Ecological Beings

Ecological Beings

What began as simple pecuniary theft in order to accumulate capital has, over the last half-millennium, devolved into the rapacious taking of foreign lands to put that ever-increasing capital to work. Hannah Arendt understood that this process was key to the de-humanization of subject populations and the development of totalitarian governments in the twentieth century.  What has been less understood, until recently, is that by this same process we have also alienated the non-human world. We have now awoken to a ‘Nature’ that has developed an alarming kind of suicidal agency: we are reaping the whirlwind of global warming and the entropic decimation of much of the non-human life with whom we share the planet.

The U.N. recently issued a summary report from their Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The complete 1,500-page report will be issued later this year. The summary notes that, “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history…but it is not too late to make a difference.”That was early in May – and the news cycle has long since moved on. This initial summary, of what is sure to be truly horrifying data, is mostly ignored by an indifferent world and the full report, when it lands, will likely be read by very, very few.

That was it - the summary of a definitive report demanding, “…a fundamental system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values” - barely noticed. Australia, a country highly vulnerable to a changing climate and with much of its unique fauna already at grave risk, a well-educated and literate population, where voting is compulsory, just elected a government determined to dismiss the impacts of global warming, pollution and habitat destruction – fully undeterred, apparently, by the U.N. report.

Societies and individuals alike fail to take action in the face of a torrent of publications, video and other media that are unequivocal in explaining the perils the earth faces. Occasional victories, such as the banning of DDT some years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the more recent international agreement to limit the use of CFC’s are rare indeed. The attempts by the U.N., active since 1988 in the attempt to reduce carbon emissions - the proximate cause of climate change, have failed utterly.

Can we take any comfort from the fact that the language which Anglophones are using to describe these complex, interrelated threats to the health of the planet is changing? That this change may even herald a long awaited shift in consciousness that can confront climate change? Inevitably, in this age of limited attention spans, the evolution in language has been occurring at the level of the meme - the smallest unit of declamatory communication. Encouragingly, ‘Global Warming’, the meme, is becoming ‘Extinction’, the meme, a potentially virulent token that expresses our concern for the condition of the biosphere. The IPBES summary finds that, “about one million animal and plant species are threatened by extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.” As the condition of the planet worsens, the language that describes this phenomenon must become more robust. Climate change protest, and all activities directed at slowing the rate of extinctions, resource depletion and pollution have been re-framed as ‘Rebellion’, at least in the U.K., where overturning the establishment has long been popular (cf. Brexit).

‘Extinction Rebellion’, has even greater potential memetic power. Its abbreviation is simply XR. For visual reinforcement, there is a sophisticated hour-glass logo, stylized as an ‘X’ encased within a circle. This is dissemination of an idea at a level routinely reserved for the marketing of products. As such, it reflects the co-option of the tools of the oppressive, socio-political ideology of neoliberalism that is complicit in our failure to confront the planetary malaise.

The evolutionary arrival of ‘Rebellion’ (née protest) is an example of punctuated equilibrium, the theory that this process is occasionally roiled by episodes of rapid speciation (or change) between long periods of quietude.  This instance of Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of rupture in a ‘steady-as-she-goes’ normality grew out of the campaign ‘Rising Up!’ in the U.K., which proposed the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ back in September 2018. Its founder, Roger Hallam, backed by academics, politicians and scientists, claims that, “The world has changed … A space for truth-telling has been opened up.” While the physical protests will likely peter out, its radical coinage may live on.

The history of our inaction since the ‘Great Acceleration’, coined by J.R. McNeil in 2014 to describe the geometric increase in fossil fuel usage since 1945, is encompassed in ‘The Great Dithering’ - a meme established by Gabriel Metcalf, also in 2014, which he proposed as a name (lifted from the sci-fi author, Kim Stanley Robinson), for, “the period of human history, following modernism and postmodernism, in which humanity failed to act rapidly or decisively enough to avert catastrophic climate change.” The ‘Extinction Rebellion’, together with the global declamations of the young, other-worldly, English-accented revolutionary Greta Thunberg, and the just released U.N. IPBES summary are all attempts to end the dithering and inspire societal, economic, technological and political change. But, as Thunberg says, despite her own frenetic travels, despite the U.N.’s impeccably researched data, despite the availability of ‘Extinction Rebellion’ T-shirts (and the meme), “nothing has changed.”

‘Anthropocene’ is firmly entrenched as an earworm amongst the climatically woke. Proposed, in 2002, by the Nobel prize-winning climate scientist Paul Crutzen, this word/meme is used to define the geological period, now taken to have begun right after the end of World War II, like the ‘Great Acceleration’, when it became apparent that human activity impacts the planet in ways that transcend traditional geologic and biological forces – through the discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, human caused erosion and sedimentation, sea level rise,  increased acidification of the ocean, and extinction levels that are now some 1000 to 10,000 above background rates.

Elizabeth Kolbert popularized the notion of ‘The Sixth Extinction’, in her book of the same name, sub-titled, An Unnatural History, and published to great acclaim and a Pulitzer in 2014. It inevitably references the previous five extinctions, in all of which climate change was implicated and in all of which a minimum of 75% of extant species were lost. In the last such event, 66 million years ago, the coup de grace was delivered to a climate-changed, vulnerable world by an asteroid. Ancient squid-like ammonites and the mighty reptilian dinosaurs perished alike despite both having been around, at that point, for close to two million years.

And yet, now the world, with the neurasthenic, metronomic gait of a zombie, continues to trudge towards the precipice – over which its inhabitants, it seems, must plunge into a time of environmental feedback, where snow and ice melt produce permafrost methane release, amplifying the processes that lead to a drowned and vastly diminished planet. Evident, in this death march, is a lack of feeling that we humans routinely bring to the issue of carbon emissions and habitat loss which entirely smothers the dramatic exhortations of Thunberg, the passionate leaders of the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and the U.N.’s painstakingly researched IPBES summary report, with a blanket of profound indifference.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is sui generis, a one-woman green-meme-machine. Her recent speech at Howard University, sponsored by The Sunrise Movement, a youth climate activist organization supportive of the ‘Green New Deal’, had the rhythmic eloquence and emphatic repetitions found in the Black rhetorical tradition. She framed action to decarbonize the economy as a struggle for basic human rights - for a living wage, health benefits for all, and a sustainable and just America. She ridiculed the middle-ground beloved of Republican and Democratic centrists. She ridiculed those who claimed the ‘Green New Deal’ was too much, and then blazingly listed the egregious environmental misdeeds of the last half-century perpetrated by Congress that were ‘too much’ for her. She declaimed: “We are at a precipice…We are here to say ‘no more’…Hope will come for us who refuse to settle for less”. Apart from highlighting the fact that we have just reached a historic high of 415 parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there was little regurgitation of data. The speech was heart-felt and inspirational, and while Greta Thunberg has been popularly proclaimed as the Joan of Arc of Europe’s environmental advocates, AOC is now our own visionary heroine, as both women dare to challenge the logic of profit – heresy to the corporate interests that enslave us.

The ‘Extinction Rebellion’ has been effective in clarifying the political terms of the climate debate, the U.N. has issued a damning environmental assessment that explicitly links global warming with extinction, and AOC and Thunberg have added their missionary fervor in the cause of sustainability and justice. But the philosopher of ‘Dark Ecology’, Timothy Morton, in his latest book, Being Ecological, 2018, founded on his embrace of object oriented ontology, suggests that environmental anguishing is but a theistic echo of agrilogistics - the organizing principle of the Neolithic revolution, when agricultural technologies, supported by new religions and newly stratified societies, began to develop more than a millennium ago. We remain, he suggests, locked in patterns of shaming, visions of salvation, and eschatological imaginings, while we ignore the reality around us. We remain, at heart, Mesopotamians, confirmed in the habits of mind necessary for civilization, champions of the Neolithic revolution which, “...has been going on for about twelve thousand years, since the start of agriculture, which eventually required industrial processes to maintain themselves, hence fossil fuels, hence global warming, hence mass extinction”.

The latest U.N. data dump is, he implies, just the thing to further impede the possibility of ‘being ecological’. Greta Thunberg’s rhetoric feeds directly on ancient eschatological traditions, and the intrepid ‘Extinction Rebels’ speak truth to power within ritualized hierarchies long designed to vitiate such assaults. He suggests that our fascination with the latest reports of a damaged world - facts that need constant up-dating - reflect the manic reiterations of trauma experienced by those who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. Our inability to fully understand that we are living in a time of mass extinction leads us to crave what he calls ‘information dump mode’ as a way of confirming ourselves outside of its reality. Instead of an urgent call to action, each iteration of data confirms our paralysis. Immobilized by each new tranche, we remain stuck, he suggests, re-living the trauma. We need, he urges, “to start to live the data” – to initiate an entirely new way to absorb the information that has been washing over us for so many decades by living it in a manner that actively erodes our ancient civilizational programming.        

The impact on climate of the burning of fossil fuels was first identified by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, and media attention was occasionally drawn to this fateful connection over the next century, but it was not until 1988 that a global focus was brought to bear on the issue when the U.N. formed its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There has been a steady stream of jeremiads on climate change ever since, and the issue rose to new levels of public prominence when Al Gore released his film, An Inconvenient Truth, in 2006.  Morton attempts to solve the grave conundrum that while trapped within an atmospheric blanket made ever more efficient because of our carbon emissions, we are burdened with a consciousness that inhibits our ability to change our behavior, and that the torrents of data that document this crisis are complicit in our paralysis.

He notes that our personal contributions to the problem are statistically meaningless (a little like voting in a large democracy) since there is no feedback loop to register our individual emissions. We have to act on trust. But, he writes,

“…ecological data is so complex, and is about such complex phenomena, that it’s difficult to make that data into facts, let alone start living those facts, rather than repeating truthy factoids…”,

And these ‘truthy factoids’ are the very stuff of memes. He points to a radical gap between things and data (the Kantian core of object-oriented ontology) and that, “Ecological things are very complex, involve a lot of moving parts, are widely distributed across Earth and time, and so on.” They congregate in what he describes as ‘Hyperobjects’, one of which is global warming, and which inevitably resist data analysis. Yet data is all our modern scientific world provides us with which to approach things. Now, as the IPBES summary report bombards us with factoids we crouch before the onslaught, as Morton suggests, “in the fetal position or simple curled up like a hedgehog.”

His alternative, of ‘living the data’, involves a process of what he calls ‘tuning’. First of all, he establishes that living non-violently with non-human beings is at the core of ‘being ecological’, and that the deconstruction of the fire-wall that exists between humans and non-humans is imperative. He writes, “Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it.” He urges that we create living, dynamic relationships with other ‘ecological beings.’

We have a history of fiercely argued texts that attempt an elucidation of the contemporary data and confront the social, moral, and economic issues around global warming. Many of us have any number of memes lodged in our brains that prompt us towards responding to the unprecedented events that attend our age of extinction. Many of us are both armed and armored with data. We feel that there is both a protective and a predictive value in reading the texts and watching the videos. We may even believe that the acquisition of ecological data is valuable in persuading others of our dire circumstance. We may believe that we have a purpose to account for the present condition of the planet – not as prophets of doom but simply as contemporary truth tellers. We may find it exhilarating to imagine that the long arc of environmental awareness is bending towards action. We may even believe that technological progress assures us of a final triumph in our attempts to de-carbonize the economy.

But much of this may indeed be a ‘busy-busy’ recapitulation of the Neolithic revolution, when knowledge was sought for precise, productive ends and data was substituted for the reality beneath the surface of things (a reality that Paleolithic people spent millennia exploring and the knowledge of which still resides today in those few populations untouched by Western Civilization). Morton has taken this notion, argued by Jared Diamond among others, and linked it to a philosophical path that leads him out of Modernity and into the almost impenetrable thickets of object-oriented ontology.

Where does that leave the rest of us? It is difficult, outside of academia, to argue convincingly that we should abandon Modernity. Yet our obsession with facts, the factoids and the mimetic ideation that lives in our brains as memes, may well be standing in the way of our simply meshing with the environment, not as humans uniquely capable of realizing reality through our consciousness, but as ecological beings.

The house that I live in is embedded in chaparral, the flora and fauna community that dominates the foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountains, a transverse range in Southern California. It’s spring and so it’s time for the annual brush clearance mandated by the Ventura County Fire Department. It’s a time of weed-whacking the invasive oats, brome grasses and tocalote thistles (Centaurea melitensis) and hand weeding the mustard. Late May rains mean that the weeding has taken on added urgency because, for a few weeks, it’s possible to pull the mustard rather than chopping it with a Pulaski axe.

Partly because of the late rains, and partly because it’s the second year of recovery after the devastating Thomas Fire of 2017-2018, the native wild flowers have been extraordinary. Bird life seems to have recovered with the notable exception of the tiny wren-tit, with its signature chaparralian song. At night, the faint hooting of a pair of greater horned owls drifts through open windows.

 I have spent the last ten years informally studying this community, and it is the haunting birdsong, the wild flowers, trees, rocks, mountains and sky that help me to explore what it might mean to live as an ecological being: to discover the possibilities of an enmeshment with the non-human world.  But still imprisoned within Modernity, it is the ever growing literature focused on the global warming induced sixth extinction (and its related memes) that give urgency to my quest.

Wildlife Corridors not High-Speed Rail coming to California

In a rare historical moment that counters half a millennium of Modernity, non-human species, their native environments and their freedom of movement, have been privileged over the transportation of humans within the State of California.

In a month when Gavin Newsom, the newly appointed Governor of California, in his State of the State address, all but threw in the towel over high-speed rail, agreeing to call it quits after the rump line between Merced and Bakersfield in the Central Valley is finally built, the County of Ventura plans to institute a Wildlife Corridor Overlay Zone that will enhance the possibilities of survival for the County’s fragmented wildlife populations.

 Is it entirely specious to couple these two events?

For one shining instant, can Californian wildlife corridors and the high-speed rail system co-exist within the public imagination and register the smallest of tremors, a foreshock that presages a shift in the zeitgeist? Allow me to savor the possibilities of the moment.

Upon returning from this fanciful conflation, it is appropriate to remind ourselves, in these days of spurious States of Emergency (can we doubt that more will carom down the Trumpian track?) that,

“Of all the decisions any society must make, perhaps the most fundamental ones concern the natural world, for it is upon the earth’s biota – its plants, animals, waters, and other living substances – that all human existence ultimately depends.” Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature, 2001.

The County of Ventura, in Southern California, squeezed between the Counties of Los Angeles to the southeast, Santa Barbara to the west and Kern to the north, has made a fundamental, life-affirming decision: its plans for wildlife connectivity, if approved by the County Board of Supervisors early in March, will be the most far-reaching provisions of their kind in California. But, just like high-speed rail, they face a panoply of reactionary forces arrayed against them. But it now appears, that of the two projects, wildlife corridors is the more likely to transcend this opposition.

In his analysis of this country’s environmental history, Jacoby notes that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “in an unprecedented outburst of legislation known as the conservation movement, American lawmakers radically redefined what constituted legitimate uses of the environment.” The movement’s philosophical foundations were laid by conservationist stalwarts, George Perkins Marsh (Man and Nature, 1864), John Muir, Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, among others. But there arose too, a vociferous and sometimes violent reaction by those impacted by these new laws which regulated hunting, fishing, logging, the setting of fires and other activities that impinge on the natural landscape. What was once legal, or at least unaddressed by the laws of the land, often became illegal.

The proposed passage of protections for ‘Habitat Connectivity and Wildlife Corridors’ has elicited echoes of this reaction: most egregiously at the recent Planning Commission Hearing, when one landowner shouted out, during the afternoon’s public comment phase (which lasted over five hours), that the County’s planners and planning commissioners “should be taken out and shot.” This death threat was met by his removal from the hearing room by Sherriff’s deputies.

Despite the frenzied outcries of concerned property-owners who branded the proposals as the ’Wildfire Corridor’, falsely claiming that leaving lands un-cleared would encourage the passage of fire (the opposite is true, since cleared wildland leads inevitably to botanical type-conversion whereby the ancient, endemic ecosystems are replaced by hyper-inflammable weedy grasses), the Planning Commission unanimously approved the provisions. The Planning Department staff-recommendations will now move on for consideration by the County’s Board of Supervisors on May 12. Their expected approval will likely lead to an appeal by the opposition forces and an eventual resolution in California’s Supreme Court.

While the Planning Commission hearing heard but one outburst of threatened violence, a barely constrained anger flowed through most of the crowd in attendance. They had been organized, encouraged, and accoutered with lapel stickers (urging, ‘Send it Back!’), and provided with a variety of pre-printed foam-core placards by their non-profit front, the Ventura County Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business (VC CoLAB). The organization contends that “The proposed ordinance places extreme restrictions on fencing, walls, lighting, and structures that will compromise the security of families and prevent property owners from reasonable use of their land.” Their counsel advises that “the proposed ordinance constitutes a regulatory taking of private land that would require just compensation and violates the Equal Protection and Due Process rights of property owners.” Let it be said, that despite the absence of MAGA hats, this was the closest I ever want to get to a Trump Rally - or a lynching - for the blood curdling sense of barely-contained frontier violence hung heavy in the air.

Undeterred, the following week I attended my local Ojai City Council meeting at which the Mayor and four Council members planned to discuss the sending of a letter in support of the proposed ordinance. Thankfully, VC CoLAB, and their property-owner legions seemed nowhere in evidence, perhaps rightly discerning, that whether this small incorporated City sent a letter or not, was of little import. So it was, that as the clock approached ten o’clock, and the agenda item came up for discussion, the audience in the council chamber had been reduced to two – me and a gentleman who had no interest in the issue. I spoke in favor of the ordinance and the letter-sending motion passed unanimously. I left the chamber and strode into the chill air both delighted with the evening’s outcome and relieved that, as is customary after nine p.m., the streets of Ojai were entirely deserted.

The greatest threat to wildlife rangelands in California is the system of freeways that cross hatch its still substantial areas of wild habitat, isolate populations, and promote genetic fragmentation. As a top-predator, the mountain lion is key to the survival of Southern California as one of the most biologically rich natural landscapes in the world. Because of the pressure that sprawling growth has placed on its habitat, Southern California has been the focus of pioneering research into the science of habitat fragmentation and wildlife corridors. Paul Beier has been the leading scientist developing much of this work, in California and internationally, for the last thirty years.

He was a key figure in the critical academic study, Missing Linkages: Restoring Connectivity to the California Landscape, 2000, which came out of a conference in San Diego sponsored by both California State Parks and The Nature Conservancy, among others. The assembled biologists developed the understanding that anthropogenic forces were carving up the wildlands into smaller and smaller bites and reducing the viability of California’s natural heritage. Wildlife corridors were proposed as an antidote to this fragmentation. Additionally, they suggested that specific range bottlenecks might be relieved with freeway overpasses, underpasses and culverts, provided that enough natural habitat existed on either side of such connections. Barely south of the Ventura County line, in Agoura Hills, Caltrans, the State’s Transportation Department, is proposing to build an approximately 50’ wide vegetated bridge across U.S. 101, known locally as the Ventura Freeway. When completed, it will be the largest wildlife crossing in the United States, and link habitat in the Santa Monica Mountains, via a wildlife corridor, with the Los Padres National Forest.

Beier has contributed his research to the South Coast Wildlands Group who have developed the specific proposals for wildlife corridors in Ventura County. Such connectivity between areas of wildlife habitat not only improves outcomes for the State’s charismatic animals such as the mule deer, mountain lion, bobcat, grey fox, and badger, but its entire community of wildland species and native flora.

The State of California has worked in parallel to identify priority conservation areas. Its Department of Fish and Wildlife is charged with compiling an on-going database of California’s most critical areas for maintaining habitat connectivity, including wildlife corridors and habitat linkages. Counties throughout the state, it is hoped, will begin instituting planning overlay zones to support the protection of these vital wildlife links.

The fight for wildlife conservation, which has endured for well over a century, is now shrouded by global warming and the awful knowledge that we are experiencing the sixth extinction. Within these twinned realities, Ventura County is nevertheless making attempts to ameliorate conditions for the indigenous fauna and flora with whom we share the land. They face virulent opposition from hobby-farmers, W.U.I. homesteaders and horse-ranchers. But by moving their program of ‘Habitat Connectivity and Wildlife Corridors’ forward, guided by impeccable research (whose scientific credibility the opposition predictably questions), it is making both a practical and deeply symbolic gesture.  Although the proposed ordinance is vitiated by the exclusion of all agricultural and oil lands, as well as other provisions designed to assuage land-owners, the County is acting, it seems, in full knowledge that the species we ultimately save will be our own.

Are we Moderns or Terrestrials?

We, in the United States, are accustomed to discriminatory segregation, accustomed to those excluded, and to those left behind. Bryan Stevenson notes, in a New York Times interview, 01.20.19, “Slavery didn’t end in 1865; it just evolved.” It evolved through the sabotaging of Reconstruction, through lynching, through institutionalized segregation, and through mass incarceration (as is made explicit in the Equal Justice Initiative’s permanent museum exhibit, ‘From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration’ in Montgomery, Alabama). It has also evolved through a deliberate program of mass immiseration conducted by the government’s withholding of adequate education, social services and living-wage work - with the notable exception of impressment into military service on behalf of the nation’s imperial juggernaut. And it has evolved, in this broadened notion of slavery, which might reasonably include all servitude to the economic benefit of rich and powerful, mostly white-male elites, to encompass peoples of color and the white underclass, the white working class and the white middle class. A similar process of division, of segregation, between the exploiters and the exploited, has, since the advent of colonization, separated the Global North from the Global South.

In Down to Earth – Politics in the New Climatic Regime, 2018, Bruno Latour, the French philosopher and sociologist, writes, “To the migrants from outside who have to cross borders and leave their countries at the price of immense tragedies, we must, from now on, add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries”.

What kind of vast conspiracy is responsible for these circumstances? And, what has the weather got to do with it?  Latour demonstrates that globalization, the populist reaction to it, an ever-widening chasm of wealth disparity, and climate change are inextricably linked. He suggests that the conjoined global elites from the worlds of politics, commerce and celebrity (whose quintessence metamorphizes into a kind of turtle head emerging from its shell of planetary capitalism every year at the World Economic Forum at Davos) are, by now, fully aware of the limits to the earth’s resources, and have concluded that there is no longer room for both them and everybody else to fully satiate their material desires.

Given this awareness that we cannot all gravitate to, “…a common horizon, towards a world in which all humans could prosper equally” these global elites, Latour suggests, have been actively trying to separate themselves from the world - and have been conducting triage: sorting the population into the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, most dramatically, since the onset of deregulation in the 1980’s.

 In this country, this process is a well-established tradition reaching back to the founding of the Republic. Globally, it has been ongoing since the sixteenth century, in the operations of colonization. But it is what has become known as the ‘Great Acceleration’, the rapacious impact of fossil-capitalism, post WWII, on the planet’s physical, chemical, biological and human resources that has now made urgent the deliberate constraints on the aspirations of vast swathes of the population. Those left behind no longer reach toward the allure of the future (branded as Modernity) but instead, seek solace in the imagined beneficence of the past, in pastoral imaginings, in nationalist isolation, or, in this country, the prosperity of a dreamtime when America was Great - in the overtly segregated 1950’s.

Latour writes that, “The climate question is at the core of all geopolitical issues and is directly tied to questions of justice and inequality.” Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord on June 1, 2017, was an egregious example of American exceptionalism – the idea that the United States, uniquely, is not threatened by climate change. Speaking in Rio in 1992, George H.W. Bush had set the stage by declaring that “our way of life is not negotiable”. Trump’s action was undertaken in the full knowledge that this American lifestyle of excessive consumption was only ever the perquisite of a favored few, and otherwise serves as a carrot to goad the futile economic endeavors of the dispossessed.

By denying global warming, Trump has consigned this country to a continued unreality, while adding incrementally to the impending inundation of the earth. His concern to protect the country’s southern borders from climate change refugees instantiates a fortress mentality, cutting across notions of globalization, to produce, amongst his supporters, an assumption of national impregnability. It is this assumption that gives credence to his denial of a globalized phenomenon that knows no borders.

Cultural and economic globalization represents a profoundly entropic force in the world. The local (the heterogenous) has been subsumed into an extraordinary elitist vision of a gilded palace - a globalized world where all can no longer possibly fit, and which exists solely for the comfort and profit of the few. Its construction has relied on the gross exploitation of the planet’s fossil biomass, the deleterious effects of which now threaten us all. This fatal systemic flaw is denied even by those in the U.S. promoting the so-called Green New Deal which proposes the continued embrace of an expansionary economy and the growth of urban development. Business-as-usual with a green twist is a toxic cocktail.  It does nothing to blunt the point of the capitalist spear driven into the heart of an erstwhile, reasonably stable ‘natural’ world, which supported a negentropic complexity of human and non-human species and their varied cultural and biological stratagems.

We are now witnessing the end-game of the Modernity project. Founded on rationality, emancipation and progress and devoted, ostensibly, to the welfare of all, it has been subverted by, “a dizzying extension of inequalities”.  This process of triage has created the so-called ‘left-behinds’ necessary as sacrificial populations that, ironically, support the elite practitioners of this economic and cultural discrimination.

Latour accepts that his hypothesis, that “The obscurantist elites…have decided to abandon the ideology of a planet shared by all,” sounds suspiciously like a conspiracy theory. Yet the elite’s concerted actions, like the privatization of formerly government functions, the dismantling of social safety nets, and the highly successful efforts to widen the wealth gap, are all too evident. To this can be added the elite’s disposition to deny climate change, as practiced by Trump or, more often, to churlishly accept the science but refuse to act to moderate its proximate cause, confident that they, at least, can escape its worst consequences. The pursuit of wealth, freedom, knowledge and leisure for all, which has been at the heart of the Modernist project, has been abandoned. Latour argues (with the aid of several cryptic diagrams) that, in response, we need to shift our headlong, centuries long tilt along the temporal axis that has as its horizon, Global Modernity (the chosen few clamoring on the leading edge of its Modernization Front) toward a new attractor, which he calls the Terrestrial.

We cannot simply retreat, reverse time’s arrow and live in the Local - the point of origin from which we have sprung on our march to the modern world - for once there, most would starve, because there are now far too many of us. Latour counsels that we abandon the Local – Global axis, made untenable by the climate-driven ecological collapse. Geopolitics have been replaced by geohistory in which humankind has relinquished its role as the primary actor. We are dealing with “…an upheaval that is mobilizing the earth system itself.” Social questions, he suggests, must be replaced by ecological questions. The premise of our politics needs to be profoundly reoriented.

It is no longer a question of Left or Right. In Down to Earth, Latour challenges us to respond to his provocative, existential question: “Are we Moderns or Terrestrials?”.

A National Emergency

As Trump projects his Imperial power in the direction of our southern border, demanding to reinforce its security by building a wall, the real threat to America’s safety - weather terrorism (Bruno Latour’s term for the biospheric backlash aimed at the vast hubris of humanity) - goes unheeded. Trump’s posturing with regard to establishing a national emergency to facilitate wall building, obscures a genuine emergency in just one more case of the Fake eclipsing the Real.

The president is supported in this passive, climate change denialism by the misdirection of the mainstream (and much of the alternative) press, which expends an immense amount of journalistic energy impugning him. We know he’s an intensely solipsistic president who uses political issues sociopathically - for their sole value in aggrandizing his sense of self-worth. Can we move on? That logorrheic energy might better be used in raising the issue of weather terrorism to a scare factor in excess of his bogus issue of illegal immigration. Ironically, south of the border emigration is itself a climate change phenomenon. Most of those making up the migrant caravans originate in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, countries whose lands are devastated by drought, giving their farming families little choice but to seek a life elsewhere.

Violent acts of extreme weather come and go with virtually no political will to prepare for them or mitigate their consequences. Existential crises, it seems, must be matched with the pre-existing Imperial-Fossil-Capital agenda to warrant a meaningful response. Rising sea levels, global warming exacerbated hurricanes, storm surges, floods, drought and wildfire are the real dangers at our borders, along 12,383 miles of coastline, in our cities, on our islands and farmlands, in our wilderness and hinterlands. Yet they elicit little in the way of a concerted public outrage at the failure of a supine federal government to make efforts to protect against them.

While the full impact of such future events is ultimately unknowable, there already exists a consensus menu of potentially viable responses which include a hardening of infrastructure, the building of sea walls, the raising of levees, the softening of shorelines, the relocation of threatened populations, conservation of our fresh water resources, bio-engineering of drought-resistant crops and the development of fire protection strategies, along with a drastic reduction in our energy usage such that renewable sources can entirely replace our reliance on fossil fuels. Such goals encompass short, medium and long term strategies, and some, indeed, are already being put in place by state, county and municipal authorities. But in the immediate term, the financial resources and legislative will to begin fully manifesting them can only be generated by the building of a media-infused ground-swell of popular concern that can then be addressed by federal politicians fully confident of public support. That, at least, is how representative democracy is meant to work.

We may already be seeing the faint outline of such a process unfolding. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Corey Booker and others are spearheading the so-called ‘Green New Deal’, in an attempt to make the Democratic Party relevant to the climate crisis. Their platform encompasses higher taxes on the uber-wealthy, a massive program of investment in clean energy, jobs and infrastructure, federal job guarantees, a basic income program and universal health coverage. Social initiatives to foster fairness and justice in the projected post-carbon economy are also being proposed. All that is missing is the demand that the president declare a national emergency (as authorized under the National Emergencies Act of 1976) that explicates the gravity of the situation and proposes the full marshaling of the country’s resources (while we still have them at our command) to bear upon this civilizational crisis. Fat Chance.

If there are to be any winners in the climate apocalypse it will be in those areas of the planet that have assumed some forward positions of preparedness. We can choose between engineering a massive infrastructural response that may help mitigate the worst of the on-going crisis, and, at the same time, radically reimagine how we cooperate in living on the planet - or face the certainty of a dour future with a devastated economy marked by drought, rising waters, mold, rot, disease, and hunger. This is both a social and an environmental crisis. That means not only attempting to curb greenhouse gas emissions but also undertaking rigorous planning for current and impending acts of weather terrorism and their consequences. Naomi Klein optimistically wrote, way back in 2014, in This Changes Everything, “There are ways of preventing this grim future….but the catch is these will involve changing everything….it involves changing how we live, how our economies function, even the stories we tell about our place on earth”.

Five years later, it is no longer a matter of preventing a grim future. The careless extension of what the American Sci-Fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls ‘The Dithering’ – those decades when we understood the atmospheric CO2 problem but totally failed to address it - guarantees its imminent arrival. The catch now is that the climate is changing everything for us.  We have already liberated enough carbon in the atmosphere to put the weather on disaster auto-pilot for the next millennium. We can but batten down the hatches, stockpile provisions and close the fire-doors. The weather is the effective change-agent, not we nor our politicians. The pretense that humans are in charge has finally to be abandoned. We await our fate possessing only crude materials of resistance and, thus far, almost no political will to emplace them.

The most salient function of government is the protection of its people - our allegiance to the Republic depends on its successful manifestation. The present regime appears totally committed to the denial of our climate reality and its power to inflict terrifyingly real damage on our underfunded and aging infrastructure and to the people that that infrastructure supports. Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Maria, Harvey, Thomas, and Michael, should each have been a wake-up call, a weather 9/11. Instead, they have proven to be opportunities for official prevarication, dissembling and hand-washing. From George Bush’s, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, to Trump’s notorious paper towel toss (in post-Maria Puerto Rico) there is a through-line that speaks of the government’s dismissal of the seriousness of these amplified weather events and their wider implications. The validity of the updated death toll in Puerto Rico of almost 3,000 was, predictably, denied by the president - while estimates of the toll continue to rise. A Harvard study now puts the number of Maria-related fatalities at over 4,500, as of year’s end. The climate has far exceeded the lethality of 9/11. Its death toll, in fire, flood, drought and wind is ever rising, as each season’s disasters inexorably add bodies to the statistical burial mound.

Alongside old-school disaster preparedness must come a radical pivot from the traditional national security state that protected out-of-country natural resources, including oil, secured global transportation routes and reacted to perceived threats from other national and imperial actors on the presumption that our individual safety, as members of a democratic society, ultimately depends on the state’s ability to project lethal force. It will turn out that stockpiling sand-bags is of more strategic value than stockpiling vast arsenals of lethality pointed at others on the planet who share our exact predicament. There is no acknowledgement yet, from AOC and her cohort that the defense budget needs to be re-imagined, although Trump’s notion that the military can be charged with building his border wall perhaps opens the door to such thinking.

It is the Army Corps of Engineers who already shoulder a great deal of the responsibility for flood control across the land, yet they do so with an allocation of discretionary funds that is less than half of one percent of the defense budget. A review of the U.S. Department of Defense Budget Request for 2019 shows no understanding of the threats that are emerging from a drastically altered biosphere. Instead, its rationale is the need to “Respond to growing political, economic, military and information competitions” itemized as “Revisionist powers such as China and Russia; Regional dictators such as Iran and North Korea; Transnational threats, including jihadist terrorists and transnational criminal organizations”. Domestically, its goals are to protect our vital national interests listed as “Protect the American people, homeland, and way of life; Promote American prosperity; Preserve peace through strength”; and “Advance American Influence”. The full extent of the country’s infrastructure, food security, and the health of its people, is threatened by global warming – amply demonstrated in recent enhanced weather events, of which apparently, the military has no awareness and to which it is, therefore, offering no response.

The Russians, Chinese, Iranians and North Koreans represent entirely chimerical threats – used to prop-up a military establishment fueled by testosterone, medieval strategic thinking and technological fetishes.  Trump’s southern hordes, threatening the gates along the Mexican border, are equally chimerical, created to bolster his own and his supporters’ nativism, machismo and illusory sense of worth.

There is no shortage of disaster journalism. Fire, flood and storms are avidly covered, and mined for their most mawkish ‘human interest’ stories. What is missing is the overt linkage to global warming and the understanding that, beyond being ‘the new normal’, we are fated to endure escalating levels of terror within our forever-changed biosphere. Are we prepared for the psychological traumas that the weather will inflict – for the loss of islands, coastlines and cities to the rising waters, storm surges and flood; to the loss of prairies, chaparral and forests to wildfire; to the loss of entire mountain and valley towns to the flames; and to the loss of essential services, clean water and viable sewage systems? Are we ready for food shortages? For the re-emergence of cholera, sundry diarrheal illnesses, typhoid and leptospirosis and yet other diseases spread through contaminated water, soil and food? 

In this imminent national emergency, where can we put our faith, if not in the best efforts of our government?

Burn Lands

At dawn, and again at sundown, the cloud scudded winter skies over the foothills of Southern California’s Santa Ynez mountains have been flushed recently with pinks and violets, shadowed with undertones of browns and grays. In the early mornings, the charred skeletons of laurel sumac, chamise, and ceanothus are silhouetted against the blazing firmament above these burn lands. The flame and drought plagued mountains are a grey-brown, newly studded with pale sandstone, exposed by the Thomas Fire. The foothills look as though they are covered with the mottled skin of some bottom-dwelling sea-creature.

The flesh of the chaparral, that biotic fuzz that drapes itself over so much of California, is fire-changed. Beneath its erstwhile canopy the matrix of sandstone and thin soil is now revealed as though a new volcanic age is upon us, the mantle still writhing from some recent uplift of magma. It’s not new of course, this growing medium has been weathering down for many eons, derived from sediment laid down in the Eocene, perhaps fifty million years ago. The plants of the chaparral emerged more recently, just twenty million years ago, and organized themselves into chaparralian assemblages just as soon as some semblance of a Mediterranean climate (wet winters, long, dry summers) emerged mid-Miocene, about ten million years ago. The florid, crepuscular skies that glow on the horizon at either end of winter days are a characteristic of that climate, of moisture laden skies that both diffract and reflect the near-horizontal rays of the sun.

I can only comprehend the strange images that the local hills present as simile. So, their surface looks like the camouflaged skin of a giant cuttlefish recumbent on the sea-floor. What remains of the chaparral is spiked with skeletal limbs awaiting miracles of stump-sprouting or obligate re-seeding. These burn lands have spread over storied territories of Southern California such as Malibu, Calabasas and Ojai. Absent the drama of flame and smoke, the ancient plant communities now mutely regenerate.

Far below this landscape, plankton and tiny sea creatures rich in stored solar energy, have been compressed, over the geologic ages, beneath dank swamps and shallow seas under layers of sea-bottom sediment and metamorphized into oil through the influence of pressure and heat.  As the earth has moved and folded, seams of this fossil biomass have puddled beneath the land. Where it has pooled, it has been assiduously extracted since 1865, although California has mercifully seen a fall in oil production of over 50% since 1985.

Southern California expresses itself geographically as ocean, off-shore Islands, beaches, sand dunes and wetlands, mostly transverse mountains (running west to east), coastal sage-scrub, chaparral, oak woodlands - sometimes mixed with juniper and pinyon - and desert. Freeways thread through and between sprawling conurbations, suburbs and exurbs. The burn lands (either consummated or awaiting a random, probably anthropogenic, ignition source) exist throughout the natural landscape but especially at the Wildland-Urban-Interface. Something approaching half a million acres burned in SoCal in 2018 while the State saw a record year of almost two million charred acres. It is now a land of wildfire and oil (where 40% of carbon emissions come from gasoline-burning public and private transportation).  It is a land that burns both living and fossil biomass. It is a land that is making good on this burn-notice by its carbon contributions to an atmosphere now infused with over 400 ppm of CO2, a level that likely represents planetary ecocide.

As this remarkable year ends, I have sought to sketch a geological, botanical and topographical survey of Southern California. It has been a year significant, I think, for the raw physicality of exposition that has attended the fires in California. None here can now doubt the conflation of global warming and its deadly terrestrial consequences. This may be considered as the revenge of the Carboniferous, a sixty million year period that concluded three hundred million years ago during which the formation of oil began, but did not end. Its characteristic geological strata were first mined for coal and it was the combination of this fuel and the invention of the steam engine that would propel the Industrial Revolution in Britain, a revolution whose global momentum is, even today, not quite spent.

Historically, the recent increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere date to the middle of the nineteenth century and have been greatly advanced over the last one hundred and seventy years. This phenomenon has led to what the geologist Marcia Bjornerud (in Timefulness, 2018) calls the “wreckage of long-evolving biogeochemical cycles”. More generally, the civilization enabled by fossil-capital has also destroyed ancient ecosystems and caused extinction rates to spike by a factor of somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 above background rates. These issues, together with vastly increased human-caused erosion and sedimentation, ocean acidification and sea level rise are taken, by most of the world’s scientific community, to validate the notion of a new epoch in the geologic timescale, the Anthropocene.

While the connection between the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and global warming is widely accepted, less understood is the connection between atmospheric carbon dioxide and the five other mass extinctions that are used to mark geologic periods. Bjornerud notes that the concept of a species driven epoch, such as the Anthropocene, fundamentally challenges the continuity of processes established by the founders of Geology, Hutton and Lyell. Yet there is a chemical thread that links all but one of the mass extinctions that demark the geologic timescale - all were partially initiated by quantum increases in atmospheric CO2. The exception is the Cretaceous extinction event that ended the reign of the dinosaur. It was caused by the impact of a meteor in the Yucatan which kicked up rock dust rich in acids and sulfur. This shroud of rock particles blocked photosynthesis and led to a kind of nuclear winter. All five extinctions then, were precipitated by abrupt changes in the climate attributable to an alteration of the atmosphere.

Southern California is uniquely entwined in global warming. It has produced vast quantities of oil and shown the world’s peoples how it could be used in the private automobile to enrich their lives, both by the example of Los Angeles, the first city to be shaped by the needs of the car, and through Hollywood’s cultural colonialism. Its over three hundred miles of highly developed coastline from San Diego to Morro Bay, which harbor many oil production facilities along the way, are extremely vulnerable to sea-level rise. Its dominant plant community is chaparral, whose drought-stressed shrublands reach deep into suburban and exurban enclaves and which are chronically subject to wildfires. The desire of its wealthier inhabitants to site their homes in the foothills amidst these fire-prone landscapes and drainages vulnerable to flood and debris-flows exacerbates the intrinsic connection between Southern California and what Mike Davis calls an Ecology of Fear. For many of us, the shorthand for these myriad real and potential disasters is, quite simply, global warming.

Even in the burn lands, the beauty of the hills, valleys, canyons and distant mountains remains. Bathed in the soft glow of early morning and evening light, it is transfixing. Scoured by cold north-easterly Santa Ana winds (in other seasons, the fire wind) the atmosphere is preternaturally clear, the landscape stunningly chromatic. Yet as the year turns, and we enter another millionth sliver of geologic time, it is apparent that although we humans are often individually long-lived, as a species we will die young.

What remains is to negotiate the precise terms of our extinction.

What World do we Seek?

If David Attenborough (the British Natural Historian, narrator of the video series, Planet Earth and a national treasure in the U.K.), gives a speech to the UN proclaiming the end of civilization and few hear it, does our world still collapse? If the President releases the Congressional report on climate change on Black Friday and no one heeds it, does it have an impact? If Trump tweets his denial of the substance of the report (which strongly affirms the reality of global warming) - does that mean anything at all? And, if the U.N. releases a chatbot designed to empower the people of the planet (at least, those with access to Facebook) to act in reducing carbon emissions, does that signal a democratization of the process or a profound cynicism as to the likelihood of an organized, intra-government, legislative solution to the climate catastrophe?

We are being stress-tested on our ability to survive in the multiverse, the fractured continuum of space, time, matter and energy that manifests in parallel worlds where factual and counterfactual narratives co-exist. 

We are being asked, by our political circumstances, to believe in both truth and untruth, the fake and the real, and yet retain our equanimity. We are being asked to hold two opposed ideas in our mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function - a feat that F. Scott Fitzgerald considered “was the test of a first-rate intelligence”. We are being asked to consume and to conserve; to change and to sustain; to believe in progress - time’s arrow, and in the everlastingness of a regenerative natural world – time’s cycle.

We are being asked to believe in the possibility of continued fossil-fueled economic growth while that phenomenon’s miasmic specter of global warming threatens to destroy the productivity and habitability of vast swathes of the planet. And, we are being asked, now, to believe that the server farms that support Facebook run on fairy dust.

What’s a second-rate intelligence to do?

Last year, at just about this time, I wrote, “At the recent twenty-third session of the U.N.’s Conference of the Parties (COP 23) in Bonn, Germany, there was the usual byzantine wrangling by committee on the ways and means by which greenhouse gas emissions might be reduced globally, states might sustainably adapt to climate change and the Global North might recompense the Global South for causing the whole mess in the first place”.

Now, in 2018, Robin McKie writes in the Guardian, at the start of COP 24,

“On Sunday morning hundreds of politicians, government officials and scientists will gather in the grandeur of the International Congress Centre in Katowice, Poland. It will be a familiar experience for many. For 24 years the annual UN climate conference has served up a reliable diet of rhetoric, backroom talks and dramatic last-minute deals aimed at halting global warming”.

A tepid response from those assembled in the great hall to Attenborough’s challenge for “a continuation of civilization” which, he charges, “is in your hands”, may reflect on the conference’s conflicted setting – most immediately, the three year old behemothic steel, glass and concrete box by JEMS Architekci, artfully and faux geologically fractured mid-span by antic planes of grass atop yet more concrete (a material whose production is dependent on cooking limestone which releases encapsulated carbon stored over geologic time scales). The conference center is set in the regional capital of Poland’s coal country, responsible for supplying 80% of Poland’s electrical energy consumption.

After twenty-four years and still going strong, the U.N.’s shadow play of climate kabuki is set for an apparently interminable run. It has reached an apogee of Sisyphean futility that echoes the earth’s endless geological cycle (interrupted at its surface only by the mass extinction events presaged by spiking levels of CO2 in its atmosphere). The U.N.’s Paris Climate Accord of 2015, has barely scratched the glittering, lithic surfaces of a civilization it is bent on preserving.  This year, COP 24 turned to the exhortations of the nonagenarian David Attenborough.

Somebody at the U.N. deemed it a good idea to have the esteemed Attenborough shill for the U.N.’s Act-Now bot. The organization intends, it seems, a neo-Bushian campaign of ‘a thousand points of light’. Attenborough pointed to an empty chair in the hall labelled ‘The Peoples’ Seat’.  The U.N.’s web site heralds, “The renowned broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough, has announced the United Nations’ launch of a new campaign enabling individuals the world over to unite in actions to battle climate change”. Did I detect a squirming in the hall (via the video feed) amongst the delegates who represent the almost 200 nations that were signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement, and are, perhaps, under the impression that they represent the world’s people? Are they now to be replaced by a single seat and a Facebook app?

Also released at COP 24, was the report by the Global Carbon Project which estimates a 2.7% rise in global CO2 emissions in 2018, up from 1.6% in 2017, after plateauing for the year following the Paris Accord.

Meanwhile, the City of Light, whose Latin motto of Fluctuat nec mergitur, translates roughly as, “She is storm-tossed but does not sink”, is being battered by les gilets jaunes or the yellow-vests, demanding an end to increased fuel taxes and demonstrating a profound dissatisfaction with the leadership of Emmanuel Macron, their president. Rioting continued over the weekend. What world do these yellow-vests seek?

There are some parallel universes that they (and others) might desire. One such is proposed by Thomas Piketty (author of the magisterial Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2013), in a manifesto issued on December 10, 2018, in which, within the EU 28, is proposed a meaningful tax on carbon emissions, an end to the tax evasions of major corporations such as Google, Amazon and Apple and a tax on the uber wealthy and their assets. Piketty, along with a cohort of fifty other progressive politicians, historians and economists, proposes a new, sovereign European assembly composed of members drawn from national governments (80%) and the European parliament (20%). Generously funded, as outlined, the assembly then would tackle the continent’s most intractable problems of wealth disparity, migration, global warming and democratization.  

This assembly would be a supra-governmental institution designed to transcend the legislative log-jamb of traditional agencies. It is proposed as a parallel government that might take its place alongside of Europe’s other democratic institutions. The Manifesto imagines a fracturing of traditional centers of power but not their eclipse.

In the shadow of the failure of the United Nations’ to deal effectively with planet’s many woes, we citizens of the world, long practiced in surviving in the multiverse, might take note of the possibilities that such parallel, imaginatively funded structures of power might afford us.

Geographies of Violence in Southern California

The Arroyo Conejo winds through what once were oak meadows in the Conejo Valley. The area is now home to the Los Angeles exurbs of Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park, Westlake Village, Agoura Hills and Oak Park. It was here, before contact, that the Chumash people relied on acorns as their staple food and traded their flour for seafood from coastal villages along the Pacific coast some twenty miles to the west. William Bryant Logan in Oak, the Frame of Civilization, 2005, notes that “early European travelers came to recognize how close they were to an Indian village by the boom and thump of women driving pestles into mortars to grind acorns into meal”.  That sound had hung in the Conejo Valley for at least two millennia.

On Wednesday evening, November 7th, the only boom and thump to be heard along Rolling Oaks Drive in Thousand Oaks was coming from the Borderline Bar and Grill where country music echoed into the night. A little before midnight that sound was punctuated by the dull thuds of a Glock 21 handgun being fired in a mass shooting that killed twelve. The shooter, a former Marine, concluded the massacre by turning the gun on himself.

Early in the afternoon the next day, a wildfire started somewhere on the 2,668 acre Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Up until 2006 this facility had been used to test nuclear reactors and rocket engines for over fifty years. It was here that Rocketdyne developed and tested the engines that powered the space shuttle. In an un-used corner of the vast site sits Burro Flats painted cave, a Chumash solstice observation rock formation where members of the community’s priestly caste, the ’Antap, confirmed the return of the sun for another year. It is here too, in the surrounding Simi Hills, that winter rains run to the Arroyo Conejo, to form a part of the Calleguas watershed.

The fire would spread quickly, propelled by forty mile an hour Santa Ana winds, and like the creek, eventually find its way through the Santa Monica Mountains to the coast. Named the Woolsey fire, for a canyon close to its origin, it has now burnt almost 100,000 acres, destroyed five hundred structures and killed three.

On Friday morning, believing the fire barely west of U.S. Route 101, which runs the length of the state and follows El Camino Real for much of its length, and unaware that at seven a.m. Malibu had declared a compulsory evacuation order, my wife and I, guided by Google Maps, chose to take the Pacific Coast Highway to LAX. We moved swiftly across the alluvial plains of Oxnard, some of the richest agricultural lands in the country, and across the Calleguas Creek that filters its waters through Mugu Lake and its bordering wetlands along the beach. Then, in the usual abrupt fashion, we arrived at the northernmost outcropping of the Santa Monica Mountains, manifested (in my imagination) as a dragon’s tail plunging precipitously into the Pacific Ocean. In 1926, this rocky bastion was broached by dynamite, pick, shovel and the unremitting labor of newly arrived immigrants to allow a two-lane track to pass through what is now known as Point Mugu. A remnant of this severed spine remains as a sentinel rock at the Point.

Approaching Point Mugu, we had driven past the Seabees shooting range on the right and the trail head of the Chumash trading route on the left (which passes over Boney Mountain and then is buried beneath asphalt and concrete before reappearing in the Conejo Valley). Four years ago, after the first winter rains following the Springs Fire of 2013, which began, like the Woolsey, just east of Route 101 and like it, burnt through the mountains to the beach,  I had followed the trail through a mostly monochrome landscape (the creek bottom and the puffs of new oak growth the only green) and noticed, on the blackened earth amidst the white ash of burnt shrubs, other more intense dots of white. Looking closer, I realized that I was walking through a collection of shell middens – where mussel, barnacle, sea-snail and clam shells had been exposed by the fire. These were the leavings from some Chumash meal in the Mission period, and below them no doubt, was buried the detritus from countless sea-food dinners consumed over many thousands of years. This ancient landscape of coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and riparian oak meadowlands, twice burnt in the span of five years, will likely only grow back as botanically impoverished, weedy grasslands, in a process known as type-conversion; its discarded shells left exposed in fields of non-native oats, mustard and star-thistles.

The sky was already dark with smoke, the ocean ruffled by off-shore Santa Ana winds, its waves flattened. Once beyond the portal, the road clings to the edge of the flanking mountain to the east and is supported by a rocky cliff to the west that falls into the roiling waters of the Pacific. By now, the curtain of smoke had fully descended except at its very edges far to the west where an orange glow of daylight peaked between the ocean and the billowing pyro-cumuli.

When we reached Zuma, one of Malibu’s northernmost beaches, traffic ground to a halt as the city’s residents heeded the evacuation call and headed in their SUV’s, Priuses, Teslas, Bentleys, and one conspicuously new Rolls Royce, south on the PCH. For five hours we crawled along the picturesque highway as volcanic clouds, and the occasional line of ridge top fire, loomed to our left and the curiously placid smoke-dark sea lay to our right. We listened to AM radio predicting the fire’s imminent and inevitable arrival at the coast while we inched our way towards Santa Monica and an awakening from the nightmare of our almost stalled cars being engulfed in flame.

We arrived at the airport seven hours after leaving our home (usually an easy two-hour drive) and long after our flight to Vancouver had departed. Having failed to secure later stand-by seats, we stayed overnight with friends in Venice who were harboring a fire-refugee from Topanga, a threatened rural suburb just south of Malibu, and who themselves were mourning the loss of another friend’s house in Malibu Lake.

Our harrowing experience was a very minor note in a major state-wide catastrophe that included the Camp Fire in Butte County east of Chico, which started on Wednesday November 7th, far larger and much deadlier than the Woolsey fire, but entirely lacking in the latter’s celebrity frisson.

The carbon sequestered in over a quarter million acres of trees and shrubs and within the building materials of many thousands of structures has now been released to the atmosphere in these hellacious wildfires spread across California. In a state that has seen most of its historic old growth forests logged into extinction, its fossil biomass extracted from the earth for well over a century, where its gasoline burning automobiles clog its cities and highways and its industrial and domestic energy needs are largely supplied by the burning of natural gas, its wildfires count as the reciprocal in a cycle of violence.

The wildlands of California have long been co-opted by civilization as either ‘Lands of Many Uses’, the motto of the USDA Forest Service, or as a mythological counterpoint to human agency. They are perceived as an ancient backdrop to the miraculous achievements of a humanly engineered modernity which, in turn, has undertaken their systematic violation. Through the karmic medium of global warming, the victim is now wreaking its revenge.

Characterized by the enduring marks of Chumash inhabitation, the landscape between Conejo Valley and the Pacific coast, reaching south to the long spit of Malibu, now experiences, it seems, recurring fires that are fueled by drought stricken vegetation and driven by powerful winds that funnel down the canyons, defiles and valleys of the Santa Monica Mountains - carved over millennia by their rivers and creeks.

The anger-stoked shooting rampage in Thousand Oaks during the Santa Anas recalls Raymond Chandler’s note of caution that when these winds blow, “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.” This is but a picayune meteorological fancy. All across the nation, American violence cleared the way west and we are now haunted by these fitful, generational, reenactments of the carnage. This time, in this place, it was the act of a young man likely innocent of our history, but, as a Marine, deeply inculcated in the Empire’s killing machine. We are all complicit by the fact of our living on lands stolen over a century or more of a rolling genocide and of contributing to the culture of war by paying our taxes. Perhaps more perniciously, we are also complicit in creating the circumstances of global warming by way of our egregious habits of consumption.

Following this second week of November in Southern California, amidst these entwined geographies of violence, can we hope that we are newly alerted to this complicity?

The Rewilding of Humanity?

“We are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed”, so wrote Neil Gunn, the early twentieth century Scottish novelist responding to his biographers, F.H. Hart and J. B. Pick, and quoted in their book, Neil Gunn - A Highland Life, 1981. He was recollecting the terrible emptiness of the Scottish Highlands that had been purged of humanity, often violently, during the nineteenth century clearances when absentee landlords judged there was more profit in sheep than leasing their land to populous communities who had practiced mixed farming for centuries past.

In the wildlands of California, across the deserts, mountains and plains, it is this echoing sense of desolation that prevails where humans are no longer present amidst the rich flora and fauna of the state’s varied ecosystems. Corralled in massively polluted conurbations connected by ribbons of freeways and their associated services, products of what Andreas Malm characterizes as ‘Fossil Capital’, Californians are effectively exiled from the spaces between. Only the two-lane black-top state highways snake into these largely forgotten areas away from the cities that once supported homesteaders and small farmers. In these spaces, it is Big Ag and Oil that now predominate, employing scant permanent personnel and relying instead on independent contractors and seasonal labor.

While agriculture attracts vast influxes of immigrant field workers who drive to the fields from surrounding small towns or follow the harvests up and down the state, these workers do not experience inhabitation. Theirs is a casual occupation of places in which they are temporarily housed and meagerly rewarded. We should not regret that America never possessed a peasant class, but we might note that, despite their global exploitation, they were (and in places remain) connected to the land, capable of a degree of self-sufficiency and were economically conscious. Not so the pools of labor that now well up on demand across the state as corporate profits dictate.

Oil service workers contract to drill, perform ‘workovers’ and transport oil and produced ‘waste’ water for a complex of financially intertwined oil lease-holders and owners. They are essentially itinerant journeymen often lacking a geographic locus. In Southern California, the oil industry has been largely exiled to the hinterlands where, abetted by the Federal Bureau of Land Management, it can drill with comparative impunity.

In the West, we had, until the middle of the last century, a homesteading culture. In Southern California’s wild places like the Mojave, Anza Borrego or the Carrizo Plain, remnants of that culture’s buildings are preserved in the dry air – wood, iron and corrugated sheet metal glowing in colors of dark browns and rust reds amidst the desert scrub. It is in these places, on boulders and scattered over the thin soil, that there is evidence of far older, indigenous cultures. Here, Native Americans fashioned stone tools, left lithic scatter (stone shards from shaped rock) and created pictographs, petroglyphs and, more rarely, geoglyph alignments. Their reed and timber shelters are scattered to the winds, their baskets stolen long ago and their food resources evidenced only by piles of bone and shell fragments (middens). But these cultures endure in the marks they left on the land.

On the Carrizo Plain, where I camped during the last full moon, farmers abandoned their combine harvesters and other agricultural equipment in the 1940’s when winter rains grew less reliable and wheat could no longer be profitably farmed. At approximately the same time, the sand cranes ceased over-wintering on the plains as their marshes disappeared. In his Marshland Elegy, 1937, Aldo Leopold writes of the crane, “his tribe we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene…Their return is the clicking of the geologic clock.” On the Carrizo Plain, where there were once crane marshes, there are now salt flats. The ineffable return of ancient birds is forever foreclosed.

The area is named after the rushes that grew in the wetlands, but they too are long gone. Cattle ranching was the final strategy of failing farmers, but their buildings, barns and cattle pens today lay picturesquely abandoned along the foothills to the west. The Carrizo Plain has been relinquished as a place of human habitation while the Tule Elk, coyotes, and jack-rabbits endure, still finding summer water at the remaining springs. Tourists visit from surrounding cities and their suburbs when the native wild-flowers are in bloom, but these are only deemed worth seeing after a particularly wet winter season. In 2017, thousands drove over deeply pot-holed, mostly dirt roads to view the flowers each weekend in March and April. Many remained in their cars, the vistas framed in their windshields or captured on the screens of outstretched arms clutching cell phones.

Across the world, urban dwellers have been alienated from the wildlands that surround them. A little more than two centuries ago, only two percent of the Earth’s population lived in cities. We are fast approaching a time when most do. Here in America, we have been lashed to what Stephen Jay Gould calls ‘time’s arrow’ since the country’s inception in an embrace of innovation and industrialization. (Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle - Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, 1987). Gould’s countervailing notion of time’s cycle never stood a chance – Jeffersonian democracy was swept away in a flood of consumer (and necessarily urban) based capitalism. Progress trumped the rhythmic verities of an agrarian life. Agriculture is now mostly pursued with an industrial-age ideology, hence factory farming and alienated low-wage workers.  Jefferson’s ideal of homesteaders morphing into yeoman farmers (as was often the pattern in the Scottish Highlands before the nineteenth century) was never realized in a society more interested in material prosperity than rural quietude.

There has been intensive economic exploitation of the rural hinterlands but rarely stable levels of human habitation. Lands have been raped and pillaged - logged, drilled and strip mined. Once their indigenous occupants had been removed, they were often left abandoned, untended, and empty - ready to become invented wildernesses subject to a romantic narrative that proclaims them inhospitable and anathema to the human presence. We have been driven out of these lands because of false narratives that support an urban civilization powered by fossil biomass where, ironically, we are increasingly dependent for our sanity on the non-indigenous animals we call our pets and perhaps a backyard garden of exotic vegetation, some raised vegetable beds or a few potted, exogenous plants.

In Britain, George Monbiot and others have urged that top predators be re-introduced to the countryside. In the U.S., there have long been successful moves to reintroduce wolves to wilderness areas. Yellowstone’s wolves have had a startlingly benign impact by rebalancing the park’s ecosystem. In the Santa Monica Mountains, a dwindling population of mountain lions are carefully tracked and protected. All the while, we are becoming increasingly cognizant of the great damage we have done to the planet. A new report from the World Wildlife Federation claims that humanity has destroyed sixty percent of the planet’s wild mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970. It may be time to consider the measured re-introduction of our own species into the wild in a last ditch effort to re-discover the circumstances of sustainable co-habitation with non-human life-forms.

In California, Spanish and then Anglo-American imperialists destroyed what Benjamin Madley in An American Genocide, 2016, described as “an exuberant clamor of Native American economies, languages, tribes and individuals”. Instead of domesticating wild animals, these cultures managed their environment to facilitate hunting. Instead of practicing agriculture, they enabled the edible plants, seeds and roots that made up much of their diet to flourish by weeding, pruning and, most of all, burning. They were co-creators of their world, not its destroyers. Is it overly romantic to imagine that the early homesteaders, despite their genocidal tendencies with regard to the native population they displaced, still retained a sense of connection to the land, and remained linked to their peasant forebears, generations apart and an ocean distant?

 If, as Frederic Jameson has remarked, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” then the WWF report has facilitated the first part of that heuristic exercise. Can we imagine a rewilding of humanity that entirely forestalls our economic predations?  Can we embrace time’s cycle as the dominant metaphor in our brief lives? Can we, at last, begin to believe that modern humans can live in the wild and truly prosper amidst its natural beneficence?

The Last History of the United States

The words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”, from America’s Declaration of Independence, stand as one of the finest historical examples of what Hitler, and later Goebbels, called the big lie. Hitler wrote in Mein Kamf, 1925, “that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily…” In Jill Lepore’s These Truths - A History of the United States, 2018, she painstakingly exposes the truth that America is founded on hypocrisy.

The greatest fear of the Founding Fathers was democracy. Their intent was to establish a white aristocracy of wealth largely based on the productivity of African slaves.  Lepore shows that they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams of avarice and power. She shows that big lies and little lies have subsequently sustained the illusion of democracy in the United States and the façade of inclusivity and freedom it presents to the world. The nation’s underlying hypocrisy is rarely challenged; instead, political factions compete to demonstrate (or at least propagandize) their fealty to its foundational “truths”. Along the way, the means of communication, from broadsheet to newspaper, radio, TV, computers and now the internet have serially compounded the ability of partisans to disseminate their truths – to propogandize more effectively.

The narrative she weaves, over almost 800 pages, is more requiem than history – the ship of state, in her telling, now wallows adrift on a rising ocean bereft of a mainsail. Those who most revere the country’s constitution had, she writes, “pulled up the ship’s planking to make bonfires of rage: they had courted the popular will by demolishing the idea of truth itself, smashing the ship’s very mast”. Lepore closes her tome by calling on a new generation of Americans “to steer the ship through wind and wave”.  In 1933, Walter Lippman wrote, in the depths of the depression, that “The fixed points by which our fathers steered the ship of state have vanished”. Now, in 2018 and similarly despairing, Lepore cautions that these young Americans, “would need to learn an ancient and nearly forgotten art: how to navigate by the stars”.

If those stars represent for Lepore some guiding elemental truth, it will surely only be revealed once the clouds of polluting hypocrisies that have thus far beguiled the government and its people have fully cleared our beautiful spacious skies. Lepore, her tendentiousness muffled in elaborate veils of metaphor (as befits a Harvard historian), goes some way towards clearing the air.

Modernity began, she suggests, when people commenced arguing about the nature of truth. Hers is a political history; her truths are embedded in ideals. Yet the story of America is also told in the physicality of its lands and their extraordinary material abundance. The European extraction of the wealth of the Americas made possible the rise of capitalism: she notes that Adam Smith believed that the discovery of the Americas and the passage to the East Indies were the two most important events in the history of mankind.

Capitalism, funded by the New World’s gold and silver, was only able to metastasize once it could feed on a surplus of commodities. Cotton, sugar and tobacco were the mainstays of the American slave states - production that was powered by the overseer’s whip upon the backs of African slaves, in what Edward E. Baptist calls the ‘whipping machine’. Cotton was King and in Britain it was spun into cloth almost exclusively, after about 1830, in coal-powered steam mills. Fossil fuels and the whip thus cohered in the production of this dominant commodity. The Atlantic slave trade was ended in 1808, but the vast global market for cotton led to this country’s internal slave trade in which, as Lepore writes, a million African slaves were sold and shipped west between 1820 and 1840.  

Britain’s industrial secrets had been smuggled into the United States early in the nineteenth century, and the Anglo-American Industrial revolution produced both country’s extreme, but highly concentrated, wealth. That wealth was produced by a noxious amalgam of coal and slavery - each component having left a dark stain on America. Lepore acknowledges both. Indeed, the political struggle to maintain the ideal of white supremacy against the claims of Native Americans and then African Americans and non-white immigrants is the leitmotif of her work.

Lepore’s history is driven by the past politics of the United States, but like all historians she filters her facts through the present. If Modernity began with a questioning of truth, Post-Modernity was born of cultural relativity, studied in the academy in terms of structuralism and post-structuralism. Truth in the body-politic is now, Lepore suggests, scattered into shards of diverse identities, each claiming its own reality.

Hers is, perhaps, the last significant one-volume history of the United States (continuing a tradition best exemplified by Charles and Mary Beard’s work from 1921 and Zinn’s People’s History from 1980) that focuses on ideologies and the propaganda that sustains them. The next such work of any significance must surely be a post-human history that arises out of a re-mapped cosmology – based on an historical awareness imposed by the sixth extinction and the climate apocalypse, first engendered, lest we forget, by a coal-burning industrial revolution. Jill Lepore can only offer perfunctory rhetoric: “a nation born in revolution” she writes, “will forever struggle against chaos”.

Nearly forty years ago, Zinn railed against the corrupting influence of money in politics. In the afterword to his signature work he warned that America’s social problems “would not be solved without some great social movement of the citizenry” and those without wealth “would have to demand access in their own way”. In her epilogue, Lepore notes that just after Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord, “a trillion-ton iceberg the size of the state of Delaware broke off of Antarctica”. She leaves that iceberg dripping in the textual room – a non-human object as an avatar of our post-human future, now vividly foretold in the latest IPCC report.

Enlightenment philosophers had theorized that from a state of natural, perfect equality, men might create a civil society - government - for the sake of order, and the protection of property. Our founding fathers punted on ‘perfect equality’ but were nevertheless genuinely concerned to create order and protect property. Our history shows that we continue to struggle with equality at least partly because order has often meant the death, oppression or incarceration of non-whites. Whatever fractured and unequal order has been achieved, it is now menaced by more than social unrest. The basis for the American state is existentially threatened by the climate apocalypse and the weather terrorism it births. Two words of current significance: Hurricane Michael.

The reasoning that informed the framers of the United States Constitution and which for over two hundred years has formed the basis of the American State, albeit honored primarily in the breach, has been rendered moot by the advent of weather terrorism. Jill Lepore’s book is thus truly a requiem for civil society and the American way of government. No state can survive if it fails the most basic test of maintaining order and protecting property. The climate apocalypse is an existential threat against which the U.S. government has demonstrated itself to be helpless. The hardening of infrastructure and the geographic reassignment of vulnerable populations are its only discernible responses – and neither strategy can satisfactorily quell the random attacks of a rampant climate.

We are now merely walk-ons in the terrifying story that the weather tells of our environmental misdeeds. Our ongoing activities that depend on the liberating of sequestered carbon continue a demonic tale now told by its consequential phenomena rather than by its instigators and victims. It is history in the making, but we humans no longer control the narrative. So it is that the truths embedded in our nation’s founding and which continue to be the base material of our contested societal constructs, and which Lepore glosses with such consummate rhetorical skill, cannot save her book from an ultimate and overwhelming irrelevance.

California: Waging War on Wildfire

Not so long ago, the people of what is now called California lived with and by fire. It was the element that allowed them to thrive in an environment that did not give up its riches easily. They harvested new grasses and fresh forbs out of burnt lands. Using fire, they sculpted landscapes in which they could hunt their prey, predominantly mule deer, and, of course, they cooked by its heat. Lightning-struck wildfire, when it came, found landscapes where fuel loads had been limited by this careful management of food plants, the creation of hunting meadows and the clearing of tangled woodlands where particular trees were privileged over the competing biomass. Elsewhere, perhaps in the rocky hinterlands thick with chaparral or heavy with ancient redwoods, wild fires ran their course; but this was not land in which the native peoples lived, except in those favored spots along the tumbling creeks that were laced across the wild.

The entangled shrubs of the chaparral do not make for easy human passage. When travelling to higher ground where they might summer beneath pinyon pines, native peoples traveled along narrow deer trails or broad Grizzly pathways or, where neither were available, crawled on all fours beneath the dwarfish canopy. When wildfires swept across these lands, as they invariably did once, twice or even three times a century, the going was easy. The game would be scarce, but it was at such times that new connections might be made with the exposed topography, its sentinel rocks and its sheltering caves. The burnt earth thus rendered its blessings.

Millennia of carefully managed range-lands were entirely dispossessed of their stewards in the half century after the Civil War. By the beginning of the twentieth century, massive wild fires were roiling across the land, indiscriminate in their feasting on unprecedented fuel loads through redwood forests, chaparral and coastal sage scrub. They have not since abated and are now undoubtedly exacerbated by global warming in both their ferocity and frequency. We have carelessly laid the old ways bare: the land’s primordial managers are no more - swept away by the winds of modernity. We are left to suffer the consequences: some twenty fires burning across the state (as of 08-11-18). In Northern California, smoke and ash from the massive Carr fire continue to blow across the land of Ishi, immortalized in Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America, 1961.

Ishi was the lone survivor of the Yahi, a band living in the rugged Lassen Mountain foothills, who, in 1911, sought help from the community of white men who had destroyed his people. Through the good offices of a local sheriff, he quickly found food, shelter and some sort of latter-day purpose (demonstrating his native skills) living in the University of California’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. Kroeber's book is (or should be) in every Californian high-school library for it offers a visceral connection to a discarded way of life. Meanwhile, his people’s ancient trails, canyons, cliff faces, and caves are threatened by fires spawned by the white man’s genocidal history, his fossil economy and by his alienation from his environment.

Kroeber’s sober telling of Ishi’s story cannot entirely prevent many of us from attributing the romanticism of Dryden’s couplet,

“Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.”

to her tale of the ‘Last Wild Indian’. America’s wilderness has been mediated, over the last half millennium, almost exclusively through European Romanticism.  Meanwhile, California’s wildlands are corralled in a subset of this tradition - a niche famously developed by John Muir - and now, as fire explodes across the state, they are securely situated in California’s world-renowned Apocalypse Theme Park (Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis, 1998). The current blaze in the Cleveland National Forest is named the Holy Fire, with its signature media image being a massive mushroom cloud emerging from the chaparral. Earlier this month, a 15,000 feet high, quarter-mile wide Fire Tornado whirled out of the Carr fire to take its place in this spectacular tradition with winds in excess of 140 m.p.h. The terrifying gigantism of the Mendocino Complex Fires, totaling over 300,000 acres and still burning, make them worthy additions to this Promethean carnival.

Vast reaches of California and indeed of all the West, were long considered areas into which Indians could voluntarily withdraw or be mercilessly pushed under pressure from the Eastern colonization of the continent.  Little considered was that bands of native peoples already occupied most if not all the favorable ecological niches in these areas. With the discovery of gold in California at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 and the subsequent influx of largely Anglo-American ‘49ers, the native peoples of the State were newly imperiled. The Spanish, in their quixotic dream of establishing agriculturally productive feudal estates peopled by quiescent, baptized native serfs reached only as far as Monterey, but they had initiated, albeit accidentally, the genocide of the Indians.  In a much more deliberative fashion, gold fevered Anglos, inspired by their Manifest Destiny of capital acquisition and imperial conquest completed the mission. As Karl Kroeber writes in his introduction to his mother’s book, “No state in the Union surpassed the Golden State in systematically and shamelessly harassing, murdering, and stealing from its native inhabitants”.

 M. Kat Anderson in Tending the Wild, Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, 2005, demonstrates the costs of the cultural and corporeal eradication of these highly effective stewards of the wildlands. She writes, “There were productive, expansive grasslands not only along the coasts, in the Central Valley, and in montane meadows but also in the open understories of many woodlands and forests throughout the state that had been perpetuated by Indian burning”. It was the replacement of a mosaic of Indian lifeways and their managed wildlands with the uniformly materialist, rapacious and ecologically ignorant American monoculture with its factory farming, forestry practices, irrigation, industrialization and urban sprawl along with steel and concrete transport corridors that have created the conditions (yes, exacerbated by global warming) for the California conflagrations.

The state’s response echoes the nation’s post-Civil War solution to the Indian populations that lay in the path of westerly conquest - call in the U.S. Cavalry. As the U.S. Army’s Chief of Military History has it in Winning the West, The Army in the Indian Wars, 1865-1890, the Cavalry’s function was to “…protect the arteries of white settlement across the frontier. At the same time, operations were launched against Indian tribes that represented actual or potential threats to movement and settlement”. In California today, metastasized fire response teams dedicated to fire-suppression are coordinated under an Incident Command System, a model of inter-agency cooperation that was developed in the 1980’s in the face of the increasingly complex demands of dealing with wild fires that refused to respect their wildland borders and impinged on urban infrastructure. It has since become a universal protocol for all-hazard emergency systems. In California, A Fire Survey, 2016, Stephen J. Pyne, the nation’s preeminent pyro-historian, explains the tangled roots of the bureaucratic efforts to establish this militarized model of engagement with perceived existential threats.

It is a history that begins, ideologically, with the cavalry, but extends through the stewardship of the U.S. Army over the national parks up until the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, (which explains the martial aspect of contemporary N.P.S. uniforms) through World War Two, Korea, the Cold War, and Vietnam. As Pyne writes, “War against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany made possible a collective fight against fire. When the war ended, the military crisis was discharged into civilian life….A state of continual emergency demanded a cataclysm that would recur in place and time with some regularity. California fire was ideal.”  When the demand emerged, during the Vietnam War, to “bring the war home” air-tankers that might once have dropped agent orange or napalm were refitted to discharge fire retardant. Huey helicopters, direct from their service in Vietnam, were requisitioned as attack choppers ready to drop water, foam and hot-shot fire crews directly into the battle field.

The militarization of Cal Fire, formed in 2006 as the lead agency in fire suppression, meant that all pretense at land management had been subsumed within its role as an emergency fire responder. The Indian way of forest stewardship, the seasonal burning of the montane woods and the lowlands, which came to be known in fire-fighting circles as “light-burning” and considered to be a credible prophylactic to cataclysmic fires for much of the twentieth century, was deemed anathema. What Stephen J. Pyne calls ‘good’ fires were outlawed in the late 1980’s after Yellowstone went up in smoke in 1988, following the Reagan era policy of ‘let it burn’. One ‘good’ fire turned ‘bad’ was enough to invalidate, in the eyes of officialdom, a tradition that had served humankind since time immemorial.

In the Shasta Cascade, lands long kept safe by Ishi’s Yahi band (a part of the Yana peoples) along with their neighbors, the Modoc, Maidu, Okwanuchu, Paiute, Shasta and the Wintu, are now subject to urbanized, militarized assault by an agency that sources many of its front-line fire-fighters from the state’s penitentiaries. Similarly, the sacred places, burial grounds and rock shelters of the Kumeyaay, Luiseños, Cahuilla and Cupeño, tribes that once roamed the oak meadowlands and rocky defiles of the Cleveland National Forest are now engulfed in flame and subject to the awesome powers of the state’s fire-suppression machine.

When America was Ruled by a King

America emerged out of darkness and light - a proto-nation clouded by the genocide of native Americans and the enslavement of transshipped Africans but brilliantly shot through with shafts of luminescence - the liberal ideals of European philosophers such as Locke and Hume.

The alternate red and white stripes of its flag have thus come to echo a nation born in the blood of its innocent victims yet ennobled, in parallel, by the spirit of the Enlightenment. Yet even after its ideals were enshrined in The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and The Bill of Rights, the country continued to countenance slavery, the trading of domestic, purpose-bred Africans and the brutal killing of native peoples and their vibrant communities. Today, the historic and contemporary horrors of the American nation are ground together with its liberal principles (in some mythic bedrock mortar) to produce a culture that proclaims its goodness to its people and to the world, yet is visibly marbled with the evils of state violence against refugees and minorities, the economic oppression of a population paradoxically made comatose through over-consumption and the global havoc wreaked by its Imperial killing machine. It is this grand chiaroscuro that Eugene Jarecki explores in The King, 2018, his new documentary on the life, death and after-life of Elvis Presley, now in select release following its acclaimed debuts at the film festivals in Sundance and Cannes.

The vehicles for the film maker’s ruminations are the man, born a twin in Tupelo Mississippi, in 1935 (his brother Jessie, still-born) and his one-time car, a Rolls Royce, manufactured in Crewe, Cheshire, in 1963, an era of intense antagonism in Britain between management and labor. Both vehicles are marked by their birth – Elvis shadowed by his dead twin and his mother’s tragic love and the car ruinously assembled by bitterly resentful workers whose fellow union members went on, perhaps justifiably, to destroy the entire British automobile industry.

Elvis died at age 42, of a drug-overdose, in 1977. The car, now of a far greater age, survived its laughable lack of reliability long enough for Jarecki to capture rare footage of it running during the filming of The King. Elvis lays next to his mother in Graceland. Jessie remains buried in a by now decomposed, once beribboned shoe-box, in an unmarked grave in East Tupelo. The car will likely continue to be spared the crusher because of its royal provenance. This June, it was delivered to the new Hard Rock Hotel in Atlantic City where it will become a static part of their rock and roll memorabilia collection and thus can continue to dissemble as the epitome of regal transportation.

As the motor vehicle is trailered from Tupelo (with the occasional on-road cameo) - where a failed effort is made to identify the two room shotgun shack of Elvis’s birth; to Memphis where he grew up as a teenager in public housing and made his first records with Sam Phillips of Sun Records, including the groundbreaking work of inspired cultural appropriation, That’s all Right (Mama), written by the bluesman, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup; to Nashville where he signed with RCA and made his first gold record, Heartbreak Hotel, in 1954 - various luminaries huddle in the back seat and speak portentously about Elvis, America and the World. Jarecki’s approximate thesis is that the rise and fall of Elvis somehow reflects that of the American Empire. Chuck D, former front man of Public Enemy, wryly notes, that if we accept that notion then the United States is overdosing right now. At the end of the movie, having established the King’s pill-death, the credits unfurl over an unsteady image of the watery depths of a gold-plated toilet bowl. 

Thank heaven for Chuck D and the risible Rolls. As a featured back-seat talking head, he refuses to be impressed by the legend of Elvis. The Rolls refuses to operate as a functioning automobile. Each embodies their histories of oppression – of underpaid automobile line workers or, more consequentially, of his race. Elvis exists as the inauthentic commodification of an authentic culture founded in enslavement and the lash. His reward for this impersonation is riches beyond reckoning (except by his Mr. 50%, ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker) but the material manifestations of his wealth are poignantly tawdry – his taste the apotheosis of the aspirational, but impoverished, Southern white.  Elvis comes by this heritage honestly. His paternal grand-father was a share cropper, his father a convicted felon, his mother a sometime two-dollars-a-day seamstress, and his maternal great, great, great-grandmother reputedly the Cherokee Indian Princess, Morning White Dove, 1800 -1835.

Emmylou Harris (who wisely avoids the Rolls’ back seat) asks at one point, why didn’t Presley drive an American car like a Cadillac? A 1963 Coupe de Ville was undoubtedly a better automobile but it was, of course, entirely lacking in the louche appeal of the Roller. Ironically, it represented a high water-mark in the history of the American automobile at a time when Cadillac could still credibly claim to be the ‘Standard of the World’ before its precipitous decline in the 1970’s - unstaunched to this day. The Rolls represented a misguided automotive choice just at the time when Elvis’s career moves were similarly inauspicious.

Over a decade spent making (mostly forgettable) movies, at the rate of almost three a year, a marriage to a girl he began seeing when she was fourteen years old and his firm alliance with the establishment as a proud sergeant in the U.S. Army consigned Elvis to irrelevance in the foment of the 1960’s. His comeback TV special of 1968 occurred in a tumultuous year that saw escalating protests against the Vietnam War, massive student demonstrations in Paris, the rise of the Black Panther party, black power salutes from the podium at the summer Olympics, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and in the fall, the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency. Elvis found himself firmly on the wrong side of political and musical history, allied to Nixon as a faux DEA agent, mute on the Vietnam war and about to be shipped to that acropolis of has-beens, Las Vegas, where he assumed the mantle of Fat Elvis. In record breaking runs at the International and Hilton Hotels he kept the money rolling in for himself and the Colonel.

Meanwhile, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Janis Joplin had forever changed the ways in which black music might be re-interpreted, or appropriated, by white artists; Jimi Hendrix ensured the continuing relevance of the generative canon of American popular music, and a host of black musicians made music that outsold Elvis. His white face was no longer necessary in the marketing of blues, soul and rockabilly nor in the selling of its anodyne amalgam, American pop music. He had been outflanked by the societal changes initiated by the civil rights movement.  

The sub-text of Jarecki’s movie, made at a time when the ascendancy of the Donald was clearly foreshadowed, is articulated by the back-seat pundit Alec Baldwin, who questions how, against all reason, we might become a nation of Trump voters. For this the Rolls has no answers. Neither, it seems, have its other back-seat pundits, Van Jones, David Simon and James Carville. In desperation, perhaps, Jarecki segues to apocalyptic footage of the Iraq Invasion, an Atomic explosion and the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The Vegas years, from 1969 to 1977 were lost to Elvis in a haze of pharmaceuticals - his ballooning body encased in ever gaudier, high-collared rhinestone jumpsuits, his music parodied in mumbled renditions of his greatest hits. 1968 was the inflection point. That year was important not for Elvis’ TV special, but because it heralded a global return to some of the values of liberty, equality and freedom of religion that had made a brief appearance during the founding of this country. If Elvis established himself as a king in the America of the 1950’s, it was not only because of his startling charisma and talent in interpreting black ‘soul’ music, but also because he was a white man. More generally, all white men could see themselves as kings in that era, even the most impoverished fully secure in their racial ascendancy. By the 1960’s, that presumption was no longer tenable. In this were born the festering seeds of resentment against minorities, refugees and liberal ideology that characterize the Trump voter.

That resentment has now, ironically, been empowered by the urbanization of America, where liberal ideologies hold sway but younger populations vote less reliably. The influence of white rural voters is further aggrandized by the targeted disenfranchisement of minorities and the gerrymandering of congressional districts - such that vast areas of depopulated America are greatly over-represented in the Senate, House and Electoral College.

There is a final point that entirely eludes Jarecki and his assembled talking heads. In Tupelo, Mississippi (and elsewhere) Trump is the new Fat Elvis, a man suffused with self-loathing but who remains a cultural icon acutely attuned to the tastes and aspirations of a diminishing population across the rural spaces of this great land.

Remembrance of Past Fourths

Frederick Douglass (The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, 1852) likens American Independence to the liberation of the Israelites from the bondage they endured under the Egyptians.  Speaking to a white audience in Rochester, N.Y., he declared, “This to you, as what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day.” But what does the Fourth means to those who experienced the full fury of Southern California’s Thomas Fire? On Wednesday last week, the local Independence Day parade along Ojai’s main street included a float celebrating fire survivors (#lovespreadsfasterthanfire) followed by another flatbed truck from which were tethered something like one hundred red helium-filled balloons, representing the homes destroyed in the small Upper Ojai community. Although I did not appear on the float, nor watch the parade, I did cast my mind back to my great deliverance, and to the signs and wonders of the Fourth. 

That would be the Fourth of December 2017, when the secondary source of the Thomas Fire began barely two hundred yards above my house and the fire-storm raced through the chaparral of Upper Ojai. Those on the float may have been survivors, like me, of that night or the many days and nights when the fire swept uncontained towards the Pacific and ran north beyond Santa Barbara, but we all, by now, must understand that our liberation was into a world changed forever by global warming. The emancipation celebrated in our national holiday (which has partially spread even unto the oppressed peoples whom Douglas championed) cannot free us from the meteorological terrors that modernity has unleashed. 

Last week, new fires in Yolo and Napa counties had the Los Angeles Times declaring a year-round fire regime in California as ‘the new normal’. NBC reported,

"A massive wildfire burning in rural Northern California has exploded in size, torching at least 72,500 acres, and forced additional evacuations in Yolo and Napa counties. The fast-moving County Fire burning northwest of Sacramento grew dramatically by Tuesday morning, largely burning out of control in rugged terrain with a few cattle and horse ranches and sending smoke and ash as far south as San Francisco".

By week’s end it approached 90,000 acres with 30% containment. Cal-Fire has responded in force. 

Meanwhile, the Federal Government is obviously powerless to prevent extreme weather events, but by disavowing the scientific reality of global warming the Trump administration has fully abrogated its responsibility to its citizens to protect them (to the extent possible) from the harm carbon emissions are wreaking across the planet. This is entirely consistent with their apparent goal of dis-empowering the government and privileging of non-state actors such as individual oligarchs, oligarchical families (such as Trump's own), stateless corporations and dubiously qualified bureaucrats practiced only in destroying the machinery of government and offering up public lands to the depredations of the 1%.

Fire is the most dramatic manifestation of our enslavement to worsening environmental conditions: we live now in a country governed by those willful in their determination to exacerbate them. The heat wave that careened across the Midwest and the Northeast of the United States left at least 36 dead in Canada and has now moved into the western US where it will terrorize us both as a vaporous, stealthy killer and as an active accomplice in the ten fires currently burning in California. Those seeking respite at the beaches face the fury of Hurricane Fabio, freshly arrived from Mexico (unhindered by ICE) which is churning up the surf and creating monstrous riptides.

As Douglass noted, each July Fourth marks the beginning of another year of national life, and inevitably spurs reflection upon the state of the  Republic. Some fifteen years after the Declaration of Independence, George Washington was elected president. He was the richest man in the America of his time and thus trusted by his fellow plutocrats to safeguard the lands wrested from the English king for their pleasure and profit. Although the American people belatedly banished slavery (but not its shadowy twin of racial discrimination) we have yet to emerge from almost a quarter millennium of oligarchy. True-to-type, modern-day presidents are distinguished not by their levels of incompetence, venality, corruption, lubriciousness, turpitude or the narrowness of their vision, but by the assiduousness with which they pander to the financial interests which support their elections. They are united in purpose by the sourcing of their campaign funds, a process supercharged by the Supreme Court in its Citizens United decision. No big news here.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders did not eliminate the influence of money in politics, but he revolutionized the way it can be raised by going directly to his potential voters rather than to self-interested corporations and super PACs. Suddenly, just in time for the Fourth of July celebrations, the promise of Bernie was made manifest in the congressional primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The system is run by access to money, but if you democratize its collection (as Sanders did) then its influence is less destructive – the people have an opportunity to prevail against oligarchy. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is part of a new generation emerging from the brotherhood and sisterhood formed in devotion to Bernie. Come fall, she can expect to be installed as the new  Representative of New York's 14th. Congressional District which covers parts of Queens and the Bronx. She thus appears to have revived an entirely moribund democratic process. Others will doubtless follow in a concerted attempt to apply resuscitation to the body politic. Can we now bask in the hope (however premature) that we may finally emerge from the tyranny of overbearing wealth? 

There is little prospect of remediation for California's swarm of globally warmed conflagrations. Yet, by week's end, there was more good news. The man who reportedly persuaded Trump to abandon the Paris Climate Accords finally caved under the pressure of escalating reports of his petty corruption and resigned his position as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Scott Pruitt was driven, as the agency’s chief administrator, to emasculate its role in protecting the environment, citizen’s health and most egregiously, limiting industry’s emissions of green house gases. He was effective in his nihilistic agenda and was ironically undone by his pathetic penny-ante conniving and cheap pick-pocketing of the public purse. Pruitt favored the cheapest, most brutal and toxic extraction and transportation of coal, oil, gas and minerals from devastated public and private lands; he thought nothing of oil-workers' or miners' health nor the world down wind of their evil industries. In this he diligently served the interests of the oligarchy at the expense of the people.

One hundred and sixty-six years ago, Douglass did not despair of his country despite its glaring injustices. He wrote, in words of some encouragement to those who tremble at the condition of the Republic, circa 2018,

“Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of man...Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe”.

This week of July Fourth, as California continues to burn, Douglass’ belief that hope may exist “...under the dark clouds which lower across the horizon” is manifested in the nomination of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the forced resignation of Scott Pruitt. Like Douglass, I do not despair of this country. He wrote,  “There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.”  Today, we may work towards the downfall of oligarchy and its capitalist drive to enrich the few to the detriment of the environment and all its teeming species. In California, we wait now for some relief from global warming - the chain that shackles us to an environment of never-ending patchwork conflagrations. We wait too, for a champion of the vast and visionary eloquence of Frederick Douglass.

Living in the Ruins of Capitalism

The daughter of friends was telling me recently about the almost completed PhD thesis she is writing at UCLA’s History Department. It is, she explained, a gendered study of post-war Japanese photography and its connection to the development of that nation's all-conquering camera industry. Coincident with the final touches to the last chapter of her study, will be the birth of her first child, due in July. We spoke at her baby shower. I talked of matsutake mushrooms (made flesh in The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015), she of Japanese camera manufacturer’s use of female models in their splashy advertisements featured in American magazines such as Life and National Geographic - media that somehow encapsulated the buoyant optimism of the post-war American era whilst its manufacturing base was, all the while, being fatally eroded by both its own hubristic triumphalism and the startling prowess of Japanese technology. 

The subtext to our polite conversation, at this celebration of an impending birth was, I now reflect, the death of the Man/Nature dichotomy long underpinned by what Tsing characterizes as “the moral intentionality of Man’s Christian masculinity”. Liberated from these strictures, the PhD candidate has the opportunity to write a gendered history and I to read (and recommend) a book written by a Chinese American academic who, using tales of the global supply chain of the matsutake mushroom, touches all the pulse points of inter-species entanglement (thus negating the notion of Nature as a neutral background against which Man struts his stuff) which currently inform an influential subset of ideas about the possibilities for survival in our highly damaged world.

Tsing writes that “progress stories have blinded us”. As Aidan O’Brien ventured recently in Counterpunch, none are more purblind than the Japanese - living out the death throes of a capitalism deep in the shadow of both its own Imperial history and of the American Empire. O’Brien suggests that contemporary Japan presages the bleak netherworld the West can expect as it moves ever closer toward the dead end of hyper-capitalism. Left unsaid is that the incipient death of the globalized progress-driven financial system will not undo its long-standing vampiric leaching of Japan’s (and the world’s) environmental life-blood: its poisoning of the land and its fouling of the atmosphere.  

Japan adopted the western ethos of progress with the restoration of the Meiji dynasty in 1868, lurched headlong into industrialization and then into the imperialist adventures that culminated in the Pacific War - horrifically and gratuitously ended by the U.S. atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Post-war recovery was chaperoned by the United States. O’Brien writes, “As Japan’s US guardian descended into CIA madness – Japan’s rationality seemingly blossomed. The success of its “jobs-for-life” social model and it’s “just in time” production model, persuaded the world to put Japan on a pedestal”. Yet the nation saw its resurgent economy fall into permanent recession in the late twentieth century and, as an eerie counterpoint to its earlier experience of atomic destruction, suffer the environmental catastrophe of Fukushima in 2011. Tsing offers a salutary riposte in the subtitle to her book, On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

New protectionist trade policies and heinous enforcement of inhuman immigration laws within a newly fashioned Fortress America (where an ever-expanding gulf between the rich and the poor eats away at the social fabric) together with the seemingly permanent deflation of Japan’s once booming domestic economy point to the slow and painful collapse of these erstwhile liberal democracies, each having foundered on the systemic viciousness of global hyper-capitalism. In Europe, Britain’s post-war experiment with an enlightened social democracy , although always starved of funds (the country deliberately emasculated financially by the U.S. insistence on full repayment for the materiel it had supplied to its ally) and having suffered immense infrastructural damage from German bombing campaigns, nevertheless experienced thirty years of income growth and a robust social safety-net during an era the French call the Trente Glorieuses. Adoption of a steroidal neoliberal agenda by Thatcher in the 1980’s now sees these storied islands beleaguered and squabbling over the Brexit decision (born, like Trump’s electoral triumph, of entrenched race, class and regional wealth disparities) with its exit from Europe still to be negotiated.  Like Japan and the United States, it is living out the demise of its once secure place, founded on a sustainable balance of production and consumption, in the global market place.

All this occurs against a background of a damaged world in which other species struggle for their survival or are rendered extinct in the diminishing interstices carelessly left by the roiling tides of homo economicus liberali. Logging, fossil fuel extraction, mining, industrial agriculture, industrial and manufacturing installations and their associated destruction of habitat together with the sprawl of residential development and its trade, transportation, recreation and institutional infrastructures, are all in the process of narrowing the pathways towards species sustainability. “How much chance”, Tsing asks, “do we have for passing a habitable environment to our multispecies descendants?”

Yet, it is in such ruination that Tsing finds the matsutake mushroom flourishing and its pickers, bundlers (middlemen who buy the mushrooms from individual pickers), traders and retail sellers flourishing alongside their foraged crop in complex webs of symbiosis that exist both outside of such devastation and entirely dependent on it. She traces the mushroom across the globe -  in abandoned forests located in Europe, the United States, China and in its primary market Japan; and, in exploring the supply chain of this commodity over three continents she finds that matsutake “illuminate the cracks in the global political economy”.

The first written record of matsutake occurs in Japan in the eighth century and it was by then common around the ancient centers of Nara and Kyoto, where they flourished in forests of red pine - second growth woodlands that had colonized areas where the prized species of hinoki, sugi (Japanese cedar) and oak had long been logged for building and as fuel for iron forges. Matsutake became a treasured gift item much appreciated by Japan’s aristocracy and subsequently by the burgeoning merchant class. By the 1970s, however, it had become rare as the, by then, endemic pine forests which nurtured the fungus were no longer cared for by peasants in traditional systems of rice agriculture and woodlands known as satoyama, because subsistence farmers were increasingly choosing to move to the cities. Broadleaf trees began to re-emerge in these abandoned woodlands and shade out the pines, the roots of which had hitherto nurtured the matsutake . Thus, was born the global export trade which emerged to satisfy the continued demand.

In the ruined industrial forests of Oregon, matsutake have thrived and it is here the author spends time with Southeast Asians who have recreated the hill camps of Laos and Cambodia beneath lodgepole and ponderosa pines on the slopes of the Eastern Cascades. Oregon’s logging industry was put out of business in the late twentieth century by the clear-cutting of tropical timbers in Southeast Asia, sponsored by Japanese trading companies and enforced by local military squads (with or without their government’s backing), which resulted in a dramatic fall in global lumber prices. Logging in the Pacific Northwest has never recovered and now the prolific lodgepoles crowd in on one another in a situation exacerbated by the Forest service’s policy of fire exclusion – conditions that favor fungal symbiosis.  Quantities of matsutake, the sapid mushroom, whose smell for the Japanese is highly redolent of autumn, have replaced the board-feet metric in the state’s erstwhile industrial forests. Now the mushrooms are picked, as often as not, by refugees of countries torn asunder, not so long ago, by the American Empire in full anti-communist cry.

Opportunistic mycorrhizal organisms and the people that pick their fruits exist in vibrant worlds of their own making within larger landscapes of environmental decay, species extinction and the slow death of modernity – in which was spawned (and which continues to nourish) the idea of America, hyper-capitalism and the global economy. Yet Tsing has found, in the pine-duff beneath which the mushrooms lurk, and within her fundamentally dystopian vision, cause to be sanguine. She documents one way in which communities spread across the northern hemisphere have found a way to prosper in the ruins of capitalism. She has discovered, in the matsutake, reason to hope. The PhD candidate’s decision to have a child, likely to live long into the twenty first century, indicates similar levels of optimism.

Life will not Spare Them - Graduating White in a Black City

The doubling of the earth's human population in the four decades between 1960 and 2000, from three to six billion, a population now on its inexorable way to an expected ten billion by 2050, is the proximate cause of the cataclysmic environmental changes that are upon us and which have marginalized geopolitical maneuverings, nationalistic grandstanding, the violence of ethnic and religious division and even personal tragedy. Our futures have been mortgaged to the unprecedented scalar transformation of our inhabitation. Our humanity – the very nature of our humanness is in question: Can we reasonably continue to celebrate it?

A significant nexus of an unquestioning celebration of our humanity is occurring throughout the land in the nation’s liberal arts colleges. I recently attended the ceremony for Tulane's graduating class at the Mercedes Benz Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. The student our family was honoring had majored in Music with a minor in Philosophy from Tulane's School of Liberal Arts. The castle like stage-set (a recreation of the University's signature Gibson Hall, that dates from 1894, built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style and named for a Confederate General) formed the backdrop for the ceremony located somewhere in mid-field. We sat in the stands close to the twenty-yard line. On the dais were arrayed banners representing the schools within the University. A local jazz band kicked off proceedings. Faculty and the administrative staff were escorted into the arena by bagpipers - the Pipes and Drums of New Orleans. Somewhere, along the stage-managed and scripted proceedings there was an acapella harmony rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, a piano concerto and a performance by the local soul singer, Irma Thomas, who was granted an honorary degree. Jesmyn Ward, the Mississippian writer and winner of two National Book Awards, gave the commencement address.

During the event, which began at nine and wrapped up mid-afternoon, there were several outbursts from a small group in the audience chanting “Black Lives Matter” - which quickly withered under the shushing of an overwhelming white audience. The stage-seated faculty and administrators in their many-colored, medieval academic robes were predominantly white. The jazzmen, Irma Thomas and Ms. Ward represented the black faces at this ceremony held in a city that is over 60% black, while Tulanes’ student body barely tops 8% in African American enrolment. The University claims a high level of 'diversity' partly because of the number of different states from which it draws its (white) students.

Such rites are replicated during the spring at expensive private colleges across the land and at public institutions that do their very best to mimic them. On display is an ethos that suggests humankind and all its works is to be celebrated and that Rationality, Science and Technology, gifts of the Enlightenment, exist to further the cause of human progress in the world. Although Romanticism lives on in liberal arts schools, as an early modern philosophical reaction to the Enlightenment and which continues to have relevance in its emphasis on imaginary, transcendental works of cultural production, nowhere is challenged the triumph of the species.

Jesmyn Ward is a survivor of a Global Warming catastrophe. Her experience of Weather Terrorism, along with her experience of the poverty, injustice and prejudice of Mississippi (all exacerbated during and after Katrina) are the material of her fiction. In the Superdome where, during the 2005 hurricane, New Orleans’ human detritus - those who had not evacuated and thus became homeless survivors of the storm - were gathered up by the National Guard and deposited in a stadium whose roof had ripped open and which notoriously became a quagmire of surging humanity, their waste, polluted storm water and mold, she spoke simply of her family’s struggles living in coastal Mississippi west of New Orleans. The one thought drummed into her by her parents and grandparents, none of whom had graduated from high school - needing to earn a living rather than continue their educations - was that college would set her free from the cycle of generational trauma, poverty, wage-slave drudgery, violence and drug-abuse.

Her softly spoken downbeat message was that attendance at college (in her case, Stanford) was but one step in a long road towards achieving mastery in her chosen art form of the literary novel and of finally gaining admission into the predominantly white world of publishing after having her first book, Where the Line Bleeds, 2008, published by a small, exclusively African American press, Agate Bolden. The miracle of her success did not occur until she was well into her thirties. Speaking to mostly prosperous, mostly white students and parents, her words thudded into the vast arena as a message from another planet – the predominantly impoverished black communities of coastal Mississippi, where Ms. Ward still lives. This was not a speech about triumphalism. It was a speech about struggle. It was not a speech about progress, but about her momentary good fortune in rising above the mean. It was a speech about the survival of her spirit, tested first in the difficulties of her family’s circumstances, then in their survival of Katrina, and then again in her repeated rejection by the gatekeepers of literary fiction.

Ward is racially entangled. She is discomfited by her mixed ancestry having grown up identifying black and believing in her intrinsic, genetic legacy of black resistance and strength. Yet, a 23andMe genetic test revealed that her ancestry was forty per cent European, thirty-two per cent sub-Saharan African, and a quarter Native American. Her father was half-Choctaw; her mother half-European. She notes, however, in Cracking the Code, The New Yorker, May 14, 2015,

“I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans—but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?"

She continues,

“…in choosing to identify as black, to write about black characters in my fiction and to assert the humanity of black people in my nonfiction, I’ve remained true to my personal history, to my family history, to my political and moral choices, and to my essential self: a self that understands the world through the prism of being a black American and stands in solidarity with the people of the African diaspora.”

She now teaches mostly white kids in a liberal arts school. Yet her commencement address demonstrates that she is fully cognizant of the complacencies she needs to challenge. She is not, I suspect, a believer in the secular humanist dictum that things are better than they ever were and will only continue to improve. She is, it seems, a woman of the Anthropocene, sufficiently separated from the teleological march of a disastrously burgeoning humanity by seeing life through both the prism of being a black American and of living in the bayous of Mississippi, where land mixes with water, salt water with fresh, ever vulnerable to the warming of the Gulf and to the storms it births. In her novel, Salvage the Bones, 2011, she writes of Katrina which she describes as,

“…the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and so black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered….”

The liberal arts continue to privilege human consciousness and its creative imaginings which in turn shape the dreams of secular humanism wherein our lives are supposedly bettered through technologically based development - much of which is projected to be 'sustainable' - although nothing in the human realm is sustainable if our population continues to metastasize across the planet. Biostasis, the ability of a species to survive change substantially intact, is now beyond our reach. Yet it is also out of the humanities that environmental criticism has emerged. It is at schools across the world that an understanding is emerging of humankind's intense enmeshment with the biosphere in ways that were entirely opaque until very recent advances in genetic analysis - advances that have now trickled down to the level of 23andMe.

Cross-disciplinary thinking has thus contributed to the recalibration of the human/nonhuman hierarchy within the environmental humanities. As a species, we are newly aware of how thoroughly entangled we are with our bacterial biome, the nonhuman part of us which is greater than our specifically human genetic material. Ward is discomfited by her mixed ancestry. Lynn Margolis, the evolutionary theorist, biologist and creator, with James Lovelock, of the Gaia hypothesis, has shown us how we, as a macro-species, universally live in symbiosis with other micro-species. Our ancestral entanglements are thus compounded by the complexities of interwoven human and nonhuman biology.

In her fiction, Jesmyn Ward tolls the sonorous bells of social and environmental realism. In her commencement address, she introduced Tulane’s 2018 white liberal arts graduates - acolytes into the narcissist cult of secular humanism – to the horrific notion that their degree might not be sufficient to distill the complexity of their lives into a speedy realization of their passions. That Life will not spare them.

Modernity's Long Twilight

While Marx expected the industrial proletariat to spearhead the socialist revolution, it is now left to those who resist the burning of the last of the planet’s fossil fuel - which continues to engorge the hyper-capitalism of the early twenty-first century – to usher us into the gloaming: the dappled shadowland of Modernity’s long twilight where we begin to make living arrangements that fully recognize the critical symbioses of the human and nonhuman.

Citizens for Responsible Oil and Gas (CFROG.org) in Ventura County in Southern California is fighting big, medium and little oil as they rapaciously squeeze the last reserves of an oil-rich county by drilling, fracking, and even tar-sands extraction right in the middle of the Oxnard plain, one of the richest row-crop regions in the state. There is, at this point, no such-thing as responsible oil and gas. But as CROG’s executive director, Kimberly Rivers, explained to me, this milquetoast designation is necessary to maintain ‘a seat at the table’. This is a table that is sliding irrevocably into the trash-heap of history. But for now, attendance at the last supper of the depraved predation of the earth’s crust provides a few scraps of satisfaction in the reining in of the worst acts of malfeasance by the County and oil industry cabal.

CFROG are fighting oil interests on the basis of their bureaucratic over-reach facilitated by a County Planning Department long used to the laissez-faire, rubber-stamp continuance of long-ago conditional-use permits extended time and time again often covering new methods of monsterish extraction, flaring and waste-water re-injection without enforcing the terms of the California’s Environmental Quality Act - because the original permits pre-date the passing of the legislation signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1970. Oil drilling, oil spills and resistance to the environmental damage they cause have a long history in Southern California.

Locally, in the foothills of the easterly spine of the Santa Ynez mountain range, interest in oil seeps began for Anglo-American settlers in 1854 when surface oil from Sulphur Mountain was collected and then refined for oil lamps. By the 1860’s, tunnels were dug into the folded oil-bearing seams of the hills and became, for that era, highly productive generating up to twenty barrels a day. They continued in production for almost a century and a half. The last Sulphur Mountain oil tunnel was only plugged and abandoned in 1997. Oil seeps continued to smoke for several months after the recent Thomas Fire which swept through western portions of the county.

The first commercially productive well in California was in Rancho Ojai just down the Ojai Road as it heads to Santa Paula alongside of Sisar creek and just north of the oil-seeping Sulphur Mountain. It was drilled to a depth of 550 feet in 1866 and produced fifteen to twenty barrels a day. That well was capped long ago, but to this day, CFROG continues to fight the oil companies who endanger local steelhead trout and other native fauna by drilling adjacent to Santa Paula creek, into which Sisar creek flows.

California’s first gusher was located close by in Adam’s Canyon which winds up from the Santa Clara flood plain a little west of State Highway 150 towards the Sulphur Mountain ridge. This blew in 1892 and 40,000 barrels ran down the canyon into the river below and were washed out to sea just south of Ventura harbor before it was capped. There were no video cameras to record the environmental damage and this, the first major oil spill in the United States, has passed quietly into History. In 1910 the greatest gusher of them all was unleashed in the Midway-Sunset field two miles north of Maricopa in Kern County which ran unchecked for eighteen months and spilled over eight million barrels.

In the County of Santa Barbara, north of Ventura, oil fields were discovered towards the end of the nineteenth century and in 1896 its first off-shore well was sunk off the small community of Summerland. The 1969 one-hundred-thousand barrel off-shore spill in the County’s Dos Cuadros field focused world-wide attention on the environmental havoc wrought by the pursuit of oil and is the event that spurred the creation of the first Earth Day, which arguably began the modern environmental movement.

Nearly fifty years later, we are no closer to containing either the rapacity of oil companies or the global warming impacts of the consumption of their products. Apparently, we are going to keep on grubbing for fossil fuels for as long as they remain the high density/low cost energy source. Global consumption has now moved past one hundred million barrels a day.

Along the transverse Tehachapi range which, in the 1940’s the socialist writer Carey McWilliams established as the northern boundary of Southern California, wind turbines stand magnificently in the grazed landscapes, like the ghost gums of Australia. They are not topped with a fringe of leaves like the antipodean arboreal giants but instead with great leafless branches stretched wide - their triple bladed rotors. In the vastness of the Mojave they have been positioned at its western fringe as it uplifts into the transverse range which guards the spine of Central California, John Muir’s High Sierras. Here, the turbines harvest the seemingly eternal on-shore winds that are funneled through the Tehachapi pass and their electrical power is then transmitted, substation to substation, to the dense populations of Greater Los Angeles.

This is what many wish that twenty-first century Modernity will look like: behemoth machines striding across damaged landscapes feeding energy hungry Americans accustomed to gorging on the all-you-can-eat buffet of cheap oil and gas. Now, wind power and large scale solar arrays provide a renewables side dish to further sate the appetite for the ease, comfort, personal transportation and media devices that define American lifestyles of over-consumption, all the while eroding the wild edges of their habitation. This is where the infrastructures for energy production - whether renewables or fossil fuels - have subsumed the landscape. Almost unnoticed beneath Tehachapi’s giant wind turbines, cattle continue to graze having long since effected plant-community type-conversion, from native Joshua tree woodland to Europeanized weedy pastures. The hunger of the electrical grid and of its meat-eating consumers are conjointly satisfied.

It is thus that wind, solar, hydro and geo-thermal power nourish engorged appetites for energy by means other than oil and gas, whilst continuing to contribute to the environmental blowback of Modernity. In California, forests of wind turbines, displacing native vegetation and solar panel arrays, shimmering like water in the desert, offer mirages of a benign future.  But renewables feed the same hubristic leisure pursuits, industrial production, factory farming, urban sprawl, globalization and endless travel to which we have long become addicted and which now condemn us to live on a damaged planet.

As the editors Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson and Nils Bubandt write in their introduction to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 2017, “living arrangements that took millions of years to put into place are being undone in the blink of eye”. Their prescription is to show us, in their collection of papers originally presented at a conference they convened in 2014 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, “how to pay better attention to overlaid arrangements of human and nonhuman living spaces”, so that we might stand up to “the constant barrage of messages asking us to forget – that is, to allow a few private owners and public officials with their eyes focused on short-term gains to pretend that environmental devastation does not exist”.

In Southern California, an inordinately rich mosaic of ecosystems, plant communities and culturally rich human settlements, it is getting ever harder to pretend ignorance of our damaged planet and harder still to believe that ending our addiction to oil, vital as it is, will resolve the terrestrial predation that is entangled within Modernity’s toxic amalgam of capitalist, imperialist, racist and hegemonic habits of violence and exploitation.

As ever, we begin with noticing.

In the Ruins

I am not alone in the blackened, fire scorched chaparral on the north-eastern fringe of California’s Thomas Fire.

Life is stirring in the wild hills, still partly dark with rain-washed ash, and, where the decomposed sandstone is exposed, oxidized to a sickly orange-brown. The soil is naked and unaccustomed to the light. Closer to roads and houses, where there had been disturbance of the native chaparral, the slopes are an eerily bright green, opportunistically colonized by weedy, European grasses, thistles, mustards and erodium along with the native fire followers, phacelias, acourtia, and soap plant. Other seeds, tubers, bulbs, burls and scorched stumps are restive - quickened by the recent rains. Maricopa lilies, blue dicks, lupin, popcorn flowers and the chaparral yucca are flowering. Laurel sumac, chamise and oaks are sprouting. Wild cucumber is draped over the landscape, twined into charred, skeletal shrubs and emerging from the fissures of heat-cracked rocks.  

Southern California's burned mosaic of chaparral plant communities is recovering. Fire is not necessary to its survival, but it is fire adapted. When fire happens it finds ways to continue in the ruins of its mature growth. In Donna Haraway's words (and the title of her new book) it is, Staying with the Trouble, 2018. Living in the wreckage of a planet ravaged by an exploitative economic system, there may be some comfort in understanding the forms of revival undertaken by these plant communities as possible models for human and nonhuman survival in the sprawling devastation of Modernity.

In the last few years we have traveled from earnest discussions over limiting carbon emissions and tinkering with public policy seeking some ameliorative pay-off in the effort to contain global warming to a profound acceptance, (prevalent certainly, within some academic circles), that the unfolding of the sixth extinction, initiated by loss of habitat and the industrial poisoning of land and water and now amplified by the effects of climate change, impacts us all – humans and non-humans as fellow victims of the struggle to flourish on a critically damaged planet.  In this wounded state, the primacy of human consciousness, triumphant through half a millennium of Modernity, is now challenged by our understanding of ourselves as symbionts, crucially dependent on the flourishing of all the organisms that surround, inflect and co-exist with us.

So it is, that when Noami Klein writes in her Introduction to This Changes Everything, 2014, that she could see,

“…all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change – how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructures like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights – all of which would help end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them”,

she sounds like yesterday’s voice of ‘progressive’ reason; the earnest spokesperson, circa 2014, of what Haraway calls the ‘Great Dithering’ - those years, and now decades, when nothing was done, and is never likely to be done, because the corporate and governmental structures that organize societies in the West are entirely invested in ‘business as usual’ – which, for the last century and a half has run on ‘Fossil Capital’, Andreas Malm’s term for the spiraling infiltration of cheap, non-renewable energy into the over-heated economies of late Capitalism.

Klein’s prescriptions for tinkering with public policy, in 2018, are totally out of touch with any meaningful reality outside of the polite dining rooms of left-leaning coastal elites. In her well-meaning upbraiding of our failed policies, she might also represent one of the many reasons why Donald Trump is our president. He smartly suggested during his campaign, that he, single-handedly, could ‘Make America Great Again’. Amidst this impasse, all some of us now seek is a small corner of the planet that remains fully habitable by the vast panoply of creatures that have come to call it home – and yet, even this, is an almost impossible ask.

Klein, the savvy, au-courant journalist, may already have received a much-needed transfusion of the bumptious, incautious, smart, connected wit of Donna Haraway, who declares that we are living in the Chthulucene – her neologism that displaces both Capitalocene and Anthropocene with a word brazenly not ready for any dinner party conversation outside of the far fringes of the woke. Its etymology derives from a species of spider, the Californian Pimoa Cthulhu, which populates the redwood forests close to Haraway’s home and serves as a metaphor for the web-like interactions between human and nonhuman life-forms.

Klein piled onto the conventional wisdom that colors the progressive spectrum - Haraway eviscerates it: shredding its apparently thoughtful, constructive policy options into critter litter. Klein uses action infinitives, like ‘to demand’, ‘to reclaim’, ‘to block’, ‘to invest’, ‘to take back’, ‘to remake’ ‘to open’ and ‘to finally respect’, as if she were writing a resume for a gig as a third-string speechwriter with the Democratic National Committee. Haraway uses phrases like ‘speculative fabulation’, ‘multispecies worlding’, ‘Kantian globalizing cosmopolitics’ and ‘grumpy human-exceptionalist Heideggerian’ as if she were writing a resume for a gig as a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a position, as you might have guessed, she secured some years ago. But stay with her, as she stays with the trouble and offers the kind of visioning that entirely outflanks Klein’s ‘steady as she goes’, moderately progressive, business (almost) as usual approach. This Changes Everything sits at number 9,383 on the Amazon sales chart, the much newer, Staying with the Trouble at 30,537. No one ever said changing our worlding practices was going to be popular – just existentially essential.

Like Timothy Morton, the object-oriented ontologist with whom Haraway shares a devotion to the work of the French philosopher, Bruno Latour, she pins her hopes on a re-worlding capable of embracing the other-than-human. She calls for a re-conceptualization of our gender roles. She embraces the notion of a mind-shift as dramatic as that which characterized the replacement of the Paleolithic with the Neolithic, when scrawled bovine imagery on subterranean caves became the genesis for a testosterone fueled male rampage that gave big-game hunters a hegemonic role within cramped societies and created a model of male hubris that, even today, is scarcely moderated.  She deplores the ‘hero’s journey’, what she calls ‘prick history’, and the serial conflations of ‘word’, ‘weapon’ and ‘war’. (In these three words she deflates the pretentious grandiosity of all the religions, many still virulent today, of Karl Jaspers’ ancient, Axial Age).

Most who care to be self-reflective, half-heartedly informed by Darwin's theory of evolution, remain essentially atomistic in their view of the world, still naively confident of our singularity, standing alone as perfected apes, the apex predator. Haraway shows us that we are, instead, ingredients in a biological stew in which we depend for our individual and societal agency on the distinctly nonhuman. Our thriving relies on the thriving of others. We are symbionts within a holobiont. We are situated beings, and Haraway fleshes out the possibilities that exist in our fully living with, in sympoiesis (collective collaboration), nonhuman beings - the animals (which Haraway endearingly calls critters), insects, micro-organisms and bacteria, plants and geological formations that enfold us in their presence. Similarly, Morton provocatively urges solidarity with ‘nonhuman people’.  We are cadet Gaians, junior partners in what used to be called the great chain of being. Humility has been forced upon us by circumstance. Sympoiesis is now, Haraway urges, our opportunity.

The chaparral plant and insect community employ a variety of strategies to ensure their survival after fire. Long dormant seeds of many species of shrubs and forbs awake to take of advantage of newly available light beneath the absent canopy. Other shrubs and trees sprout from burnt stumps or burls. Insect populations are decimated in the immediate burn area, but replacements quickly arrive from beyond the charred perimeter. Some species of beetles actively seek out the smoldering vegetation and even begin their courtship amidst still burning brush.

Chaparral has fluid spatial and temporal boundaries, with disparate generations of the biome reflecting past fire events. Haraway notes that it is the “porous tissues and open edges of damaged but still ongoing living worlds, like planet earth and its denizens” that enable us to consider possibilities for its rehabilitation and sustainability. My concern for the chaparral’s ongoingness opens a portal to what Haraway terms ‘response-ability’. She might even suggest that the plant community in which I am situated, and which is deep within the ambit of my caring, will likely generate some small epigenetic response.

In Haraway’s Speculative Fabulation (companion to the other SF’s threaded through her text, such as String Figures, Science Fiction, Speculative Feminism, Science Fact and Science Fantasy) and with which she ends her book, she follows five generations of women, each named Camille, within a renegade North American community dedicated to their co-evolution with the monarch butterfly. She describes these Camille stories as ‘invitations to participate in a kind of genre fiction committed to strengthening ways to propose near futures, possible futures, and implausible but real nows. (Klein, by contrast, does a great job of writing plausible but unreal nows).

As a human survivor of the Thomas Fire, I am now embarked on an SF endeavor of my own - Speculative Forturity. The chaparral is resurgent, my task is to watch over its rehabilitation not in an active or intrusive way (the burnt soil crust crumbles under the pressure of human foot falls – rendering it vulnerable to intrusion by weeds), but in a contemplative manner that privileges the directly observed details of its regrowth over the mediated dramas of a globalized neoliberal society to which my attention is all too often drawn.

While I can be certain that the chaparral will long outlive the grotesque final writhings of a moribund and profoundly anthropocentric Modernity, I may or may not live to fully see this iteration of its local restoration - which will progress over the next three or four decades; and I may or may not live to see another fire. But this is the trouble I am resolved to stay with.

Climate of Fear

In The Atlantic, November 1, 2007, Cornell West wrote that "Niggerization is the wholesale attempt to impede democratization - to turn potential citizens into intimidated, fearful and helpless subjects." He went on to suggest that post 9/11, there had been a similar process inflicted on the wider American population. "Like the myopic white greed, fear, and hatred that fueled the niggerization of black people, right-wing fear, and hatred have made us all feel intimidated, fearful and helpless in the face of the terrorist attacks." As the fear of imminent terrorist attacks has faded, we have found new ways to live in fear.

Now, we are the people of the gulf and of the islands who fear for every ripple on the water, every puff of wind, and every drop of rain. We are the people of the drought who fear for every day without moisture.  We are the people of the temperate lands who fear the extremes of heat and cold. We are the people of the tropics who fear the cold, and of the polar landscapes who fear the melting of the ice. We are the people of the burned lands who fear for every wisp of smoke. We are the people of the debris flows who fear for every rivulet and rill. We are the people of the flood lands who fear for every rise in the water; we are the people of the tide who fear its every incoming, and we are the people of the storm who fear its every surge.

But these new fears are not necessarily debilitating – they can also breed solidarity and resistance.  What is clear is that the impacts of a warming climate respect no national boundaries.  They present societies, in their shared distress, with opportunities for common cause across borders. But deep divisions exist that run along both national and hemispheric lines. Even as the Global South industrializes, there remain issues of accountability for global warming. The Global North having, historically, produced the bulk of the offending carbon-dioxide is now consuming the lion’s share of the goods manufactured in the Global South. Greener production in the North continues to be offset by off-shored production in the South using generally more carbon-intense energy sources. Additionally, political ideologies such as neoliberalism cut across attempts to solve or ameliorate climate issues through a shared environmentalism.

Most insidiously, while countering Islamic terrorism feeds directly into the imperial proclivities of the North’s military-industrial complexes and their political aggrandizement and economic enrichment, there has developed a zero-sum consideration that couples expanded resources poured into the War on Terror with global warming denialism. Even when this linkage is not explicit, as under the Obama administration, it is rendered implicit by the allocation of federal resources.

Neoliberalism remains in the ascendance in much of the Global North and the model of economic growth upon which this ideology is based would necessarily founder if heading off calamitous global warming were taken with any seriousness. The continued obscenity of the U.S. Military budget would certainly be made vulnerable if climate change became a focus of the U.S. federal government. While Trump’s refusal to have this country participate in the COP23 agreement is an extreme symptom, his calculus is baked into the compromises and concessions intrinsic to the agreement.

Expect no neoliberal salvation of our climate-shadowed souls. We are the children of fossil capital. We are the burners of the stolen fuel. We are the ravenous consumers of the earth, now disinherited by our willful acts of predation and sacrilege. We are the people of the Anthropocene.

Can we now accept its most symptomatic epochal condition and, in environmentally conscious solidarity, accommodate global warming and, even at this late stage, head off its most extreme temperature rise? We, the People of the Anthropocene, own the fear of Weather Terrorism. This fear is not the creation of the oligarchy and the governments they control – which, in fact, are often committed to denying the threats of global warming both because they are fully complicit in its cause and because any reasonable, non-geo-engineering attempt to contain it would strip them of their power.

It is no longer, as West reflected on the manufactured War on Terror, only right-wing fear and hatred that have made us all feel intimidated, fearful and helpless, a condition that ultimately cripples democratization.  It is the weather and its extremes that have also rendered us, for the moment, supine and frightened. However, if we fully accept our vulnerability then we can, perhaps, exult - not for the fearsome oppression that the super-sized weather events inflict, but for the opportunities they represent to shape communities of resistance. That resistance may be aimed purely at the accommodation of new climate realities and the amelioration of our relationship with the enfolding natural world, but its practice will inevitably involve the tearing down of entrenched political and economic models.

Adrian Parr, for one, is exultant. In Birth of a New Earth, 2018, she promotes the concept of Commonism which she identifies as a strategy for creating “situations of radical alterity from within the privatized landscape of neoliberal planetary urbanism”. The models she cites are outside of the neoliberal realm, but she argues that they could serve as emancipatory disrupters of it. She relates the experience of Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union created a shortage of oil-based fertilizers and pesticides as well as agricultural machinery (and the subsequent partial trade blockade instituted by this country), forced it to “creatively blend food-autonomy, land use and economic policies with small scale community driven agricultural activities” in a system of organic urban farming known as Organopónicos. Similarly, in Venezuela, the Agro Ciudad movement developed as a response to the oil crises of 2002 and 2003 and the global food crisis of 2009, where food is produced in schools, colleges, factories, by cooperatives, neighborhoods and families. These are programs that build community solidarity and a local control of the fundamental human right of nourishment. It is in these practical pursuits of a common endeavor that true democracy can be birthed.

In this country, The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network was created to counter the urban blight, shrinking population and food deserts of that prototypical rust-belt city and emphasized the role of community building in urban commoning and then grew to address not only food security but congruent issues such as drug-use, unemployment and homelessness.

The economic and political events that prompted these solutions in the face of existential crises are surely comparable to the kinds of impacts that we will experience as global warming continues to unfold across the U.S. The community responses to the devastation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, other Caribbean Islands, Texas, Florida and Louisiana wrought by last year’s explosive hurricane season suggest that, as Parr writes, “the singularity of local experiences, resources and capacities” can coalesce around a “universal attitude that aspires for the dignity and flourishing of all life on earth both today and into the future”.

It is communities on the margins in some of the most ecologically vulnerable places in the country that we can expect to see solutions in local sustainability (evidenced, quite simply, by survival in radically changing geo-physical circumstances) begin to challenge the hegemony of militarized emergency services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) whose implicit goal is the restoration of ‘business as usual’ despite the clear evidence of extraordinary circumstances. Communities along the New Orleans coastal waters are resisting re-location to higher ground (where they might continue to contribute to the creation of surplus value that is then suctioned-off into the gaping maw of the 1%) and are prepared instead to tough it out in what are fast becoming wet-slums, but which survive socially and economically in conditions, like favelas, of ‘radical alterity’. The hasty restoration of Breezy Point, in New York City, burnt to the ground during Hurricane Sandy, was a boon to local businesses but ill-serves the community who live in the same jerry-built houses (but of newer vintage) that performed so badly in the storm surge. Residents are fated to endure a few more cycles of destruction as the City, State, and Federal agencies, along with private insurers, continue to paper over this beach-side Potemkin village until their resources run out or the residents wrest control of their own fate. Massive residential post-Sandy re-development at Rockaway Beach (Where Life is a Never-Ending Vacation) built to 100-year flood standards is set to see that vacation end swiftly as once-in-five-thousand-years storm surges roll in.

Even in the burned lands of California’s recent Thomas Fire and last year’s Napa and Sonoma County fires, the majority of the proposed residential re-builds are in the mode of ‘the-same-old-shit’, similar to the houses that burned with such alacrity so recently - fully supported by the reactionary policies of insurance companies, banks, local municipalities and state and federal agencies determined to restore ‘business-as-usual’, as quickly as possible in denial of the altered realities of global warming. 

Concerns for changing meteorological conditions have resulted in a legitimate climate of fear. It is a primal fear akin to the dread of predatory wild beasts. It is a fear that is born of our fundamental situation in a global ecology of both extreme threats and sublime comforts. The ironies of the situation, of our kind having initiated this radical change in the composition of the atmosphere and its insulating properties does not alter our primal reactions to its effects. The fear, thus far, has not been co-opted by West's 'myopic white greed, fear, and hatred'. It is a fear from which can spring, as Parr suggests, “extraordinary emancipatory and egalitarian promise”.

Can Hollywood Save the World?

The Shape of Water, Dir. Guillermo del Toro, is a tale of a woman establishing solidarity with the non-human whilst enduring the oppression of a corporatist, militaristic society - and then experiencing a profound physiological transcendence. The movie is suffused with post-humanist notions - where ethical concern expands beyond the human to embrace a connection with the multiplicity of the biosphere and where the teleological drive to subsume the earth under human consciousness and thus materially consume it, begins to wither. Theodore Adorno wrote that “Progress begins when it is at an end”. Is it time to begin rolling back half a millennium of Modernity? Hollywood, ever an indicator of the zeitgeist, seems to think so. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded del Toro Best Director and Best Picture of 2017 for his self-proclaimed homage to Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dir. Jack Arnold, 1954. It is out of such mythic tales that the Earth’s destiny may be shaped.

Pete Dolack, in China Can’t Save Capitalism from Environmental Destruction, writes that at last October’s 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress, President Xi Jinping proclaimed, “Man and nature form a community of life; we, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it…Any harm we inflict on nature will eventually return to haunt us”. Xi was channeling his inner Thoreau, but as Dolack makes clear, his sentiment is meaningless in terms of moderating China’s growing impact on global warming. Nevertheless, his paternalistic nod to nature and, by inference, the threat that humans now present to it, was more than either Trump or Joseph Kennedy III, could manage in this country’s annual showcase of political theater, the State of the Union address and the Democratic response which went by, all 93 minutes of it, without a reference to global warming. Trump’s speech, clocking in at 80 minutes, was just nine minutes short of the insufferably loquacious Bill Clinton who established a record in tendentiousness in 1995. In 2000, Clinton got it partly right, with his final State of the Union, when he spoke of global warming in these terms,

"The greatest environmental challenge of the new century is global warming. The scientists tell us the 1990's were the hottest decade of the entire millennium. If we fail to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, deadly heat waves and droughts will become more frequent, coastal areas will flood, and economies will be disrupted. That is going to happen, unless we act. 

Many people in the United States, some people in this Chamber, and lots of folks around the world still believe you cannot cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. In the industrial age, that may well have been true. But in this digital economy, it is not true anymore. New technologies make it possible to cut harmful emissions and provide even more growth."

His pro-growth stance entirely undercut his glib good intentions - his reference to new technologies presumably indicated the mechanism by which production and its attendant harmful emissions, was to be off-shored to Asia.

The environment is not a core Republican Party value except where it impacts hunting, mineral extraction, grazing, and now, perhaps, golf courses - all of which have negative impacts on what we used to think of as the great outdoors. The Democrats cleave to a misty eyed, John Muir inflected romanticism with respect to the natural world (enshrined in the ethos of our National Parks) without ever making a credible linkage between its protection and global warming. Yet both China and the United States have national ideologies wrapped in a professed love and respect for nature – while also being the world’s leading emitters of CO2 into the atmosphere. Dolack sketches the compromises, corruption and cronyism that bind China to cheap fossil fuel and with that to a profoundly paradoxical relationship between its environment and its economy -  between a now alienated nature and a culture dedicated to its consumption.

 In this country, in its long glide path towards post-industrial senescence, the form of that relationship, paradoxical from the start, was created in the middle of the nineteenth century with the widespread adoption of steam powered mills and the railway. After World War II, when it became apparent that the conflict had metastasized technology, a genre of horror movie became popular as a way to exorcise the fears of a run-away advancement in nuclear, ballistic and plain old fossil-fueled engineering. Today, new fears have emerged out of our subversion of the atmosphere.

This country does not lack for jeremiads concerning our climate future. Clinton’s wingman, Al Gore, huffed self-importantly about Earth in the Balance, in 1992. More recently, David Wallace-Wells, in last year’s New York Magazine piece, The Uninhabitable Earth, listed a number of worst-case scenarios in an attempt to engage his shrinking, elite, hyper-literate audience of old white people (They Read Long-Form Magazine Pieces Don't They?) many of whom are warehoused in the tonier neighborhoods of New York City. The New York Times, playing, perhaps, to a similar audience, just produced a three-part supplement to their February 24th issue, ten months in the making, in a collaboration with Nola.com and The Times Picayune titled The Drowning Coast. Louisiana is indeed the emblematic battered shoreline - the soft underbelly of the southern states ripe for its global warming exacerbated 'disappearance'.

As Wallace-Wells promises, it really is worse than we think, but as more and more Americans (and others) suffer in real time from the weather impacts of our historical legacy of burning fossil fuels, the perception gap, between the bad and the catastrophic, narrows. A Nor’easter, characterized as a Bomb Cyclone, or more accurately as explosive cyclogenesis (terminology that is inching ever-closer to the notion of Weather Terrorism), ravaged the Boston area on March 2nd., leaving seven dead (from fallen trees), millions without electricity and severe flooding from a massive storm surge.  Europe freezes because the polar vortex which hitherto has kept super-chilled air at the North Pole has now swung open like a recalcitrant refrigerator door so the Arctic spoils while canals in Amsterdam ice over and snow falls on Barcelona.  Even Trump's denialism may be dented when Mar-a-Largo sinks gently into the Atlantic.

We are all deeply complicit in the consumption of the necrotic fuel - not merely in the act of filling the gas tank in our C.U.V., but more insidiously as passive consumers of its impact in off-shored, mostly Asian production. It is in the act of living and consuming in a society founded on the surplus value generated by fossil fuels that renders us complicit: we are nourished by the energy entombed between five and 439 million years ago, hydrocarbons that now inflame our atmosphere and deaden those beings who live within its realm. It is Fossil Capital (Andreas Malm’s inspired conflation) that has ensnared our consciousness, and, through the process of what Althusser called appellation, calls out our name and renders us its subjects. 

Like characters in another Best Picture nominee, Get Out, Dir. Jordan Peele, a racially charged horror movie in which white consciousness is seen to be inserted into stolen black bodies, we American consumers are possessed by a succubus - the demon fuel.  We passively accept global warming as we react to weather emergencies with palliative care (in the form of emergency services) rather than attempting to staunch its cause. This is the kind of false consciousness generated when a society is held hostage to Fossil Capital and provides one answer to Gramsci’s question: "why do subaltern classes resign themselves to their fate or even consent to it explicitly?"

It is not only much worse than we think, but we substantiate worst-case scenarios every time we plunge our chip into that card-reader's orifice or click on-line.  Purchase made, we grind the wheels of commerce that run through China (or an Asian wannabe) and (shortly, via the mammoth infrastructure project, belt and road) we become further instantiated by the zombie fuel.

Adopting renewables may be one part of the solution. But while production ramps up, driven by ever expanding consumer demand, it will likely remain mostly fossil fueled – a fact ensured by the iron law of capitalism that mandates that production be located in abstract, deracinated spaces of the lowest cost and most tractable supplies of both labor and energy. 

Can we think through this conundrum in terms of popular culture? Can Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, home to eight million cars and trucks, and the originator, in 1943, of mostly gasoline generated smog, now create memes that speak to our fossil-fueled psychosis?  Alongside of The Shape of Water, another Oscar nominated movie this year, War for the Planet of the Apes, Dir. Matt Reeves, was a tale of a future valorizing the non-human. The telling of such tales is a necessary first step in the re-wiring of human consciousness. At a deeply subliminal level (where transformation might be most effectively achieved) did Oscar night represent a step towards a consummation, to paraphrase Xi Jinping, of the human and the non-human forming a community of life? Did the glitz of Hollywood and its celebrity culture just get coopted by anti-materialism? And did Oscar, in his ninetieth year, finally accept his role as an Olympian god capable of disseminating a regenerative mythos - where fairy tales connect us anew to the mysteries of the biosphere?

Waiting for the Debris Flows

In J.M. Coetzee's 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, his characters sit around in an isolated colonial fort in a nameless desert country, awaiting their destiny - an invasion of the barbarians. The novel concerns its characters’ slow realization of their complicity, as agents of the Empire, in their fate. Something very similar is happening here on the eastern fringe of southern California's Thomas Fire burn area as we await the rains and the debris flows that will surely follow - as they did, earlier in the year, with such devastating results in Montecito, further to the west.

This analogy, to fully flower, depends on two things. The first is that the fire was intensified by global warming. It came, early in December, after six years of drought, towards the end of a dry first half of the rainy season and in the midst of N.E. Santa Ana winds of unprecedented intensity. The second is that we are both culpable and complicit in the first by the fact of our living in a society driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Implicit is the connection between the two.

The motley assortment of ex-pats who populate Coetzee's desert fort have more reason to debate the benefits or provocations of their colonial mission impacting the peoples they have (we presume) earlier displaced, although they too, even without the benefit of a course in post-colonial studies, come to accept their role in the disruption of a pre-existing social ecology and the acts of revenge this will ultimately generate. They sit and wait for an invasion by the people who, by destroying their world, they have made barbarians. 

Meanwhile, in our now certified fire-safe house (but still surely vulnerable to debris flows) situated in the wildland-urban-interface, we sit and wait for other acts of weather terrorism provoked by the Empire's eviscerations of the earth's crust.

So, the world ends not with a bang but with the weather: not with a thermonuclear Armageddon, but with the slow melting of glacial ice, with the creeping scourge of drought, with top soil blowing lazily away, with trees stressed and lightning stricken, with the soft lap of flood water, with the low buzz of disease carrying mosquitos that follow; with the almost imperceptible warming of the oceans, with their swelling, with their perturbation of the air into a violent cyclogenesis and with their slowly increasing acidification. The world ends with a fulsome wetness, debris flows, a coruscating dryness, extreme heat, fire storms, chilling polar cold, high pressures and lows and the violent winds that are whipped between them; it ends with incursions, as Andreas Malm frames it, into "the killing fields of extreme weather". Malm is the author of Fossil Capital – The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, 2016, a historical review of the death-spiral co-dependence of Capitalism and the Earth's buried, necrotic energy deposits and most recently, of The Progress of This Storm – Nature and Society in a Warming World, 2018, a critique of post-Latourian ecological theory and a bleakly realist analysis of our current climate predicament.

Even now, in the global north, well into the new century of warming, this stormy weather rarely rises to a level of noticeable sound and fury or causes death and destruction in concentrated and therefore newsworthy numbers, although the bar is set low. Most recently, in the fall of 2017, fires in Northern California caused 10,000 homes to be destroyed, with 48 dead - which translated into big news. Southern California’s largest wild fire followed at the end of the year and then the related and much more deadly Montecito mudslide (now officially termed a debris flow) began the New Year, helped along in newsworthiness by the frisson of celebrity’s homes being endangered. Back in 2010, floods in Pakistan displaced 10 million people and killed 2,000. As Malm writes, "climate change will ultimately choke the accumulation of capital - long after it has killed those at the greatest distance from the bourgeoisie". In the United States, the passing of our planet as a viable home for us teeming billions (and so many other species) will be slow and mostly unheralded. That process (along with its commonplace denial) has, of course, already begun.

Timothy Morton (a noted post-Latourian ‘dark ecologist’ lambasted by Malm) suggests, “It is helpful to think of global warming as something like an ultra-slow-motion nuclear bomb." Thinking this way elucidates what emergency services are trained to do. They function now as officialdom’s most visible interface with global warming, our legislatures, at all levels, being largely missing in action. In Morton’s metaphor, they help you evacuate ground zero after an explosion but then facilitate your earliest return back to your irradiated home where you will be doomed to experience similar detonations until your location becomes untenable, except that your choices narrow with each extreme weather event and the efficacy of emergency services slowly erodes with the attenuation of their budgetary resources. We do not yet understand their resilience, but it will surely soon be tested.

Despite the militaristic planning, equipment battalions and fleets of National Guard, Coast Guard and local law-enforcement helicopters, fixed wing aircraft and drones, this is not a ‘War on Weather’, even less a concerted attack on the cause of its terroristic inclinations, the blowback from ever increasing global CO2 emissions. The work of emergency services, combining regional fire and police services alongside of the Red Cross and Federal agencies such as F.E.M.A. remains, however, the most credible response this country makes to the issues of global warming. In California, and across the U.S.A., their work initiates a series of Dunkirks endlessly replayed in aggregations of private cars, trucks, S.U.V’s and minivans on freeways that once were meant to save us from the Red Menace but that now serve as conduits of mandated evacuations to anywhere or nowhere.

California, highly vulnerable to drought, wind-driven wild fires, rising sea-levels, floods, and debris flows has a Governor who talks tough but is confounded by ‘business as usual’, Malm’s damning evocation of a status quo in service to the hegemonic and carbon spewing power elites. Speaking in Bonn at COP23 last November, Brown conceded that “if we stopped the 32 million cars and said you can’t use oil, the whole economy would collapse. You’d have a revolution. There’d be shooting in the streets – and you couldn’t do that and no one would do that…..This (oil) is a very embedded industry and we need a very sophisticated response to minimize it….but it’s a part of a bigger picture. And gestures are not helpful, we need strategies and action”.

And indeed, the Governor has a plan which includes the usual bag of green tricks - renewable energy, efficient buildings, a cap-and-trade system, and a low carbon fuel standard. But even were California to become a zero CO2 emitting State, that would not mitigate its far larger role in global warming as a consumer of goods manufactured in Asia where, as Malm has it, China has become the ‘chimney of the world’ driven by globally mobile capital lured by a tractable, cheap labor supply in factories energized, for the most part, by massive consumption of fossil energy; California does its deleterious part both in consumption of such goods and as a cultural avatar which proclaims such levels of consumption as an aspirational goal for the rest of the world.

How does this end? Not well. The whimper you may hear will be the last gasp of the great mass of an oppressed citizenry under the command of a highly militarized corps of emergency services pursuing a sincere desire to assist in the human and property tolls of weather terrorism - which ultimately threatens to tear apart a society whose government is dedicated to the protection of that class of elite citizens most culpable in the production of its cause.  

America has adopted ‘Fossil Capital’ as its national ethos. (‘Drill baby, drill.’) It has been a part of the country's ideological infrastructure for at least a century and a half. America performs highly effective hierarchical command and control, a trait forged when it was a colonial outpost in the New World under constant threat from the indigenous peoples it re-cast as barbarians.  America institutes heroic large-scale, technologically and logistically intense bravura acts of intervention (world wars and space exploration); but it is constitutionally ill-suited to take the steps necessary to contain the temperature rise inherent in the continued burning of fossil fuels (to the extent that the U.S. remains relevant to this effort). 

We can therefore expect increased militarization of federal, state and local emergency services battling the blowback from global warming, and an increased focus on geo-engineering solutions to mitigate solar radiation, a strategy backed by some of the world’s richest men, including Bill Gates - all desperate to preserve the formula for added exchange value derived from the earth's store of prehistoric solar energy.

We should not expect rescue. So we sit and wait, knowing that the invasion has begun. As the rain falls (or not), the wind howls, the cold bites, the sun scorches, the wild fires rage and the debris flows, we are all under voluntary evacuation orders - but there is absolutely nowhere to go.

Weather Terrorism - W.T.F?

As the predicted storm pounded the narrow canyons in the hills above Montecito early in January, a rumble began to overtake the percussion of hard rain on scorched earth. It built, once the torrent of water had dislodged first soil, pebbles, small rocks, then boulders, into a mighty thunder as the mud gathered speed over the resin-slicked surface of the newly burned wild lands.

From out of the Wildland-Urban-Interface, the mudslide drove down into the leafy suburbs of Montecito and tangled with the fragile infrastructure that supports the life-styles of the rich and famous, the merely rich, and all those others who call this Santa Barbara suburb home.  It smashed through homes, businesses and, most critically, fractured the system of pipes, suspended across the naturally occurring drainages, that link a chain of reservoirs that serve as the community’s water source.

The broken pipes unleashed a sea of nearly ten million gallons of fresh water released from the reservoirs because their electrically operated control valves were inoperative in the storm related blackout. Much of the mud and water found its way to U.S. Route 101 which runs from Los Angeles to the Oregon border. The section that runs through Montecito, a few hundred yards east of the beach, was transformed into a rock and tree strewn delta where water ran twelve feet deep in places and over 100,000 tons of debris were spread along its length. The highway was reopened recently after a two-week closure. Restoration of the area’s water supply will take longer. Both were the collateral damage of extreme weather events.

We are a species in retreat. Pusillanimous descriptions of our geo-historical circumstances such as ‘climate change’ are daily challenged by the occurrence of extreme weather events that disrupt society, destroy infrastructure, and obliterate human life. Twenty lives were lost in Montecito and two others remain missing, buried perhaps, beneath mud or swept out to sea. These events might be more effectively described as Weather Terrorism. However, the ascription of such an inflammatory label to acts of ‘Nature’ - to grant weather agency - requires a profound philosophical re-orientation.

 It is this task to which philosophers such as Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton, among others, are currently devoted. Latour takes the position that humanity’s place in the biosphere is now fundamentally altered by its industrial age activities, most notably the burning of fossil fuels, such that it is now a global, geo-historical force which expresses itself in species’ extinction and in its power to change the weather. We are in an age he characterizes as the New Climatic Regime when our political institutions have become entirely incapable of protecting their citizens from extreme weather events and thus risk their own irrelevance. He fully recognizes the unconstrained powers of the non-human to shape our destinies.

Morton, in arguing for the agency of the non-human takes a swipe at the academic humanities (fields in which he toils at Rice University) in which it is conventionally suggested “that there are no accessible things in themselves…. only things insofar as they relate to some version of the (human) subject…. thinking which is called correlationist”. But, he argues, “the screen on which these correlations are projected isn’t blank after all”.  Both Latour and Morton acknowledge that ‘Nature’ has traditionally served as the big screen upon which human activities are seen to play out. Each philosopher urges us to begin to understand that this erstwhile passive backdrop has a life of its own, composed of what Morton provocatively calls ‘non-human people’ existing alongside ‘hyperobjects’, all-subsuming phenomena like global warming or the weather that are, in part, reflections of the violence done to the biosphere by humanity.  Our species, fully constituted as a geophysical force, now contends with the terrifying consequences of engaging with other biospheric forces.

Within such heady realms we must negotiate the minutiae of our political positions. In the present duopoly, only tepid distinctions are offered within the powerful brew of neoliberalism which drives American political support of globalization and excessive consumption in the West whilst ensuring, by heavy-handed military and financial means, the complicity of other, recalcitrant regions. Consumed with a Coke versus Pepsi ideological battle, framed within an uncontested arena of historicized nationalism, most Americans, and the political parties to which they owe allegiance, are magnificently unprepared to grapple with their nation’s irrelevance in defending them from the unfolding realities of our geo-historical moment; even less, to comprehend the apparent acts of war being waged by non-human forces - forces with which we must now find an accommodation.

This message may resonate differently depending on where you live.  For instance, with as many as one in three Americans living in the Wildland-Urban-Interface, defined by geographers as places where indigenous landscapes impinge significantly onto the ever-widening perimeters of suburbia and exurbia, wild fire looms as an existential threat.  These are landscapes increasingly stressed by historically unusual drought regimes with expanding anthropogenic ignition sources. On these exurban frontiers, endemic wild fires may begin to erode the perimeters of our species' range - despite the current post fire-event philosophy of re-build and return. At some point, the frequency of attack will change behaviors, just as repeated Jihadi bombing of market places eventually inhibits their function as viable locations for buying and selling.

Rising sea-levels and coastal inundation, storm surges and heightened wind and rain events may similarly impinge on the habitability of coastal regions. The inexorable loss of land at the coastal perimeter of Louisiana is likely more indicative of the future than the delaying strategies of sea-walls, dikes and floating storm surge barriers.  Like Baghdad’s Green Zone, where blast barriers and barbed wire were no security against rocket attacks or, finally in 2016, the uprising of the street, flood defense strategies will not, in the end, alter the geographical imperatives of global warming.  Thus, few in the USA, or elsewhere on the planet, can truly be safe from the impacts of Weather Terrorism.  

The urban destruction that has become a signature of the kind of asymmetrical wars being waged by Imperialist powers across the planet - fought to the local architectural and societal death – routinely results in the tragic loss of historically, economically and socially significant human habitat. Weather Terrorism threatens to wreak damage on an incomparably larger scale.  

You cannot outrun a wind-driven wildfire. We cannot double down on Modernity and stake our future on geo-engineering, or as Latour warns, “to increase still further the dosage of megalomania needed for survival in this world”. Fighting wild fires, hot-shots know that to find safety they have to outflank the fire and run ‘into the black’ - where the fire has consumed the earth and left it carbonized - where there is no longer fuel to support the other two legs of the incendiary triad, heat and air. Morton counsels a retreat to a time before ‘agrilogistics’, the term he uses to describe the algorithms humans run to facilitate farming, that hierarchical and ecologically damaging means of food production which he damns as “the slowest and perhaps most effective weapon of mass destruction yet devised”. This retreat, he imagines, will bring us to a more fully animated world, endemic before the rise of agriculture, where we might achieve safety in a solidarity with the non-human beings with whom we share the biosphere.

We live in an environment of extinction. We have subjected the planet to a pernicious miasma of global warming which we continue to exacerbate by our selfish actions, initiating rates of change in biospheric systems that offer non-human life-forms few options of adaptation other than death. Now, in refusing the accommodation of the non-human and the possibilities for coexistence, we must suffer the consequences - phenomena that it are quite reasonable (and politically useful) to call Weather Terrorism.