Tag Archives: natural disasters

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.

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.