Category Archives: Climate Change

Parallel to Climate Politics

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Walking around a room with 18 other people, eyes on the floor, lights off, mind adrift in thoughts of death, climate change, and politics, was a confounding experience.

My takeaways from this strange contemplative practice did not become clear until days later. In the moment, the practice seemed somehow ironic and meaningful, yet I could not understand why. I now see my experiences in this practice as almost representing or paralleling the politics of climate change.

Mindfulness among the masses. Image Credit: Unknown

With our eyes on the ground, I felt overwhelmed. Listening to Karen’s descriptions of the world, I felt helpless in the face our extensive problems. There is so much to unpack, not enough time, and I don’t even know where to start. Amongst all these other shoes walking around the floor, how can anything I do be significant? How can I sway people to my side if we all come from different backgrounds, have different priorities, and live in a polarized playground where everything is black and white, or so gray in between that it is unintelligible? This overwhelming feeling is matched in the politics of climate change. It is such an extensive issue that leaders and individuals have no idea where to start or how to help. This overwhelmingness is dangerous because it can lead to stalling on solutions, and inaction which could effectively cause voluntary human extinction.

When we lifted our eyes to acknowledge each other I struggled to remain serious. I found the reality of 19 of us aimlessly wandering the tiny classroom, trying not to hit each other, while listening to poems about death funny. Sort of a “laugh because otherwise you’ll cry” response. This reaction is similar to how many people handle the climate crisis—they don’t take it seriously. They laugh because it is a wild idea that humans could unintentionally cause so much destruction and death while wandering the earth industrializing. They ignore it, because if they believe that there is nothing they can do, then it is better to laugh and cherish what they have while they are alive, rather than to get lost in a spiral of despair waiting to die.

In this practice I felt myself putting on a face for my peers. I couldn’t just acknowledge them with an honest expression of my feelings because that would have been too vulnerable. I felt like I had to smile, exaggerate my expressions, and communicate a false narrative. This, too, is similar to the politics of climate change. World leaders go to climate conferences and exaggerate their actions and intentions, project their virtue and strength, and hide their vulnerability and honest reality of confusion and disaster. We want to die with pride, and for our largely old politicians, acknowledging a problem would mean dying guilty.

Bonn, Germany Climate Conference. Image Credit: UNFCC

Death, Institutions, Capitalism, and Climate Change

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This week in class we began with a reading of James Rowe’s article “Is a Fear of Death at the Heart of Capitalism?”. The article reflects and derives its thesis from Ernest Brecker’s work. Brecker theorized that humans act reactively to their mortality in the sense that they create structures and cultures that allow them to redirect their fear of their own death or the feelings of impermanence and smallness that accompany their understanding of death. The fear that our death is inevitable and thus out of our control leads us, as a species, to try to create structures that we feel can immortalize us. This leads to us creating systems such as capitalism allows us to determine a way to value one’s existence in a tangible way. These systems allow us to act to win within these systems in order to immortalize ourselves in these assumably immortal structures. Thus, such structures have contributed to the incredible innovation but also to the destabilization of the conditions needed to allow life to flourish. Rowe believes that the solution to reconstructing capitalism and other such detrimental systems is by understanding and changing how our fears of death enforce our desire for permanence in the form of these institutions. Through discussion concerning these pieces, I find that though there is value in this approach in the long run it doesn’t seem to address any of the problems we face in the short term, specifically that of our climate crisis. However, a potentially more suitable solution for our current situation is one that Mark Hertsgaard posits in his piece the God Species. Hertsgaard claims that humans should posit that we should also understand our role in death and rather than use that to shift the foundations of our destructive activities refine them with our current capabilities that though the byproduct of destructive practices gives us a godlike power to positively shift or minimize our impact on our planet to sustain our current systems simply not at the cost of the planet. Ultimately, I believe that the idea of explaining these generally exploitative and oppressive systems, as a result of our discordant relationship with death as a species, does very little in changing the very damning impact of them on the state of our planet. Realistically if we want to address the climate crisis we must question if we have the time to reconstruct institutions that will then adequately address the pressing crises we face now or whether we must learn to work within the constraints of our current institutions.

The false choice between capitalism and saving the planetPhoto: David Cliff / NurPhoto via Getty Images- The general discontentment with systems such as capitalism by climate activists Climate Change And Global Pollution To Be Discussed At Copenhagen SummitJANSCHWALDE, GERMANY – NOVEMBER 24: A loan wind turbine spins as exhaust plumes from cooling towers at the Jaenschwalde lignite coal-fired power station, which is owned by Vatenfall, on November 24, 2009 in Janschwalde, Germany. The CO2 emission will be one top of the agenda and will be discussed at the summit in December in Copenhagen. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

 

Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene: human issues and their specific roots

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While I resonate with many of the arguments posited in The Worm at the Core, I also find myself questioning the universality posed by authors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. Their experiments, which largely have been performed on Americans, Canadians, and Israelis, have results which are then applied to humans as a whole, and without significant regard to class, race, and other differentiators. This is not to dismiss their conclusions, but rather to question whether every person has the same understandings and fears of death.

The movie Anthropocene as well, while helpful in showing the extent of climate crisis, at many points lacked an internationalist analysis and instead pointed to all humans as the cause of climate change. While somewhat different from universalizing fears of death, this is another example, in my opinion, of painting too broad a stroke with regards to climate and death. Specificity with regards to who/what has caused climate destruction allows for more accurate conclusions with regards to alleviating future destruction.

Large, heavy machinery works in the middle of a vast, barren field. Humans look on in the foreground.

Creating the capitalocene: endless accumulation – CounterPunch.org

This specificity is exemplified in a shift from calling our current era the “anthropocene” toward names such as “capitalocene” and “plantationocene” (plantation including chattel slavery as well as other forms of agro-industrialization). I was first introduced to these terms by a friend last week, and truthfully I’ve done only the barest readings of either. Nonetheless, in this interview, Donna Haraway says that “the Anthropocene is […] an historical, situated set of conjunctures that are absolutely not a species act.” In the same series of articles, Sophie Sap Moore et. al. posit that the plantation was “produced through processes of land alienation, labor extraction, and racialized violence.”

This terminology correction seems valuable to me as a way to shift focus from “mankind” as the cause of climate crisis (which might lead to eugenicist and fascist solutions such as reducing births) and instead towards an understanding that global systems of imperialism and colonialism have exploited masses of people for the benefit of a few, moving everyone closer to climate catastrophe. This in itself does not pose a solution, and in all honesty I don’t have one. Just that a more thorough analysis of our circumstances will lead to a sharper understanding of our duties. 

Something less heavy—I’m slowly starting to curate a (limited and not at all cohesive) death/climate crisis playlist. Please add and listen! Or don’t! 

When The Bee Stings

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credit: Ryan Haskins

I have a facts-based, biological view of mortality and existence, which I think is what has allowed me to find peace. I’ve accepted the simple fact that when I die, the same thing will happen to me that happens to all organisms on our planet: my corpse will be feasted on, and I’ll be turned into energy for other living beings.

As far as why I exist, I recognize that an organism’s singular purpose in life is to reproduce and contribute to evolution. Yes, this seems like a depressing outlook (especially because I’m gay), but it has led me to pledge to use my time here on Earth to “maximize what [I] can get out of life and minimize the harm [I] do to others” (Solomon et al. 224). Maybe this is emblematic of Terror Management Theory at work.

I’ve found it useful to apply that same ‘hard place’ worldview to my thoughts about living in a time of so many uncontrollable crises. I’m afraid of where America’s current struggles with capitalism, democracy, and international peacekeeping amidst the Anthropocene might take us. However, it motivates me to try to make a difference (however small), even when it seems futile. I choose what I get out of this life, so I am going to make the most of it and do my best to make society better for those who will come after.

When I started reading The Worm at the Core, I’ll admit that I had doubts about Terror Management Theory’s explanation of why people behave the way they do. In some ways, I still do. The book focuses almost solely on Western countries in experiments, ignores different gender perspectives, and overgeneralizes some claims without evidence. However, upon finishing the book and reflecting on some of my life decisions, I can see how TMT played a role, especially regarding my worldview.

As I review our other (sometimes quite bleak) course materials, I try to stay committed to my ‘hard place’ worldview and remember that change is possible if we envision it. I think this is why I’ve particularly enjoyed “The Ecomodernist Manifesto” and The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans. When the bee stings and my time here on Earth is up, I may not have fulfilled my animal purpose, but I am confident that I will have fulfilled my human one.

Reframing the Climate Issue

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I’m taking this class with the firm belief that climate change, and by extension, climate justice, are inseparable from capitalism and the legacy of colonial and imperialist resource extraction. 

The Anthropocene documentary we watched in class got me thinking about the role of China as an eco-development state, coined by editors of the book Greening East Asia (Esarey et. al). Regions in East Asia are notorious for being some of the most polluted in the world, yet, paradoxically, within the last decade or so, East Asian countries have developed green energy, technology, and conservation, waste management, and urban design efforts at a scale that far surpasses developed Western countries. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that resource extraction has by and large happened within their own countries, so the costs of industrialization are borne by the domestic populations themselves. What would environmental policy look like in Western countries (including Scandinavia) if so much environmental destruction wasn’t externalized onto other parts of the world, or onto marginalized domestic populations?

A group of older Chinese ladies practicing taichi amidst heavy air pollution

I thought that the documentary presented a complicated history of Mao’s poor environmental policies as one of the single greatest contributors to climate change in order to attempt to lift the masses out of poverty. What would a documentary that centered Indigenous movements in North America look like? Would it discuss the impact of the near extinction of bison, hunted by white colonizers as part of their ‘Indian Removal Policy’, from 10 million to just over 300 within a couple decades (Phippen, 2021)?

A wall of stacked American bison skulls in the mid-1870s

Ultimate mass extinction might be inevitable unless radical change happens. Honestly, I can’t realistically foresee a timeline in our current reality past 2050, which is in 30 years. Who gets to live and who do the powerful let die? I have to believe that the earth will heal itself eventually, but what will happen between then and the more current future we are headed into?

 

Citations:

  • Bradshaw, S., Richards, J., Kyriacou, S., Gabbay, A., Ostby, M., Cassini, S., Steffen, W. L., Ellis, E., Zalasiewicz, J. A., Revkin, A., McNeil, J., Gonzalez, M. B., Odada, E. O., Vidas, D., Steffen, W. L. (William L. ., & Odada, E. O. (Eric O. (2016). Anthropocene. [Distributed by] Bullfrog Films.
  • Esarey, A., Haddad, M. A., Lewis, J. I., & Harrell, S. (2021). Greening East Asia: The rise of the eco-developmental State. University of Washington Press. 
  • Magazine, S. (2012, July 17). Where the Buffalo no longer roamed. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/ 
  • Meyer, R. (2017, March 21). How climate change covered China in Smog. The Atlantic. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/how-climate-change-covered-china-in-smog/520197/ 
  • Phippen, J. W. (2021, June 7). “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone”. The Atlantic. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/ 



What A Piece Of Work Is Man

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Anthropocene – A word describing our planet’s current geological age, in which human activity is the dominant force on our climate and the environment.

When I signed up for this class, I was unaware that humanity had surpassed all natural Earth systems in becoming the primary influence on our biosphere. It is daunting to think that we – ‘we’ being relative, since only a small subset of our population has the power to combat the world’s worst polluters – no longer inhabit this planet but control it. Unfortunately, however, the state of our Earth is of second importance to so many, due to another human-caused disaster: heightened inter- and intra-national political conflict that seems to constantly bring the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

Thinking about these compounding realities often lands me in feelings of despair and loneliness. But what brings me comfort is the knowledge that modern-day people are not much different from those of the medieval day. I have found that historical literature always helps me to feel grounded and motivated in my quest for societal change. One of my favorite passages about humanity, which almost perfectly sums up my own thoughts, is the following monologue Shakespeare wrote for Hamlet:

Quote from Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet: The earth seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by David Bevington, Bantam Books, 1988. 

In this, Shakespeare (through Hamlet) is describing the world’s beauty and humanity’s strengths, while also revealing his true feelings of distaste for them. I find the phrase “What a piece of work is man” especially significant because it represents to me this duality. In the context of the monologue, the phrase appears to celebrate God’s masterpiece of the human being. However, the contemporary “piece of work” insult is my preferred interpretation. Yes, there are great qualities of humankind – our resiliency and our intelligence – but it’s difficult to overstate the extent of our failings.

When I signed up for this class, I didn’t understand the true extent of our climate emergency, but I do believe that, despite our failings (perhaps even because of them), our society can adapt to the ever-changing circumstances and emerge stronger than before. The tragic story of Hamlet does not have to prophesy our own.

Climate nihilism and community care

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I worked through two responses before deciding on this one, which I chose for its attempted honesty in the face of real, violent, and discriminative political/ecological threats. This short response argues for an understanding of community care as a means to mitigate the effects of climate change on the most marginalized. I assume several things which are not necessarily true and are framed imperfectly, listed below. 

  1. There is nothing the masses can do to “stop” climate change
  2. There is nothing the capitalists and imperialists can/will do to “stop” climate change
  3. Climate change is resulting in mass extinction
  4. Climate change will not kill all humans, and will discriminate along geopolitical, racial, and class lines 

These assumptions are at best incomplete and at worst false. That said, I adopt them in my life to move toward an acceptance of “our” collective fate, and move forward in my own actions. I’ve come to terms with this as “climate nihilism,” which strikes me as similar to Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander’s This Civilization is Finished, and builds off the anonymously-authored Desert (which is kind of worth the read, but not at all working toward an Indigenous analysis of climate change and its effects).

Indigenous struggle as climate struggle and struggle against the colonial state—a blockade in so-called Toronto in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation in so-called British Columbia displays a banner reading “NO PIPELINES: Stop RCMP Invasion on Indigenous Lands.”

With this acceptance, I try and often fail to do actions that have the greatest immediate impact on those that are most affected by climate change. This can be described as community care, which I define in line with bell hooks’s All About Love, where she attempts to redirect her readers toward a constant and true practice of love in their lives. Mutual aid, whether true to its theory or not, comes to mind—in Seattle this seems to be one common way for community care to manifest. It especially stems from the knowledge that our disproportionately Black and brown unhoused neighbors are also disproportionately affected by climate change. Long, hot, smoky summers, and long, cold, rainy winters lead to preventable deaths from exposure. A meal or a cigarette for a neighbor can be a radical act of love.

Climate change is here—orange smoke in Seattle 2020 shrouds the buildings and trees.

This line of thinking, admittedly, is dangerous. It ignores opportunities to mobilize mass lines, work on long-term campaigns, and otherwise organize in politically powerful groups. I describe it, though, in an attempt at an honest answer to the question of “first thoughts”—an acceptance of collective semi-destruction must not mean apathy, but instead move us toward care for each other. 

After this wordy response—more words! Here are so many books (should be linked to free online versions) that inform these thoughts. In no order:

  1. All About Love
  2. Accomplices not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex
  3. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (will have to make an account then download)
  4. Desert
  5. Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla
  6. The Progressive Plantation: racism inside white radical social change groups
  7. The Land of Open Graves 
  8. National Union of the Homeless: a brief history
  9. Primer: Transnational Weapons Corporations (click through to w-tnc.pdf)
  10. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next!)
  11. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Liberalism

Citations:

Abbas, Freya. “What Canadians should Know about the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s Struggle.” InkSpire, https://inkspire.org/post/what-canadians-should-know-about-the-wetsuweten-nations-struggle/-M2R80RtqjuC-63LBrof. 

Alexander, Samuel. “This Civilization is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire—and What Lies Beyond.” The Simplicity Collective, June 14, 2019. 

Anonymous. Desert. E-book, The Anarchist Library, 2011. 

hooks, bell. All About Love. HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. 

Live Storms Media. “09-12-2020 Seattle, WA – Wildfire Smoke – Major City With Worst Air Quality in the World.” Youtube, September 12, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH6Spfsntjc.

Nature Is My Religion

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Recently, I have begun to see myself as a piece of the earth rather than a being separate from it. This is something I began to feel not only in thought but as part of my soul. From skiing pillows in remote British Columbia as snow dumped onto us for days, to watching seals cover themselves with sand for protection from the sun on the shores of the Redwood Forest, I began to truly believe that the God I worship is mother nature and my religion is the natural world we live in.

Clouds above a mountain peak over looking a frozen lake.

Summit of Alpental after 4 inches of fresh snowfall.

With this spiritual discovery came the painful awareness that the things I saw and experienced are in danger of disappearing or being irreversibly altered by the effects of global warming. Less rainfall means shallow streams and Salmon not being able to make it to spawning grounds, wildfires destroying thousands of acres causing ash to rain from the sky states away, and homes being brought out to sea by extreme hurricanes doesn’t even begin to describe the effects that climate change has had on our planet. 

So, I took this class. Because how can I see the earth as my mother without understanding how to grasp my own mortality as humans continue to kill it? Can we save it? If I ride my bike and take short showers, does that manage the terror I feel for the future?

Sunlight breaking through fog over the trees on the shore of a beach covered in large mossy rocks.

Early morning where the freshwater river enters the oceans on the California coast in the Redwoods National Forest.

In class, we talked about systems theory in the context of understanding that we are living in the world rather than on it. I resonated a lot with this because it forces people to see something as a makeup of parts and how those parts function together to make a whole. Which is what the Earth is and how we participate in that system.

However, I think that it is important to see the interconnectedness of everything that works together to create the environment we live in, but Deep Adaptations provides a pessimistic view of climate change that not only seems to perpetuate an idea that the Earth cannot be saved from the harm that has been caused to it. This seems to embody the extremes of terror management theory that we have discussed in class and come to understand through various educational materials that show the extremes resulting from being reminded of our own mortality. In this case, the extreme of believing there is no reason to have hope.

Sources and References:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760599683/were-all-gonna-die-how-fear-of-death-drives-our-behavior

lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

youtube.com/watch

Qualms About My Demise

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“Political Ecology of Death in the Anthropocene” is a fascinating title––oddly specific, yet broad enough to cover so many things. Signing up for this course, I was hooked.

My death is something that I contemplate quite often. It entails considering the possible ways that I want my body disposed of: I hate the idea of being eaten by worms, so burial and composting are out, and while I don’t enjoy imagining my body burning, at least my cremated ashes won’t be a direct meal for some creature. It entails thinking about my soul––will I have a next life, or will my “soul” and conscious just cease to exist in the universe? It also entails significant FOMO (fear of missing out), which is my ultimate motivator in life to do my best, please as many people as possible, see as many places as I can, and consume without need. To quote the NPR podcast We’re All Gonna Die!, “the fear of death haunts the human animal like nothing else.” I can certainly relate.

Now, only a week into this course, I’m realizing that there are many problematic implications with how I approach the fear of my death.

Using systems thinking, my death and following disposal is individual, in that it is important psychologically to me. It is also part of a larger system of the earth’s ecology. How then should I approach the subject of my body? Do I respect myself and get cremated to avoid the “ew” factor? Or do I respect the Earth, future generations, and climate action, and instead choose composting? The fact that I have a choice is part of the problem and demonstrates how our species is out of bounds. I am inclined to choose an option that hurts the environment, other humans, and the entire planetary system. To the question of “what kind of species will we be,” from Professor Litfin’s Becoming Planetary, it will someday be up to me decide in this one small, yet impactful decision and make the mature choice.

Considering terror management theory, it may be my fear of the unknown that drives my FOMO and qualms of the soul. Maybe if I were religious, I would not feel the need to travel so much or buy so many things because I could find comfort and security in a certain “after.”

I’m curious to see how this course’s content, discussions, and contemplative practices will continue to insight deeper understandings and challenge my views about death.

Image Source: Ken Lambert, The Seattle Times. Recompose, the first human-composting funeral home in the U.S. in Kent, WA.