Global Plastic

In the Beginning, there was no plastic.

Four and a half billion years ago, or thereabouts, there was nothing but a hot, rocky, lifeless mass bathed in water vapor, ammonia, hydrogen and methane. After seven-hundred million years, the Earth had cooled sufficiently for the water vapor to condense and become an ocean. And still there was no plastic. A little over half-a-billion years ago, layers of dead phytoplankton, algae and primitive marine organisms that had begun living in the ocean drifted to its floor and were trapped in mud and sand. Over geologic ages, through heat and pressure, these layers of decayed organic material became oil and liquid gas trapped beneath the earth’s surface of rock and clay.

And still there was no plastic. But its feedstock was now comingled within the seams, pools, shale beds, and seeps of fossil biomass – the hydrocarbons that had trapped the solar energy of an ancient world. The simplest of all the hydrocarbons was methane, encapsulated as a liquid gas from vapors released by the rotting carcasses of tiny sea creatures and, over time, larger, more complex organisms. Out of the simple methane molecule, in those dark, cloacal spaces, with the addition of a single carbon atom, variously configured, were created ethane, propane, and butane.

Today, these feedstocks, sourced from Hydrocarbon Gas Liquids (HGLs), derived from natural gas, are turned into plastic pellets, or nurdles, which are the raw material of finished plastics. The United States is currently undergoing a so-called ‘Resin Boom’, with manufacturers daily producing trillions of the lentil sized pellets, which are mostly shipped to Asia. Pellet ‘loss’, in production and shipping, is now a major source of global plastic pollution. Nurdles, likely to be found in their hundreds on the beach nearest you, are but the latest reification of our plundering of the earth’s subterranean store of hydrocarbons.

Peat, a coal precursor, formed by decayed organic material lying close to the Earth’s surface and partially digested in acidic and anaerobic peatland ecosystems, has been harvested as a fossil fuel since the human discovery of fire. The unlikelihood of a flammable square of turf cut from a bog, was, much later, matched by the discovery of sedimentary rocks that would burn. Coal then become the first hydrocarbon to be mined, and its use as a fuel dates back at least three millennia to China. In Europe, it was used by the Romans to heat, among other things, the water in their elaborate bathing facilities. Today, a large part of its historical notoriety is linked to it fueling, in a very literal sense, Europe’s Industrial Revolution.

From the beginning, fossil fuels have been sought out as alternative sources of energy to less tractable resources. Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century, site-specific water mills were replaced by coal-powered steam engines that could be located in areas of cheap labor, and lamp-oil sourced from whale carcasses was replaced by oil distilled from petroleum. The first widely used plastic was celluloid, which used plant-based polymers. Polymers are large molecules made up of long chains of smaller molecules called monomers. They provide the strength and flexibility, or plasticity, inherent in the cellulose that makes up the cell walls of plants. These natural polymers are also found in hair, silk and DNA.

It was the polymers present in hydrocarbons, however, that held the promise, at the start of the twentieth century, of a vast world of plastics. The first to be made, in 1907, was Bakelite, from coal tar, and was initially designed to replace shellac, sourced from Asian beetles, and used in electrical insulation. It was quickly developed as a key material in the burgeoning consumer goods market, used to encase radios, telephones and clocks, and made into housewares and jewelry.

In 1920, Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) established the first steam-cracking plant, in West Virginia, specifically to produce ethylene, a short polymer petrochemical with a wide range of industrial applications, but none as epochal as the production of polyethylene. Still dominated by Bakelite, the plastics industry was slow to respond. After 1929, development was constrained by the Depression, but Wallace Carothers, working for Du Pont, developed an artificial rubber, neoprene, in 1931, and nylon in 1938 – both of which were militarily significant materials. Consequently, the production of plastic metastasized during World War II.  Fueled by the post-war economic boom and an excess of production capacity, it quickly became the preeminent material in consumer products, clothing, packing materials and food storage.

Swept up in the ‘Great Acceleration’ - the post-war decades of excessive consumption, extravagant leaps in technology, profligate waste and CO2 emissions - this consummate material of modern materialism birthed Global Plastic, a circumstance in which, like Global Warming, we, and all other beings, now live and breathe. The Earth’s atmosphere had become a dumping ground for its greenhouse gases and its oceans a sink hole for its discarded plastics.

The evidence mounts of the apocalyptic significance of Global Plastic. As an acknowledged endocrine disruptor, the material penetrates creatures through their skin, in the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food that they ingest. Yet, the devastating consequences of a material that refuses to decompose, is recalcitrant in all attempts to recycle it (90.5% goes unrecycled, world-wide), is being produced in ever increasing quantities, and in its discarded after-life threatens to colonize the lands and oceans of the planet, remains overshadowed by that enclosing cloud of upper atmosphere CO2, which is, to coin a phrase, sucking all the oxygen out of the room. For now, Global Warming dwarfs the perceived exigencies of Global Plastic. All the while, the production of plastic, from hydrocarbon to finished material, contributes greatly to global CO2 emissions and is expected to reach 17% of the global carbon budget by 2050.

Those in the business of proclaiming ecological disaster have a professional interest in assuring their audience that there is still hope amidst the encyclopedic evidence they present to the contrary; that change can occur without radically re-thinking the world and our place within it; that state sanctioned planetary predation, of which the subterranean extraction of hydrocarbons is but a part, can continue without fatally compromising the  viability of the world. Greta Thunberg speaks her dark and eerie truth to power, uncompromisingly pure in her walking of her talk. But the single-minded focus on CO2 emissions, that she and others profess, has shaped our concerns for the environment so that the clearly observable anthropogenic changes to the climate have become the dominant trope in our visions of the apocalypse. The terrestrial threat of a planet wrapped in plastic waste, sourced from the same hydrocarbon plunder that generates CO2, has been slow to infiltrate our primal fears for the survival, in recognizable form, of the earth’s natural systems.

It is now apparent that our failure to maintain a sustainable, naturally regenerating environment which we share with all other human and extra-human beings is the result of a systemic flaw in the way we have organized our hegemonic, first world, human-privileging societies. It is not just the extinctions and the loss of wild-life habitat for those species that remain; the ubiquity of plastic waste on land and sea; the micro-plastics in our bodies, our water, and the micro-fibers in the wind; the ever-rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere; the fires, the rising sea-levels, the pollution, and the droughts and other consequences of extreme weather. These are but the symptoms of a profound misunderstanding of our place in the world.

It is a misunderstanding that has as its consequence the widely touted prediction that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the world’s oceans, by weight, than fish.

It is a misunderstanding that has as its consequence seeds, plants and animals washing up on shores where they are not native by inadvertently riding the oceans currents on windblown aggregations, or rafts, of plastic waste and devastating the finely balanced ecosystems where they land.

It is a misunderstanding that has as its consequence the clear plastic bag which strangles birds, asphyxiates small children and is mistaken for food by marine life, while being freely dispensed at your local Farmers Market to be filled with organically grown fruits and vegetables.

It is a misunderstanding that has resulted in the choking of the San Francisco Bay with micro-plastics generated from plastic waste made brittle by the sun and then abraded by wind and tides, and from rubber and neoprene marbles thrown off by tires on the twisting, vertiginous streets that surround the bay. 

It is a misunderstanding that has created the vast garbage patch of plastic waste in the North Pacific Gyre between California and the Hawaiian Islands where discarded drift nets, called ghostnets, and other commercial fishing gear, swirl amidst the microplastic soup.

It is a misunderstanding that has as its basis the intellectual separation of Nature and Society. The seeds of this toxic binary were planted over five hundred years ago and now, grown vast and enveloping, it is a construct that poisons the way of being in the world for all those who live under the sway of modernity.

Jason W. Moore, in Capitalism in the Web of Life, Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, 2015, notes that the “New modes of knowledge, bookended by Copernicus and Newton (c. 1470s – 1720s) …unfolded within a historical project that aimed at making nature external – the better that it could be subordinated and rationalized, its bounty extracted, in service to capital and empire.” This new way of being in the world emerged out of the decline of feudalism - that reasonably communitarian system that ensured some level of cooperation between lord and peasant, and they with the land on which both depended. This relationship, which lasted in Europe from the ninth century to the fourteenth, limited environmental devastation despite a slowly rising population in the Medieval Warm Period, 950 – 1250. But escalating class struggles, intensified warfare and cultural destabilization slowly eroded feudalism, its decay exacerbated by the Black Death, 1347-1352, which killed a third of the population. In the fifteenth century, Europe’s slow expansion of its frontiers beyond its continental landmass profoundly impacted the old comity and after the discovery of the Americas, in 1492, it was fatally wounded.

As Moore reports, “By the end of the sixteenth century, a tipping point had been reached – a new ethic developed that sanctioned the exploitation of Nature.” This was confirmed by Francis Bacon’s establishment of the empirical scientific method, and later by the Cartesian charge that mankind, “…make ourselves, as it were, the masters and possessors of nature”. Thus, was born a materialism based on a scientific and economic rationalism that demanded the separation of humans from the rest of the natural world. Successive waves of imperialism greatly expanded the territory on which this freshly sanctioned predation could occur, and fueled agricultural and industrial revolutions which, in turn, enabled vastly increased through-puts of labor, food, energy and raw materials. It was in this matrix that the institution of slavery could be considered rational and that later, the vastly expanded extraction of fossil fuels, after the invention of the steam engine, would become inevitable. Both events are inextricably linked with the contemporary development of capitalism.

Moore points out that what he terms ‘bio-prospecting’, has been practiced from Columbus to Monsanto and Exxon. These activities are typically supported by states in pursuit, in his lexicon, of ‘geo-power’, the control of natural resources that bolster their economic strength. It is in this pursuit that the United States has expended vast amounts of treasure to protect American oil interests in the Middle East, and vast sums, too, in the development of technologies to access this country’s unconventional oil and gas reserves.

The plastic pellets produced from HGLs have made the production of natural gas a new focus of the U.S. oil and gas industry and is helping sustain the boom in fracking. Seventy percent of U.S. natural gas is now fracked from shale deposits such as the Marcellus formations beneath Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania along with the Permian, Woodford, Barnett, and Eagle-Ford formations in Texas, as well as North Dakota’s Bakken shales. The Monterey formation that runs down the spine of California, from Sacramento to Los Angeles, holds two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil and gas reserves. It has, thus far, been saved from extensive fracking by its complex geology, local activism and the fact that much of it is under the state’s prime agricultural land. But the Monterey shale, and other unexploited formations, remain forever vulnerable to advances in extraction technology and increased demand.

The boom in fracking would not have been possible without new computer-controlled drilling and ballistics technologies, together with innovative chemical formulations, developed with the financial assistance of the U.S. Department of Energy. The state has, in effect, joint-ventured with private enterprise in plundering the shale that lies beneath the United States. This plunder is founded, as Moore and others show, on debasing the value of the natural world. It represents a strategy of terrestrial violence that asserts our dominion over the planet. The value of leaving hydrocarbons in the ground now, gold and silver back in the day, or of leaving the rich biodiversity of the prairies untouched, is, and always has been, discounted to zero, except by the continent’s pre-modern indigenous peoples.

The genocidal impact of colonial exploitation, beginning late in the fifteenth century, is widely understood as a fundamental part of the history of the Americas - but the blowback that impacted its imperial perpetrators, while less often considered, was not inconsequential. The importation of vast quantities of precious metals into Spain and Portugal resulted in a massive financial inflation that led directly to several centuries of economic immiseration on the Iberian Peninsula. The blowback from the mining of hydrocarbons is global, and we are beginning to understand that it extends, in this country, beyond the well-documented impacts of the production and burning of fossil fuels. It extends to the fracking, cracking and polymerization of HGLs, which are responsible for significantly adding to the global supply of plastic pellets, and, in turn, for the waste generated by finished plastic products.

While colonialism always relied on the development of new technologies appropriate to transportation, food production, social controls and the building of urban settlements, computerized control systems have now vastly expanded the range and impact of humankind’s predation. Moore notes that “At the core of the capitalist project, from its sixteenth century origin, was the scientific and symbolic creation of nature in its modern form, as something that could be mapped, abstracted, quantified, and otherwise subject to linear control.” Computer-controlled fracking operations serve as the apotheosis of this concept, enabling the economically efficient extraction of natural gas from shale and similarly facilitating the production of plastic pellets.

Over 300 new plastic production facilities are currently proposed in the U.S. A giant plant is planned by Royal Dutch Shell for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but it is the Gulf Coast from Houston to New Orleans and up the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge that is currently ground zero of the massive congeries of industrial infrastructure devoted to the processing of the fracked HGLs into synthetic polymers. The distillates run directly from the shale fracking fields through pipelines that riddle the eastern two-thirds of the United States, and through the Cochin pipeline which snakes north to Alberta, Canada. They travel to coastal processing plants, where they are ‘fractionated’ to separate the ethane, propane, and butane. The separated gas liquids are then pipelined to other facilities nearby, where they are polymerized (the process of forming polymer chains) and turned into plastic resin pellets. Packed in 55lb. bags the nurdles fit comfortably, beanbag like, into forty-foot shipping containers. Typically shipped directly from the Gulf ports to Singapore, they are then transshipped to other Asian destinations. Finished plastic goods then return from those same destinations, often in the same containers, to the U.S. market.

Annual consumption of the pellets is projected to double in the next decade to over half a billion tons, and production capacity continues to grow in the petrochemical industrial ghettos of Texas and Louisiana. Here, they are interspersed with prototypical, mostly black and brown, frontline communities, in areas vulnerable to flooding and rising sea-levels, where toxins lie heavy in the air and vicious colloidal dispersions paint rainbows on the streets. These are the quintessential environments of slow violence, in which the early-twentieth century chemical engineering triumphs of Union Carbide are substantiated on a massive scale, and where the poor and middle classes are oppressed by the rabid feeding of nurdles into Global Plastic’s supply chain.

Like Global Warming, Global Plastic is a planetary phenomenon, but the U.S. has an outsized responsibility for both. While the emergence of capital accumulation driven by fossil fuels first occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the British Isles amidst Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’, America’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions in the twentieth was realized both in the metrics of its oil production and in the grotesque levels of consumption to which the rest of the world, then and now, aspires. While the U.S. is no longer the primary global source of greenhouse gas emissions, it has taught the world well, and is now eclipsed by those regions that have fallen under the pall of its cultural influence.

Crude oil production in the U.S. reached a peak around 1970 of ten million barrels a day. It then suffered a precipitous decline before flat lining until 2008, when the shale fracking revolution radically increased this country’s hydrocarbon output. Since 2014, it has been the world’s largest hydrocarbon producer, outstripping its nearest competitors, Russia and Saudi Arabia. As a part of this expansion, the U.S. now produces more than 20% of the world’s plastic, and its production continues to increase fueled by ever cheaper fracked natural gas.

Perhaps the greatest damage that America has wrought, in terms of planetary degradation, is in its vast media outreach that has consistently advertised a high-consumption lifestyle. That consumption now comes wrapped in, or is largely made of plastic, and often both. Packaging consumes from between 35% – 45% of the global production of synthetic polymers; construction another 16%; textiles 15%; and transportation and electronics a further 10%. Plastic is essential, at this moment, in the packaging of our food, the building of our shelter, the production of our clothing, computers, telecommunications and transport, and in our healthcare where wellness is dispensed in plastic vials, IV bags, tubes and syringes; our sundered vitals sewn with nylon thread.  We are surrounded by the corporeal presence of plastic. Buck Henry’s line from the 1967 film, ‘The Graduate’, spoken by a middle-aged wanna-be career coach, to the eponymous young man, played by Dustin Hoffman, “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.” is a nostrum, although eschewed by Hoffman’s character, that has now been heeded around the world.

Geographic particularism is irrelevant when considering phenomena which are truly global. Global Plastic is a toxic emanation that enfolds the earth. While it is the direct result of the exploitation of a widely dispersed fossil biomass, the U.S.A. remains the avatar of those societies of mass-consumption and a throw-away ethos in which its plastic end-products are now so pervasive.

Given the time it takes to biodegrade: In the End, there will be plastic. Even if production were to stop today it would still be with us in the fourth millennium. The legacy of the modern world of, let us say, the last five hundred years, is a warming atmosphere preternaturally laden with CO2; a planet with a plastic bestrewn surface, plastic saturated seas, and with winds, waves, rocks and tides grinding brightly colored polymers into toxic grains, fated to be embedded in the geologic layers of the Anthropocene.

It is a legacy based on the manipulation of those looted hydrocarbons, created in ages past and now, in the modern world, transformed into multiple agents of biospheric destruction. This tragic inheritance is founded on a misunderstanding of our place in the world - a misunderstanding that now, perhaps, with its consequences fully apparent, we are beginning to comprehend.

The Real Megxit Deal

In a move that reflects the time-worn pathologies of powerful aristocratic families, the House of Windsor has agreed to allow the Queen’s grandson, Harry, currently sixth in line to the throne, and his California-born wife, Meghan, to leave the family business (The Firm) and attempt to establish independent lives in Canada, a former colony which remains a member of the British Commonwealth. This represents their exile from the territorial, ceremonial, financial, and emotional heart of the royal family.

The gimcrack contrivance of the constitutionally constrained modern royal family was immediately apparent upon its founding in the late seventeenth century. During a century of revolutions, the territories of England, Ireland and Scotland briefly cohered as a republic from 1649 to 1660 under Oliver Cromwell, following the execution of King Charles I. Subsequently threatened by a royal line devoted to Catholicism with the birth of a male heir to James II, the ruling class imported a foreign, but suitably Protestant, monarch, William of Orange, in what has been called the ‘Glorious Revolution’, 1688.  This line ran out in 1714 with death of Queen Anne (memorably portrayed by Olivia Coleman in the film, The Favorite) who had no surviving children. Despite the efforts of James II’s son, the Catholic James Stuart (The Old Pretender), Anne’s second cousin, George, Elector of the tiny German state of Hanover, assumed the throne, ensuring a Protestant king. The Hanoverian dynasty has proved fecund. Its offspring continue to maintain the royal line, although the House of Hanover has been known, since the First World War, as the House of Windsor - a re-branding that attempted the concealment of its German ancestry.

The idea of the nation, an area of territorial coherence marked by shared ethnicity, language and culture, developed out of the perceived need for states to enshrine their permanence. Britain was first in embracing this modern notion by creating its parliamentary democracy (of sorts) under the aegis of the monarchy, in order to bring a sense of ageless political, cultural and historical inevitability to a fractured group of North Sea islands. That this conceit has survived into the twenty-first century is remarkable, but the defection of Harry and Meghan exposes its fragility at a time when Brexit presumably requires a revived sense of purpose, with the nation about to be cut loose from the European Union. It calls into question the family’s purpose beyond its existence as providers of fresh, tabloid-ready, globally enabled, sometimes salacious, occasionally tragic and consistently sentimental content.

Tom Nairn makes the point, in his dyspeptic study of the British Monarchy, The Enchanted Glass, 2011, that the royal family has often functioned as a conservative counterweight to British radicalism.  He suggests that it has been encouraged by the ruling elite to generate sufficient and timely pageantry, bonhomie and noblesse oblige, in the celebration of the family’s births and marriages, in the lachrymose mourning of its deaths and in its tireless patronage of worthy causes in order to paper over the gross injustices evident in British society. Harry and Meghan dutifully played their part in this long-running production which Queen Elizabeth II continues to oversee as an aging but still stately showrunner. Their defection has resulted in the loss of The Firm’s brightest stars while simultaneously creating the kind of diversionary furor which is the family’s stock-in-trade.

Larger questions arise however, in consideration of the connective tissue (mostly composed of falsehoods) that binds nations together in the current age of information –the transmission of which is controlled not by individuals, states or royal families, but by the likes of Google, Facebook, WeChat and YouTube. Meghan and Harry have discovered that they cannot control the nature of their celebrity when it is disseminated by what McKenzie Wark, in Capital is Dead, is this Something Worse, 2019, calls ‘vectors of information’ under the command of an all-powerful ‘vectoralist class’ -  the elite global coterie lorded over by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and old-school media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch (whose News Corp retains ownership of the British tabloid, The Sun). These new supra-capitalists “own or control the brands and celebrities that galvanize attention”. To the extent that ‘Sussex Royals’, the couples intended lifestyle and charitable brand, is a success, Meghan and Harry will remain victims of the same powers that, Harry believes, killed his mother, Princess Diana, and are currently intent on ‘destroying’ Meghan.

Zoe Williams writes sympathetically of Meghan in The Guardian, (traditionally a broadsheet not a tabloid),

“She has become a battlefield in a culture war. Something for Piers Morgan to sound off about, a vegan sausage roll in human form. It is a fantastically unenviable position to be in, but it is also one in which she could not have stayed neutral without being trampled to dust. Silence in the face of this would not have been dignified: it is both courageous and vital to object to it, whatever the cost.”

Princess Diana, Harry’s mother, was travelling in a dimly lit tunnel in Paris, attempting to escape a swarm of chasing paparazzi, when her chauffeur-driven Mercedes crashed and burnt, killing her, her partner, Dodi Fayed, and its driver instantly. In Britain, tabloid journalists are rabid in their pursuit of Royalty: it is a high stakes game that has frequently struck at the heart of the family. Elizabeth II has suffered not only the death of Charles’ ex-wife in 1997 but was earlier witness to the dissolution of her sister Margaret’s life, barred by Royal protocol from marrying the love of her life, the divorced Peter Townsend.  Margaret’s subsequent marriage to Anthony Armstrong Jones in 1960, her divorce, and several celebrity affairs were all conducted under the withering glare of a viciously sanctimonious British press. More recently, her third son Andrew has been ensnared in the sordid unraveling of the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking ring. Much of the British public takes great joy in the travails of the nation’s most privileged family while simultaneously reveling in the pseudo traditions and ceremonies that the royal family gamely continues to produce and star in amidst, what for most members of the clan, is the wreckage of their personal lives.

Theirs is, quite literally, a noble cause – the stifling of overt class dissent, forever bubbling beneath the surface of British society. They are the proud producers of an on-going soap that validates Britain and its cruel inequities by parading the family as living exemplars of the privileges of aristocracy whilst remaining ‘relatable’. The tabloids attempt the family’s subversion at every turn, as faithful recorders of its instances of moral turpitude, peccadilloes, and lapses of protocol. Yet they remain pathetically sycophantic come a royal birth or marriage.

Enthralled by freshets of free entertainment enabled by personal electronic devices, and the increasing availability of cheap consumer goods brought directly to one’s attention by those self-same devices, we exist in a perfect storm of twenty-first century bread and circuses - supine in the face of the social and democratic collapses that fester under such conditions of popular disinterest, inattention and apathy.

Royalty, heads of state, captains of industry, sports and entertainment stars offer up their lives in service to the insatiable maw of those who trade information for the privilege of exposing consumers to targeted advertising. They are but the tip of the pyramid, the base of which consists of all those who contribute cat videos, personal vignettes and the like to social media. Goods routed to consumers, along global supply routes and hub and spoke distribution networks, do so only upon the initial capture of their consumers’ attention on, most often, the tiny screens of their devices. (The actual production of those goods remains largely hidden from their consumers eyes, spread across the planet, most often in areas of poverty-wages, pollution and environmental vulnerability). 

While the British royal family have traditionally fulfilled a leading role in the making of a state mythology, its function in the weaving of a plausible national tapestry is now challenged by self-curated ‘news’ streams that daily create personalized, pixilated visions of national coherence.  The family’s unique ownership of ‘pomp and circumstance’ remains a significant attribute, but one must question whether a nation nominally ruled by Boris Johnson really needs the staid back drop of traditional royal ceremony. As Lord Mayor of London, he was quite capable of creating a phantasmagoria of Britishness at the opening of the 2012 Olympics. The Queen, The Firm’s leading lady, you will recall, had a bit part in this production alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond. Donald Trump, who is about to begin his fourth season as the show-runner for Make America Great Again, has no need of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, to validate his show – he is content with a mythic past that does not reach back much farther than the 1950’s.

Harry and Meghan have most likely consigned themselves to a lifestyle of the demi-monde, a twilight of insignificance as royal exiles in the sad tradition of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson – those seminal arbiters of louche style and unfortunate political alliances. They do so at a moment when the relevance of the British royal family, never a very stable construct, is increasingly in question.

Bad Planet

Australia is an island continent composed of a vast treeless desert edged with a fringe of heavily urbanized temperate bush where the fierce heat of the land is moderated by onshore ocean breezes from the Pacific to the East and the Indian Ocean to the West. Now, areas of this temperate fringe are aflame as hot desert winds fan bush fires amidst a record series of early-summer heat waves. A world audience watches in horror as news reaches them framed in terms of houses destroyed, lives lost, koalas scorched and kookaburras that no longer sing in the oppressive heat. Greta tweets,

“Not even catastrophes like these seem to bring any political action. How is this possible?”

But it is indeed possible, probable, and arguably even inevitable because the climate crisis, née global warming, is embedded in a mostly white, liberal, humanist civilization whose peoples, at least since the middle of the fifteenth century, have privileged the appropriation of land, labor and geological resources over an ecological accommodation of the rest of the planet. It is this ideology, rooted in capital accumulation, that now manifests as extreme weather events. Their remediation requires not just political action, but an almost unimaginable civilizational reboot. We refuse to make this leap because making it threatens the accustomed terms of our existence.

Despite conventional green-wisdom, and Greta’s urging, changing our predominant energy source to real-time solar, wind, photovoltaic, and hydro from the harvesting of prehistoric, subterranean stores of fossil biomass does not change the underlying modes of subjugation practiced by the capitalist class hell bent on resource extraction. Alternative energy sources promote an extension of appropriation – the seizure of cobalt and lithium, for instance, in addition to the continued extraction of coal and oil.  Having reached the ends of the earth, the territory of depredation is, even now, being technologically extended to the seabed where polymetallic nodules await harvesting deep beneath the world’s oceans to provide copper, manganese, nickel and cobalt –all elements essential to the chimera of new ‘clean’, ‘renewable’ energy. Can we doubt the extractive implications of state-sponsored and commercial space exploration?

The climate action agendas proposed or enacted across the planet, including the Green New Deal, represent opportunities to replace, and potentially to expand energy use – and thus to expand the despoliation of ecosystems, human culture, communities and individual lives. They will do so by continuing to feed the algorithms of acquisition and over-consumption (by some) that Timothy Morton, Jared Diamond and other thinkers source to the beginnings of agriculture.

Kathryn Yusoff, a professor at the University of London, uses the construct of the Anthropocene to frame her critique of colonialism and slavery in service to capital accumulation. In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2019, published on-demand by the University of Minnesota Press, its small pages packed with academic prose, she writes, “The solutions and the proposals are all about the continuance of the current stain of inequality, powered by other means in a future that continues to privilege the privileged. The Anthropocene is the white man’s over-burden.”

She makes the argument that until the global North stops oppressing the global South, in the historic and present binary of a white bourgeoisie subjugating black and brown people in order to extract an economic surplus, there can be no profound healing of the ills that plague the planet. She suggests a response to the climate crisis, more subtly phrased than ‘civilizational reboot’, but with a similar impulse, when she chides her readers “to think about encountering the coming storm in ways that do not facilitate its permanent renewal”. Artfully couched, her words barely conceal the radicalism required by their premise.

A response to a problematic framed by millennia can usefully be built around the armature of the Anthropocene, which demarks the onset of a planetary epoch characterized by human production, rather than the cyclical, deep time, geological impacts that have hitherto served to delineate them. The new construct demands an investigation into its ideological underpinnings. Yusoff establishes a baseline of enquiry by suggesting that, “The Earth is massively geo-engineered, that may be what the word Anthropocene actually means.” She points out that the European program of geologic appropriation, initially and most egregiously exercised in the Americas, was achieved by the enslavement of Africans and indigenous peoples. Slavery, she writes, “…weaponized the redistribution of energy around the globe through the flesh of black bodies”. It is those bodies that, “began the work of the accumulations and which have now coalesced as the Anthropocene as an expression of geotrauma.”

She further argues that the coal mined in Britain during the nineteenth century and used to fuel that country’s industrial revolution, often cited as the proximate cause of anthropogenic global warming, was mined by men inured to their task by the pre-eminent colonial drug crop of sugar, first harvested by slave labor starting in Madeira in the middle of the fifteenth century, and later in the Americas. Tea and tobacco, produced by black and brown field workers in conditions that varied from slavery to serfdom, are similarly implicated in the bio-chemical support of the drudgery endured by Britain’s industrial working class, and thus in the creation of deleterious climate impacts. But she notes that, “While Blackness is the energy and flesh of the Anthropocene, it is excluded from the wealth of its accumulation. Rather Blackness must absorb the excess of that surplus as toxicity, pollution, and the intensification of the storm. Again, and again.”

In the United States, slavery was embraced (until it wasn’t) by white liberal society as the cost of doing business. In the event, Jim Crow ensured a continuation of the subjugation of black bodies, their humanity nullified, based not on the overt cruelties of slavery but on the implicit degradations of racism. Today, we live with that legacy, which runs deep in the minds and bodies of Americans. We live in a materiality that is often wrought by black and brown bodies, their work shadowed in the mined mineralogy of our land and oceans, the production of our farmlands, and the infrastructures of our industries and transportation systems. Prison labor and inmate fire-fighters are but the most visible evidence of an exclusionary humanism that, as Yusoff suggests, “Renders Blackness always belated in time and therefore never fully now and human”.

The precise calendrics of the golden spike, the marker that delineates the beginning of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch, remain highly contested. The invention of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century, the onset of the British Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the Atomic Age, located in the mid-twentieth century, have all attracted support. Yusoff emphatically states that, “The Anthropocene is a project initiated and executed through anti-Blackness and inhuman subjective modes, from 1492 to the present.” Columbus worked to bring African slaves to the Portuguese sugar plantations on Madeira before voyaging to the Americas and initiating the enslavement of its indigenous peoples. He thus arrived in the New World well practiced in the colonial arts of appropriation and subjugation.

 The 1619 Project published in The New York Times, August 18, 2019, attempts to establish the arrival of more than twenty enslaved Africans, subsequently sold to the Virginia colonists - four hundred years ago - as the true foundation of this country. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who inspired the project, declares, “America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.”

Whether the choice is 1492 or 1619, the territory we now call the United States is deeply implicated in the entwined histories of slavery and the Anthropocene. Yusoff demonstrates that the geological construct is as much the product of a billion nameless black and brown bodies subjugated by white Europeans as it is of the time-stamped deployment of innovative technologies. Slavery in America can be seen as a strange, bio-mechanical conflation of the two: historian Edward Baptist makes the point that it was the ‘whipping machine’, methodically operated by white overseers, that drove the productivity of the plantations in the southern states. While the natality of both the Anthropocene and ‘the idea of America’ remain contested, it is now abundantly clear that the colonial project that began in the Americas in 1492 substantiated a modernity based on the appropriation of land, labor, and geological resources  in service to capital accumulation. It made a world that must now end, if, as Yusoff writes, “another relation to the earth can begin”.

As Australia burns, and Greta fulminates, it is the dark histories of race, subjugation and violent appropriation that must be reconciled before we can begin the work of repairing the planet. David Hammons, the New York and Los Angeles artist, notes in an interview with Calvin Tompkins, published in the December 9, 2019, New Yorker, that, “Trump is the truth about America, because America has been like this forever. White people haven’t seen it, but we have.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones and Kathryn Yusoff may differ on the precise meaning of Hammons’ ‘forever’, but along with the artist, they are all agreed that America is held hostage by its underlying racism. A resolution of the exclusionary practices of white liberal humanism is fundamental to the solving of America’s and the World’s climate crisis – unless we adopt Hammons’ nihilistic fatalism expressed in his subsequent remark that,

“You know, the reason we never see aliens is that everyone in the galaxy knows that this planet is a bad planet. They all know to stay away.”

We do not have that choice.

The Green New Deal and Accursed Wealth

Accursed Wealth! O’er bounding human laws,

Of every evil thou remains’t the cause:

Victims of want, those wretches such as me,

Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee:

Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed,

And thine our loss of labour and of bread.

Al Gore missed this memo, written at some time between 1809 and 1813, by the poet John Clare in Norhamptonshire, England. However, in his latest op-ed, It’s Not too Late – The climate crisis is the battle of our time and we can win, in the New York Times, September 22, 2019, the former Vice President helpfully notes that the fastest-growing occupation in the United States is solar installer and the second fastest-growing is wind turbine service technician. The loss of Clare’s world is un-remediated. The loss of our world, apparently, is salved by the growth of mostly low-wage ‘green-tech’ jobs. Clare, at least, identifies the cause of his loss – Accursed Wealth, or, as we might call it today, capitalism.

Gore, in his best, ever youthful, Gee-Wiz journalese proclaims that, “…we are in the early stages of a sustainable revolution that will achieve the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution and the speed of the digital revolution, made possible by new digital tools”. John Clare’s erstwhile bucolic freedom had been proscribed by the British parliament’s Enclosure Acts early in the nineteenth century, under which he lost his rights to the common lands that were seized for the benefit of proto-capitalist land-owners newly cognizant of the wealth generated by grazing sheep. Wool, like cotton, was a fiber fundamental to the modern capitalist ethos whereby the acquisition of wealth transcended the interests of both humanity and the natural world.

There is, it must be admitted, something quite wonderful about wearing a sweater knitted for one by someone near-and-dear, of hand spun wool.  Similarly, there is enormous gratification in living in a house that produces all its power needs through panels attached to its roof; but we should not for a moment imagine that wool and photovoltaics, despite their benign potential, are not grist to the capitalist mill. As Clare recognized over two hundred years ago, ‘Accursed Wealth’ had overtrodden human laws. As many understand today, capitalism is the financial system that while it seemingly underpins our entire civilization and is responsible for many of its most alluring aspects, has also fatally wounded what Earth-system scientists understand as a coupled human-natural order.

After two hundred years or more of extravagant exploitation, it is getting increasingly difficult, as Jason W. Moore writes in Capitalism in the Web of Life, 2015, “to get  nature, including human nature, to yield its ‘free gifts’ on the cheap” -  be they land for grazing sheep or producing the rare earth elements  such as indium and tellurium, used in photovoltaics.

Gore is an unrepentant capitalist, eager to put nature to work in new and different ways. An exploitative capitalism is similarly baked into the Green New Deal (Resolution 109 of the 116th Congress). While the Resolution promotes “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era”, and resolves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through “economic transformation”, it remains premised on the same economic model that sparked the Industrial Revolution. It is this economic model, however dressed in green vestments, that now ravages the planet with for-profit industrial, commercial and institutional development, as well as connective and energy infrastructure – all of which feed on labor and resources brutishly extracted from the earth, albeit with sophisticated electronic assists.

Resolution 109 further notes that climate change, pollution and environmental destruction have exacerbated the ‘systemic injustices’ which afflict ‘frontline and vulnerable communities’. In response, the Green New Deal is charged with creating millions of high-paying jobs, unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security which will counteract systemic injustice. How will this be achieved? By a combination of federal and state incentives to individuals and businesses resolved to fix the problems within the same old economic parameters.  The United States will achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions, create new ‘green’ jobs, invest in infrastructure and secure clean air and water, promote climate and community resilience and ensure ‘access to nature’ and a sustainable environment within an economic ideology that presumes a supine natural world, that as Moore notes, “has sustained capital accumulation over the past five centuries”.

Given this failure to imagine epochal change it’s all too plausible to conjure a future incarnation of Sarah Palin decrying, at some point during the program’s projected ten-year mobilization, “How’s that Green New Dealy thang going for yah?”

On reading Al Gore’s hopelessly Pollyannaish and wrong-headed op-ed, I was emboldened to return to his seminal work, Earth in the Balance – Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992. Maybe ‘return’ is too strong a word. Full disclosure - although the hardback book had sat on my classroom shelves in the room where I taught ‘Green World History’ to 10th graders in the mid ‘90’s, I had never gotten much further than the blurbs on the back cover by the redoubtable, Bill Moyers, M. Scott Peck and Carl Sagan. Having now read it, I realize that although Al Gore may not have invented the internet, he can certainly lay claim to a good portion of the intellectual authorship of the Green New Deal.

Earth in the Balance rose to number four and remained in the top ten of the New Times Non-Fiction Best Seller List for almost six months after its publication in June 1992.  But it was, I suspect, a book much purchased, and little read. Resolution 109 has the virtue of brevity - but in many respects, it ploughs the same ground. Gore’s exposition of the ills that plague the planet is admirable: melting icecaps, methane release in thawing tundra, desertification, deforestation, species extinction, a prediction of on-going increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causing “catastrophic changes in global climate patterns”, loss of wetlands, the privatization of seed genetics and the loss of germplasm resources in wild refuges threatened by development, atmospheric pollution, toxic waste, the plethora of plastics, and methane production from garbage dumps – it is all there. In short, he claims we are “bulldozing the Garden of Eden”. However, as Timothy Morton might suggest, whatever its veracity, it is also horseshoe-in-a-boxing-glove propaganda, and like most tomes dedicated to the ecological apocalypse, its impact can be relied upon to be in inverse proportion to the gloom of its dystopian vision. Nonetheless, it is an encyclopedic review of the most pressing environmental issues, extant early 1990’s, and is important in its recognition of the “intricate and interdependent web of life” in which both humans and non-human species are entwined.

His solution to the planet’s dilemma covered in the last one hundred pages of the book is the development of a ‘Common Purpose’ which makes “the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization”. He proposes ‘A Global Marshall Plan’ which will contain five strategic goals: stabilizing world population; development of environmentally appropriate technologies; economic ‘rules of the road’ under which the ecological consequences of production are reflected in the market place; international agreements that will ensure the success of the scheme; and the establishment of a cooperative plan for educating the world’s citizens about our global environment.  

In Gore’s vision, the United States will take the lead and primary financial burden in attaining the goals of this ambitious project – with the success of which, if you will allow a moment of extreme understatement, the last twenty-seven years has not dealt kindly. Do we have any reasonable hope that the next decade will prove more receptive of the Green New Deal?

Moore suggests that the theoretical separation of mind and body promoted by Descartes, was shadowed by the similar binary of Society and Nature. It was these foundational intellectual presumptions of Modernity, he suggests, that allowed for, “the exploitation of labor-power and the appropriation of nature” which led to the half-a-millennium drive towards capitalist commodification, now manifested in a planetary crisis. The Green New Deal, like its antecedent, Gore’s ‘Global Marshall Plan’, will create barely a bump along this road to perdition.

Considering global warming, Moore writes, “…the appropriation of Cheap Nature has not only compelled capital to seek out new sources of cheap labor-power, food energy, and raw materials, but to ‘enclose’ the atmosphere as a gigantic dumping ground for greenhouse gases”. This is perhaps, to turn on a word, the new ‘Enclosure Movement’, accidentally engineered as a convenience to capitalism and as dramatic in consequence to our daily freedoms as the eponymous nineteenth century movement that foreclosed the options of young John Clare, the poet, along with millions of others throughout the British Isles. In its new guise, it is foreclosing the future of billions.

It was the ideas of Descartes and Bacon that created a space, in the early seventeenth century, for a scientifically founded modernity. The climate emergency - the planetary crisis - now demands, not a Green New Deal which recycles Gore’s still-born ‘Global Marshall Plan’, but the attempted closure of modernity through a complementary revolution in thought – an intellectual foment capable of turning back the rapacious appetites of capitalism.

The Four Storms of the Apocalypse: Katrina, Sandy, Maria and Dorian.

The history of the United States remains shrouded in the fog of myth and overlain by the mists of time. Here in the stygian gloom, its founding looms as the triumph of freedom over tyranny; its slaveholding the reasonable exploitation of an inferior race; its civil war the singular triumph of a great president; its period of reconstruction proof that former slaves were not ready to take their place in the country’s democratic institutions; and in Jim Crow a return to the natural order. Here, the great wealth of this country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is viewed as the result of American entrepreneurial genius and technical wizardry rather than its founding on the flagellated backs of African slaves.

Out of this venerable gloom, the Roaring Twenties shimmer as the best of times; the Great Depression rises up as a proving ground for the spirit and resourcefulness of the white population in tough times; the New Deal is established as the benevolent assurance of universal welfare; and, after Japan’s dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor, American industrial might and its greatest generation appear as the sole reason for the Allied victory in WWII. Its economic boom after the war is visible as the just fruit of that victory; its wars in Korea and Vietnam limned as vital to maintaining its freedom; its bestowal of Civil Rights upon African Americans faint proof of this country’s generosity and inclusivity.

Even in the obscuring miasma of the fog of (cold) war, the fall of the Soviet Union is seen as the result, once more, of America’s freedom triumphing over tyranny; financial deregulation and globalization (and their corollary of devastating ‘structural adjustments’) appear as a beneficent effort to spread prosperity to all; the vision of the 9/11 attack by the dark forces of Islamic extremism is brightly etched; the nation’s response coruscates as a bloody crusade undertaken across the Middle East, Asia and Africa to rout the terrorists and preserve the sanctity and freedom of our Christian homeland.  Now, when myth is hastily promulgated by social and corporate media, we perceive the homeland as threatened by menacing nation states - Russia, China, or Mexico and its neighbors in Central America, selected for demonization according to one’s partisan taste - all gathering at our real or virtual borders threatening our security, our prosperity, our democracy and, once again, our most precious heritage - our freedom.

Our mythic history is thus played out on an epic scale unto the ends of the earth - where the forces of liberty must constantly renew themselves if they are to hold oppression and tyranny at bay within the precious homeland. Yet this is a history that does not yet take account of a new actor raging across the existential battlefields where our holy sacraments (most obviously, the right-to-bear-arms, the Stars and Stripes, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star-spangled Banner) are the visible, aural and moral evidence of our God-given grace - which we must daily defend against the secular forces of evil. Global Warming is newly arrived on the stage - no longer just a part of the scenery, as Latour has it, or at best a ‘mechanical’ but now with a big speaking part.  Strangely, this epochal and newly verbose character has yet to acquire mythic status within our nation’s historical saga.

If the phenomenon of Global Warming were instantiated as ‘The Four Storms of the Apocalypse’, for instance, though already suitably anthropomorphized by The World Meteorological Organization as Katrina, Sandy, Maria and Dorian, might it then mediate the phenomenon’s mythic enshrinement and substantiate its historical gravity?  For they are the storms, spread across fourteen years, that have morphed into a tentacular Shiva, the destroyer of all things.

Surely the imagery of a flooded New Orleans and the terrifying swamp of a refugee camp that the Superdome became are seared into the nation’s cerebrum, alongside the inane flippancy of our then president, George W. Bush? Who of us can forget Lower Manhattan, the seat of the global neoliberal order, sinking beneath a full moon and a Frankenstorm surge in 2012? The tragedy of Puerto Rico continues to unfold after Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, and once again an inane President, this time Donald Trump, provided us with a horrifying picture of a lack of governmental gravitas, with his paper towel toss. Now comes Dorian, still marauding along the East coast as I write, having devastated Grand Bahama and the Abaco islands. When will Global Warming and the storms it spawns rise to the mythic level of a 9/11? The combined death toll of just these four storms, all within the American sphere of influence, far exceeds that of the Al Qaeda attack, and the human misery they have caused is incalculable.

A quick Google search for Weather Terrorism reveals two referrals to pieces of mine in Counterpunch, here and here and then to a site that promises to reveal all - “As the CIA pretends to know what is going on, the world is waiting for the real answer to the question: Who is controlling our weather?” Most reputable scientists know the answer in some detail even if our President protests his innocence of it, and even more alarmingly, of the question.

As a nation that professes a profound reverence for the Christian religion, perhaps we should seek mythic resonance in the Bible. Metastasized weather phenomena certainly find a place in Biblical Mythology. I have already referenced the final chapters of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, wherein the Lamb of God (Jesus) opens a scroll secured by seven seals. Opening the first four seals reveals four riders on, respectively, a white, red, black and pale horse, which are taken to symbolize Conquest, War, Drought induced Famine and Death, each an element of the Christian Apocalypse which presages the Final Judgment. Daunting roles for Katrina, Sandy, Maria and Dorian but not entirely incommensurate with their awesome powers of destruction.

Both Elizabeth Rush in Rising – Dispatches from the American Shore, 2019, and Jeff Goodell, in The Water Will Come – Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World, 2017, reference what Goodell calls ‘the oldest story ever told’ – which he suggests, has its genesis in the breaching of the landmass between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea – what is now the Bosporus Strait. Given the disparity in levels between the higher Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the latter rose by over 300 feet in two years, flooding, by some estimates, 25,000 square miles and giving rise to the flood story in The Epic of Gilgamesh, written some two thousand years before the Bible.

Rush notes that Noah’s flood was initiated by God’s anger at the unprecedented population growth occurring, we can presume, at some point after the invention of agriculture, and in his wrath, he caused it to rain without cease. We now know that a massive increase in the burning of fossil fuels, linked to the industrial revolution in Britain, was initiated some time in the 1840’s and has since resulted in epic population growth and growing prosperity together with extinction levels of carbon in the planet’s atmosphere and oceans.

Since 1880, when the data were first reliably recorded, average global sea level rise is about nine inches. Today, we suffer not the cataclysmic rage of a vengeful god but death by these inches, where small increases in ocean levels are transforming islands, seashores and estuaries across the planet - creating wet slums, homelessness and the loss of livelihoods nurtured over the centuries in what once were relatively stable shoreline ecosystems. Meanwhile, warming seas, where most of the planet’s heat increase resides, are supercharging hurricanes to unprecedented levels of intensity (Dorian recently joined Maria and Katrina as a Category 5 storm) and to unremitting levels of frequency.

This is the environmental epic of our age. It is, as far as we know, of anthropogenic rather than divine origin, yet any effective response must include infrastructural landscapes (either hardening or softening the shore) and the resettling of threatened populations, at Biblical scales. Such heroic strategies can only be made manifest if the phenomenon they attempt to ameliorate is likewise understood at a mythic scale. In this country, Global Warming must now join the pantheon of high dramas that illuminate (even in the twilight of historical memory) this nation’s story.

The alternative is to have The Book of Global Warming, or perhaps The Book of Fossil Capital appended at the very end of our civilizational saga.

The Isle of White

The island of North Haven in the Penobscot Bay, Maine, is an eastern establishment, white-shoe summer-place overlain on a diesel swilling, bottom feeding lobster-industry that supports the year-round residents of this tiny, fractal-shored resort. It is washed by the gulf steam and reports the fastest rising ocean temperatures in the Western hemisphere, dramatic sea level rises and a devastated eco-system. Comprehensively cleared of its old-growth hardwood forests in the nineteenth century, its second growth pines are now attacked by bark beetles moving north under the duress of a warming climate. In place of the diseased trees, the severely invasive, non-native Buckthorn is proliferating. Lashed by several hurricanes in the twentieth century, the island now awaits the first of this century’s superstorms. Already, beaches are eroding into the bay at alarming rates.

But some still say it is paradise. Expensive yachts crowd its harbors and summer visitors wave cheerily to each other as they drive or bicycle along its well-paved roads. The summer houses of the rich and discreet spot its meadows, bays and palisades. Vacation revelers eat ice cream and drink the craft-beers of North Haven Brewery along the harbor front, eat gourmet pizzas, and enjoy coffee, movies and ping-pong at Waterman’s, the community center. Lily-white youngsters learn to sail off the Casino dock. There are a couple of art galleries, a hotel and restaurant and, in the summer months, a farmer’s market.

This east coast summer enclave of wealth and privilege was originally founded between 1910 and 1920 by Wall street luminaries, including the Morgans, the Rockefellers and the Lamonts. Shortly afterwards, Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, established a 300-acre summer estate along the island’s northern shore. Several generations of their descendants still summer on this gilded isle, joined now by other families of post-second world war, twentieth-century wealth.

 The island is unspeakably white. There are other ‘white’ summer enclaves (and certainly not all are islands) just like it up and down the east coast of America. They are where many of the wealthiest, of old money and new, go to live the summers of their dreams - a summer amongst their peers, with just enough poor and middle-class workers to service their every need and, perhaps, to add just a little historical authenticity to their Fantasy Island.

 North Haven is powered by three gleaming (white) wind turbines, discreetly located on an adjacent island. They illustrate the uncanny ability of the rich to thrive in green, sustainable communities while the poor often remain in the polluted cities, suburbs and exurbs from whence wealth is extracted. The island demonstrates the dark survival of what we can quaintly call the class struggle whilst establishing the evolution of that conflict within a subsuming ecological crisis.

 Deregulation, since the early 1990’s, has facilitated the globalization of the economy and the out-sourcing of production to regions of low-cost labor, primarily Asia. This trend is resisted politically by the poor and middle class who have found a salve to their financial wounds in fierce nationalisms that cohere around skin-color, religion and territorial origin stories. This much we know. It is Bruno Latour, the French philosopher, who has added a third dimension to this dynamic by suggesting that those made wealthy in this global revolution are very aware that the climate catastrophe will now further curtail the well-being of most of humanity.  In Latour’s telling (Down to Earth, 2018) the uber-rich have made the calculus that the world will be increasingly riven between the haves and the have-nots and that they will make no attempt, either politically or economically, to heal the rift.  Indeed, they will, he suggests, continue to assiduously corral the world’s resources for their own benefit since there is not now, and likely never will be, enough to go around in a world closing in on eight billion people and whose natural beneficence is increasingly disrupted by weather terrorism.

The class struggle has metastasized, gone global, and is now conjoined with the fight to maintain a habitable planet. The apparent prosperity that existed in the United States post 1945 allowed for a brief flickering of hope for something like wide-spread well-being (at least as evidenced by the white population’s material prosperity). Three decades of this historically anomalous economic circumstance were coopted by the state as an ideological weapon  in the cold-war, but shortly abandoned in the mid-1970’s when corporate America reacted to the social challenges presented by the revolutions of the 1960’s by self-interestedly assuaging calls for personal freedom and expressions of individuality by reducing security of employment and initiating the beginnings of the gig-economy. It was Luc Boltanski and Eva Chiapello, in The New Spirit of Capitalism, 1999, who painstakingly connected the dots. The increasing precarity this caused served the wealthy elites, while Bill Clinton’s vicious Violent Crime Control & Enforcement Act of 1994, enacted policies of mass incarceration, further intimidating neighborhoods already suffering from this financial destabilization.
 
It has only gotten worse. Wars waged against the poor, on drugs, on terror, on health, on welfare and on immigrants are all in service to protecting those elites, who, having abandoned all aspirations towards universally equitable social improvement, if indeed they ever harbored them, are now engineering the impoverishment of those eight billion ‘others’ with whom they nominally share the planet.   As the global elites’ press their advantage in this war of the have-lots against the have-nots, some, in the most disaffected communities, retreat to the politics of extreme nationalism and race, manifested at the margins by apparently irrational mass violence.  Perhaps white supremacists perceive their skin color as their only asset as they fight a rearguard action against diminished prospects of achieving self-respect and economic viability; extreme nationalists may perceive their birthplace as conferring special privileges within ancestral origin stories which are threatened by the arrival of the non-native born – their worth daily diluted. Whatever the motivations of the disaffected, they risk becoming grist to an over-arching war on the poor and middle-class – either coopted by governments as their shock-troops or used as a pretext for draconian social controls. 

 We live in a new era of exclusion and extirpation that is fundamental to the vision of America not-so-secretly harbored in the hearts and minds of the powerful and well-heeled. Spot fires of deadly violence inevitably flare up amongst the underclass, unknowingly aping the ideologies of the ruling caste who then lightly condemn them. As Todd Miller shows in Empire of Borders, 2019, U.S. border protection radiates beyond the homeland far across the planet - where its agencies attempt to hold the line against the infiltration of…’your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore’… and the non-white. Our southern border is the last in line of serried ranks of exclusionary practices made manifest and is the notorious site of graphic barbarity practiced for the edification of the world.

The United States displays exemplary leadership amongst those states in the Global North committed to harassing, impoverishing, quarantining, deporting, imprisoning and denying quality education and health care to most of its citizens (and almost a totality of its undocumented inhabitants). As Paul Street succinctly establishes here, this country no longer represents even a notional leadership in democracy; instead, for the last forty years we have led the world in income triage, abandoning fully ninety percent of the population in a relentless quest to achieve obscene levels of wealth disparity. This amassing of great wealth (which represents access to resources) is the ultimate hedge by global elites against a collapsing eco-system amidst catastrophic climate change. In this country it is practiced by the uber-wealthy with a sublime disregard for the immiseration caused by their wealth-hording.

 Those who are politically and philosophically engaged in the travails of the Anthropocene understand that a revolution that attempts to install democracy in the United States is irrelevant unless it is framed within the larger struggle of the poor against the rich, which is entwined with the war to preserve a viable planet for our shared future. Historically, it is has taken power and resources to destroy the environment - the traditional purview of the wealthy. The poor are but instruments of this depredation, as, for instance, miners, drillers, builders, fishers, farmers, soldiers, policemen and ultimately, as consumers.

 If we continue to triage humanity along the wealth divide only the rich will live green, along with their select non-human companions, in their urban principalities, country estates, mountain aeries or idyllic islands. Others will endure in the brown fields of environmental devastation amidst the carnage of the sixth extinction, while the violence of the most disaffected bubbles up around them, disguised as nationalism, race-hate or religion. These ‘others’ may wait at the gates or loiter along the shores, and idly engage in discussions of freedom and democracy, but the vortices of effective power swirl ever further beyond their reach.

Joe Biden is a Collaborator

It’s really quite simple: the rogue oligarchs and corporations who now run this country constitute the enemy. Since becoming a Senator in 1973, your favorite Irish uncle, Joe Biden, has actively collaborated in the extreme capitalism, racism, nationalism, and police state-ism that enable the oligarchs’ agenda; and while most ably empowered by their instrument, the Republican Party, between times, it is more than adequately carried out by the Democrats. What we see now, with a mostly pliant Trump, with a conservative majority Supreme Court, and with a divided Congress where stasis rules, is the Oligarchy’s ideal. But as the political calendar moves on - a proven collaborator must be installed, over the next twelve months, as the Democratic nominee in the 2020 tryst with their current champion – just in case.

As has been demonstrated lately, juridical interpretations of a moldering and malleable document enable the Supreme Court to rule by decree. Indeed, in terms of command by capricious diktat, the Court, with the Constitution functioning as its Holy text is barely surpassed by the Ayatollah and the Koran. Democrats, Biden now apparently preeminent among them as the former Vice President and a Senator of Noachian longevity, stand by to facilitate this process. Not so long ago, Obama, the Appeaser-in-Chief, with the collaborationist Biden at his side, did sterling work on the oligarchs’ behalf. Obama’s failure to adequately press for the instatement of Justice Merrick Garland in 2016, ensured the Court’s conservative majority.

Having just greenlit gerrymandering in the Rucho v. Common Cause decision, the Court has neatly bookended their earlier Citizen’s United decision which allows for unlimited corporate contributions to political parties. As parties are given free rein to engineer Congressional districts to maximize their advantage and be assured of ludicrous amounts of funding, the last vestiges of representative democracy fall away.

The Democratic Party, despite its professed support of Labor and egalitarian social programs, is a tragically weak bulwark against this prevailing agenda of enrichment of the few at the expense of the many. In recent history, we have suffered through two intensely collaborationist governments, overseen by Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. In 2016, we only escaped a third because of Trump’s victory over his putative opponent Hillary Clinton. She, of course, was a Presidential collaborationist in the making, having served her time as both a Senator and as Secretary of State in a government committed to the demands of capital and to the realpolitik of Empire. In place of a Presidency infused with a profoundly false consciousness, we have instead the real deal. Frightening isn’t it?

The Republican Party has a base of self-interested voters composed of the very wealthy and of corporations and their officers. As Noam Chomsky points out, this represents a highly insubstantial voting bloc. But the Party has engineered an expansion of its base (on behalf of the very few) by appealing to the religious right through its latter-day adoption of Right-to-Life policies, by appealing to the racism of poor and middle-class white populations with horrific anti-migrant policies, and by its appeals to the base instincts of nationalists – which it appeases through populist rhetoric, a foreign policy of  blood, bombast and a lethal drone program - all wrapped in crass veneration of the flag. Democrats have stood idly by as this fabulist reinvention has taken place and, indeed, now ape many of its tropes. Biden’s sign-off at the recent Democratic nominee cattle-call of ‘Good night, and God-bless our troops’ was heinously ironic for a man who voted for the greatest blood bath of American troops in this century - the egregiously unwarranted and illegal invasion of Iraq.

Members of both major parties practice equal-opportunity genuflection before the uber-rich who, in turn, ensure their election. It is a closed system, but not hermetically so, as was illustrated by the recent Mid-Terms. The great non-white, non-male hopes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and their cohort of progressive comrades, is a welcome leavening of an institution predominantly populated with old white males beholden to the rich and powerful.

But we should not forget that Biden remains typical of the great, antediluvian Congressional horde. His complicity in furthering the oligarchs’ agenda is well known. He was complicit in the passage of the racist Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994; complicit in Obama’s canny retention of private health insurers in the mix of the Affordable Care Act; and complicit in the ACA’s denial of health services to ‘illegals’. This blatant act of government triage is coupled, in its inhumanity, with the deportation, during Obama’s two terms, of almost three million ‘illegal’ immigrants. Both actions are eerily redolent of past foreign genocides and directly comparable to our own home-grown genocide when Native Americans were herded into reservations which offered tragically limited game-lands, poor soil, disease and overcrowding. Now, in this revisiting of the past, our deportees are returned to impoverished and violent countries, fatally corrupted by the United States, where the climate emergency has made life for the poor a living (and dying) hell. It is worth recalling that these deportations are perpetrated in a nation founded by ‘illegals’.

Lest we forget, Biden is complicit too, in negotiating the passage of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, designed to halt the Great Recession but which ended up famously rewarding Wall Street and punishing Main Street, and which furthermore, permanently enshrined the ‘temporary’ highly regressive tax policies of the Republican, George W. Bush administration. A notable win for the Oligarchy.

Biden’s collegial interactions with old-line segregationists early in his career, his vituperative opposition to federally mandated school busing in the 1970’s and his intemperate denial of a fair hearing for Anita Hill which resulted in the lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of a highly reactionary Justice – indicate both his racism and sexism. Never mind the allegations of inappropriate touching of female staff, constituents and Congressional colleagues.

The aging Senator’s contributions to these acts are not ones of omission but of commission, and his Senatorial tasks are undertaken in a spirit that takes them far beyond the bounds of appeasement: they reflect the overt behavior of a revanchist collaborator, a confederate of the enemy. His legislative and administrative impulses are to reclaim the worst of our colonial past and the worst of our superannuated attitudes of racism, sexism and jingoism. At heart, his schtick reflects the instincts of an old-school populist expressed through a duplicitous patter of avuncular demagoguery. Let it be said: Joe Biden is Trump without the flim-flam and without the social media reach. He makes a terrific patsy for the oligarchs. If he gains the nomination and goes on to win in 2020, it will be because it is their determination that, as a political idiot savant, Trump is intrinsically unreliable, that he harbors notions of independence, and is more deeply obsessed with his own aggrandizement and dynastic pretensions than the enrichment of their class.

Predictably, the Democratic Party’s establishment (the Democratic National Committee) loves Biden. Despite the caveat expressed above, we can expect him to join the long list of their failed presidential candidates and thus allow his opponent to claim victory in a Jimmy Carter certified, free and fair election honestly fought against an ideological foe. But the people will once more be denied a choice. It will be Tweedledum (R) and the collaborationist Tweedledee (D) yet again.

Global Warming as a Tactical Weapon

Rather than expending energy on reviewing, handicapping and researching the policy positions of the leading Democratic candidates for the role of the losing challenger in the 2020 US Federal election, might our time not be better spent war-gaming the next five plus years of a Trump presidency effectively in control of the Judiciary and at least half of a broken-down, worthless Congress? Several former Democratic presidential candidates shadow these ruminations: Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry and, the darkest of all, if only because most recent, Hillary Clinton. My consciousness is forever dappled by the failure that each of these names represent - and these were the ’winners’ of seemingly endless internecine machinations before their fall, come election time. Those who have longer living memories of the American electoral process, or indeed, a greater grasp of its history, can doubtless add to this list of the politically maladroit, the inept and the spiritless: losers all. Do we really care so very much who, in 2020, will be added to their number?

The environmental, social, financial and international violence perpetrated by the Trump government are tactical instruments of ideological coercion. Might not the far greater violence of global warming, or more explicitly of extinction, be used as a countervailing instrument of radical change? Not with the game-board set up as it now is.

The Democratic National Committee, in its quest to remove the last microbe of radicalism from its platform, has, as of this writing, chosen not to devote one of its upcoming candidate debates to global warming, thus neatly twinning its party with their head-in-the-sand opponents and high-lighting the irrelevance of Federal electoral politics. The process is twice dead. Meanwhile, we face grave threats to our way-of-life while, at the same time, our way-of-life poses grave threats to the species with which we share the planet and ultimately, to our own continued existence.

The Republic is thus doubly threatened at a time when its ability to govern democratically is in extreme jeopardy. Trump arrived by a process that may not now be sufficient to remove him. We should not, as Bruno Latour warns, fall into an understanding of time passing as if it were abolishing the past behind it. He warns, “The past remains and even returns”. So it is that Trump is not a novelty - he is an echo of a dark past that remains present because of the intensity of its historicity.

Hitler sized power early in January 1933 and President Paul von Hindenburg then declared him Chancellor in the political chaos that followed the Reichstag Fire. He sought to further legitimize his position by holding elections in March and despite a concerted campaign of violence, propaganda and voter repression, the National Socialists won less than 44% of the vote. Yet two weeks after the election, with the support of all non-socialist members of the Reichstag, he forced through an amendment to the Weimar Constitution giving himself dictatorial powers. At the same time, he established an alternative system of ‘justice’ that existed without judicial controls and created the National Socialist League of German Jurists that purged all Jewish and socialist lawyers from the system. The Reichstag was thus neutered, and the judicial system became actively aligned with Nazi ideology.

In our war-gaming, we can assume that the Electoral College and the ineptitude of the Democratic Party will deliver the election to Trump in 2020. We are now complicit in his continuing in office in ways that will likely lead to a dynasty devoted to its own aggrandizement rather than to an attempt to confront the mortal perils of a climate-changed world. War-games can be made real by a desperate public – non-violent maneuvers such as planning for a Federal tax-revolt or State succession, can begin immediately. ‘Global warming’ is available as both a casus belli and a tactical resource for its pursuit. But first, this phenomenon needs to be weaponized to break through our intransigence.

This year’s fire season began in Southern California on Sunday June 9th when the Sky Fire erupted in Santa Clarita, just east of Six Flags Magic Mountain, causing a panicked evacuation of the theme park.  Viewed from its roller coasters, the sight of a leaning tower of smoke with a carapace of flames at its base heading towards the park, (propelled by gusty winds from the east), doubtless added a frisson of mortal danger to visitors experiencing the carefully calibrated thrills of their chosen ride. For a few minutes that afternoon, before the park was hastily shut-down, each exercise in light-hearted gravitational duress was compounded by a naked fear of on-rushing, uncontrolled wildfire.

Los Angeles, ‘Theme Park of the Apocalypse’, as foretold by Mike Davis, reached its apotheosis in those few moments, as Nature (wildfire) threatened to invade one of the more extravagant built expressions of its Culture of sensory titillation (Six Flags Magic Mountain). This was Baudrillard’s Hyperreality fully manifested - where the boundaries between the real and the mediated coalesce into a high-definition chimera.

David Wallace-Wells attempts a strangely parallel exercise, by injecting fear into the readers of his recent New York (June 13-26) cover article, ‘Living with Fire – What climate change has in store for Los Angeles’, most of whom, one presumes, live on the east coast, where climate change wreaks a very different sort of havoc.  Los Angeles, and in particular, Malibu, its north-western geographic extremity and cultural instantiation, is featured in his piece as a hellscape of perpetually threatened and frequently manifested wildfire. As Latour might suggest, he intensifies the event’s historicity.

Wallace-Wells takes as his text the 2018 Woolsey Fire which ran from just west of the Ronald Reagan Freeway - jumping the 101 Freeway – and then some seventeen miles to the Pacific where it scorched almost the entire 21-mile length of Malibu, from north to south. The images illustrating the article, suffused with the orange and red light of an inferno, are overlain with pull-quotes such as, “There’s nothing left to burn, except us” and “You could see the smoke from Space”. Its opening double page image is titled, “Los Angeles Fire Season is Beginning Again, and it will Never End”. He articulates our doom amidst the colors of conflagration. But his article is not, as the magazine coyly claims, “A bulletin from our climate future”. That future is now. For those living in California and much of the West, it is a horrifyingly present reality.

We need scare tactics to mobilize a complacent public. Hitler achieved his aims by the petty terror of the SA, his drunken brownshirts, and the more coldly professional violence of his personal paramilitary, the SS. Can we leverage the very real terror of fire in California, of sea-level rise in Louisiana, of Hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, the heat-deaths in Phoenix and the storm surges in New York and Connecticut in order to viscerally impact every American? Weather violence can be reified as a political weapon; bewildering climate impacts can be augmented through media and transformed into heart-pounding Hyperreality. The lurid journalism of David Wallace-Wells shows us a way of smashing the windows of our complacency.

Global Warming, that vast amorphous phenomenon characterized as a hyperobject by Timothy Morton, is an all-encompassing reality. Its reach extends far beyond the puny swamp of special interests that is Washington D.C. It awaits its moment as a transformative element of global, governmental change. Birthed in the dark past of the Industrial Revolution, it’s unleashed demons of fire, flood and drought may now force us to transcend our ideological divides and re-invent the political process.

But we can be reasonably sure that this transcendence will not occur within the bounds of America’s next cycle of Federal elections.

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.