has a duty to ensure it. In turn, any threat to energy supply appears simultaneously as a threat to the American dream and, in turn, the dominant position of the US in the world.”

And though her argument focuses on masculinity, Daggett acknowledges that more than half of white women voters were drawn to a different slogan, “Make America Great Again.”  These women (presumably Palin included), Daggett argues, find “security in the status quo, and therefore resent threats to fossil fuel systems and/or hegemonic white masculinities.”

Daggett also makes direct reference to Palin: “Fossil fuel systems provide a domain for explosive letting go, and all the pleasures that come with it – drilling, digging, fracking, mountaintop removal, diesel trucks. In the words of Sarah Palin, ‘drill, baby, drill!’”

Of course, the obsession with cheap oil and fossil fuel reliance flies in the face of environmental experts. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2018 that carbon pollution would have to be cut by 20 percent by 2030 to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or by 45 percent by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. And in the largest public statement of economists in history, more than 3,500 economists from both sides of the political aisle signed a statement calling for a tax on carbon — not a reduction in prices, as Palin and others have called for — as key to limiting greenhouse gases. 

Cheap oil is not a right, as it passes enormous costs onto future generations.

For Palin, “Drill, baby, drill” wasn’t just a slogan or proposed policy, it was tantamount to a divine mandate. In the years since the 2008 campaign, she coupled “drill, baby, drill” with a reference to our oil reserves as “God-given resources,” suggesting that our Creator intended for Americans to drill and extract oil. 

In 2015, while suggesting she would accept a position as US Secretary of Energy in a future Trump administration, Palin said, “Oil and gas and minerals, those things that God has dumped on this part of the Earth for mankind’s use instead of us relying on unfriendly foreign nations … No, we’re not going to chill. In fact, it’s time to drill, baby, drill down.”

If Palin is looking to God for energy policy, she should drill down instead on Pope Francis’ Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home and the words of other Christian leaders who believe combatting climate change is a moral issue.

Petro-masculinity: History Recycled, Reified

At first glance, the relationship between fossil fuels and white male patriarchy may be difficult to evince, but if captured through the prism of the cultural history of the West, especially of America, the relationship becomes anything but unclear. This is one of the more sobering points of Cara Daggett’s essay, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire” wherein the linkage between authoritarianism impulses and white male patriarchy is contextualized around the usage of fossil fuels, hence the provocative term “petro-masculinity.” 

Though the paper veers too deep into psychoanalytic territory and at times reads more like a rant than a journal article, simplistically accounting the “shared frustration among white men who have struggled to find a housewife willing to receive their veneration” for one of the reasons how the psychology of Trump supporters worked to elect the current president, the essay nonetheless engages provocatively with the Climate Change crisis. The paper connects masculinity with the usage of fossil fuels and the practice’s pointed, destructive tendencies. Whether it be a clever display of environmentally-focused analysis of semantics (Daggett deconstructs the word “petro” by presenting the diametrically opposed forces within, those of dead/rigidity (fossils) and those of life/flow (energy brought about through death)), a socio-historical reading of white male cultural bonding with fossil fuels (a leitmotif is the link between the boom of cars and the stable jobs and social positioning that American white man procured after World War II) or a psychologically engaged approach to defining authoritarianism (studies of Nazi psychology is keenly used) as an unrelenting entity hellbent on violently spreading its order and influence, Daggett’s paper impressively covers the paper’s complex topic in a rich, interdisciplinary way.

The essay leaves the reader with enough meat to chew on for days. What’s especially striking is grounding the fossil fuel-American masculinity dialectic as a response to World War II gender dynamics:

Instead of sturdy husbands and firm fathers controlling their wives and children, lisping bureaucrats and social workers were now running the show. World War II exacerbated the problem; with so many men away at the front, and women working in the factories, male authority was further eroded (37). 

Though this isn’t Daggett’s words (she references Corey Rubin here), the essay is filled with this sentiment. Daggett’s arguments tend to connect the response of American white men to the World War II “re-gendering” of society (which consisted of fossil fuels usage ala energy consumption) to the present moment when American white voters, as an aggregate, have channeled their masculinity through damning global warming movements by doubling down on fossil fuel usage (i.e. the support of bringing back coal power despite the industry’s economic impotency) in their unbridled support of Trump and his dangerous climate politics. Such connections lead us to ponder interesting questions about the effect of culture on one’s politics and consider how the refusal to let go of power is manifested in one’s political stances. Trump’s detrimental positions on Climate Change  aren’t just based in an anti-science ideology, but also a politics rooted in a nostalgia for a past for which a certain group can feel; the idea that this nostalgia is inherently related to fossil fuel usage is both a disturbing but vital thought in perhaps understanding the Trump phenomenon. 

It is disturbing in that, like the flow/rigidity dynamic that Daggett professes as the bizarre  dialectic within the fossil fuels-American masculinity model (with “rigidity” representing the blockade of culture destruction and “flow” representing the perpetuation of a dominant culture and its systemic rule), nostalgia, normally attributed to preciousness and innocence, is juxtaposed with ecosystem destruction and violence. However, it’s essential to recognize this “destructive nostalgia” since “The novelty and freedoms enabled by fossil-fuelled civilization are entangled with horrific violence, such that to embark upon fossil-fuelled life is to spark off mass species extinction just as much as it is to make possible the internet or global social movements” (31). 

Accepting this allows us to see the rubric of Daggett’s thesis as re-contextualizing the simultaneous “creation-destruction” element of the industrialization-natural environment dynamic around white male masculinity, authoritarianism and fossil fuels. Despite its engrossing angle regarding the stabilization of patriarchy in relation to the destructive usage of fossil fuels, the essay is built on a point with which many readers may be too familiar; that is, our treasures and freedoms are predicated on the evaporation of our planet. If climate deniers are to accept this, we could all be one step closer to ending the recycling of a culture and identity that preserves ecological demolition and gross exploitation of natural resources. 

Natural Disasters

The Past, Present, and Future of Climate Change: Archaeological Perspectives

A personal narrative, by Lala St. Fleur.

I used to live in Upstate New York, in a house with the Susquehanna River right in my backyard. In 2011, Tropical Storm Lee struck the east coast, the hurricane bringing heavy rains that flooded the Susquehanna, and all surrounding areas in New York and Pennsylvania alike. A state of emergency was enacted for my county and all others impacted by the Susquehanna, as our homes were all flooded in several feet of water. My family had to drive several counties over to find a cheap hotel that still had rooms, where we stayed for over a week to wait for the storms to pass and the waters to recede.

FEMA was called in, and inspected our house, but the relief money they gave us didn’t come close to covering the total damages and expenses. And no amount of money in the world would replace the priceless things lost; I used to be a hobbyist who drew and sketched, and all of the work I had done over the years was ruined. My family and I left Upstate NY in 2012, saying good riddance to that water-logged house and that river that had taken so much from us. We moved to NYC…only to be greeted by Hurricane Sandy that same year.

I am well aware of the very real dangers and consequences of climate change, global warming, and rising sea levels. I’ve waded up to my waist in river muck in my basement, struggling to wrap the fuse box and water heater in plastic and blankets as the water rose, only to toss everything down, grab whatever essentials we could pack into our car, and book it to drier, safer high ground.

I decided to enroll in college in 2014. At CUNY’s Brooklyn College, I chose an archaeological anthropology major with a double minor in history and classics. I worked on several projects examining the ways that the ever-changing natural environment shapes prehistoric, historic, and contemporary societies, with a focus on the cultural impact of ancient religious traditions. This included my creation of an ArcGIS Story Map that digitized major Natural Disasters of Ancient Japan (specifically: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis), from the Kofun Period to the Tokugawa Shogunate, which I made during junior year. I was increasingly fascinated about how everything from Japanese religious practices and mythological deities, to architecture, city planning, and government policy were influenced if not directly derived from their understanding of natural cycles and forces. And so, for my undergraduate senior thesis paper, I expounded upon that topic by writing about Japan’s cultural, economic, and political responses to geological events and disasters, from the prehistoric Jōmon and Yayoi periods up to the modern Tōhoku Disaster of 2011.

By looking at the ways that the Japanese peoples have reacted to geological changes for well over 10,000 years, it helped put things into perspective for me about the endless challenges societies face in response to geological events. But there are also equally endless possible solutions that await discovery as those events continue to be researched, so that potential crises are mitigated.

Now pursuing my master’s degree at the CUNY Graduate Center, in the MALS program’s archaeology track, my research has become further grounded in religious and environmental studies. I primarily use geomyths (mythology pertaining to geological phenomena) as my main source of inspiration for academic analysis and inquiry about the relationships between people and the (super)natural world around us.

I am currently working on my master’s thesis, which examines various topographical features and archaeological sites throughout Greece that have long been believed to be the entrances to the underworld, Hades.

I enrolled in the MALS 78500 course on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change in order to further my education about climate change, its history, and its future. For my final project, I hope to incorporate paleoclimatology into discussions about how humans have reacted to geological events, and how the planet has reacted in kind to human intervention.