Category Archives: Climate Change

Anti-Capitalism and the Great Extinction

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How should we think of the past year? One way is to realize that in that time, any possibility of making serious changes to the global deterioration of the biosphere has dramatically receded. Whether you’re an environmental activist, a “that’s so terrible” headshaker, or an “it’s all about capitalism” person has become irrelevant. Short of major collapse, disaster or unforeseen events, we’re past the point of being able to do anything about this. What might get your attention is that the signs are that what worked for the climate issue is now being applied to capitalism–denial, displacement and legal enforcement.

The last surviving Pinta tortoise, Lonesome George, died in the Galapagos on Sunday. The species is now extinct.

If you have not been paying much attention, you may even not be aware that the UN Rio+20 environmental summit came and went last week. Rio was supposed to make good the promises of the earlier Earth summit and lead towards more sustainable development. The inevitable communiqué was dismissed as “283 paragraphs of fluff” by Greenpeace. Occupy activists did interrupt the closing ceremony to make a statement but were soon silenced. There was minimal media coverage and relatively little awareness in Occupy. When the COP17 Climate Change conference in South Africa collapsed in similar fashion early last December, there was a day of action at Zuccotti Park. Last week, as wildfires devastated Colorado, Arctic ice levels fell to record lows, and an early tropical storm flooded Florida, no comparable action took place.

Along with many others, I’ve been pushing this issue throughout this project to little effect. We did hold an Occupy Theory Assembly on climate. It started well but became becalmed in demands that we endorse a long submission to the Rio conference. Proposals for direct action against the fossil fuel industry were more promising. However, the idea of lying down in front of coal trains was a little daunting. It was not that people did not see the urgency of the issue but that they could not see how to make headway with it.

And here’s why. Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals in DC ruled against a suit attempting to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating green house gases. The judgment scathingly noted against the so-called climate skeptics:

This is how science works….The E.P.A. is not required to reprove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question.

However, the Republican attorney general of Virginia gave notice that he will appeal the ruling. Any guesses as to how the Supremes will rule on this?

On the same day, we learned that, despite the disaster in the Gulf, Shell Oil will get off-shore drilling permits for Alaska. What’s so tawdry about this transparent election-year vote grubbing from the Obama Administration is that not a single Republican or Independent that wasn’t going to vote Democrat will do so as a result of this move. But one of the few remaining pristine landscapes will be ruined and yet more animals will die.

Humans are now causing what is known as the Sixth Great Extinction, a mass slaughter comparable to whatever it was that killed the dinosaurs, except that we’re doing it on purpose and we know we are. About 30,000 species a year are becoming extinct from megafauna like the Pinta tortoise to frogs. Insects are thriving and will inherit the planet.

Leave the disasters, extinctions, floods and fires to one side: we’ve got used to grey smog as the permanent condition in all the global cities, to a hole in the ozone layer, to holes in the floor of the ocean leaking oil, to the disappearance of drinking water, the spread of deserts and once-tropical diseases. If we’re ok with all this, do we expect debt and unemployment to generate a mass anti-capitalist movement?

For capitalism, this is all business-as-usual, what they like to call “creative destruction.” It’s also a new way to profit, as the wave of green-washing ads from oil companies makes clear. For anti-capitalists of all stripes, from the mildest reformist to the most wild-eyed revolutionary, our collective failure to develop anything other than rhetorical purchase on the survival of life is devastating. Not just to the biosphere, human and non-human life, but to the chances of pushing back neo-liberal capitalism.

 

Public Intellectuals: wrong on debt, wrong on climate.

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Like many NYC residents, I get a lot of magazines and journals in which the self-styled public intellectuals get to hold forth on the state of the world. As these people get a great deal of access to the media, we hear much insistence on their importance. Today I read two leading articles from either side of the Atlantic that made me question whether we do in fact still need or want such public intellectuals. In addressing two of the main themes of the moment, student debt and climate change, these pieces both decide that their subjects have been overblown on grounds that are clearly tendentious. Another journalism is possible–I would say necessary.

Writing in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, Harvard grad (1976) and president of Harvard Crimson, doesn’t see too much to do about student debt. Over at the London Review of Books, Malcolm Bull of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, agonizes over climate change ethics. Both are worryingly wrong, albeit from very different political perspectives. Lemann tends to quote Obama, Bull prefers Lenin. Both stress a highly partial account of their topic to get to their conclusions.

Nicholas Lemann: Mr One Percent

 

Lemann contrasts the “apocalypse mode” of writing on student debt with the good sense of Obama, speaking at UNC:

“In today’s economy, there’s no greater predictor of individual success than a good education. Right now, the unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. The incomes of folks with a college degree are twice as high as those who don’t have a high-school diploma.” These figures communicate the over-all reality of the situation better than do the anecdotes about heavily indebted graduates who can’t find jobs.

In fact, Obama is being cute with his stats here. While it’s unsurprisingly true that college graduates over the age of 25 have better employment than high-school dropouts, it’s also true that

Thirty five percent of unemployed college graduates and those with advanced degrees have been without a job for more than a year, the same rate as unemployed high school dropouts.

And here’s the real kicker. According to a recent study by Northeastern University of Labor Department reports:

about 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 were jobless or underemployed last year.

So what Obama said is true but it’s highly selective with the truth. I wonder how many of those unemployed graduates are part of the one million people who owe over $100,000 in student debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?

He continues to err when he suggests that

Research libraries and philosophy departments can’t possibly make money; they require subsidies from business schools and biomedical-research labs, but that drives tuition higher than it would be if universities dropped their money-losing functions.

As Chris Newfield and others have shown, humanities programs tend to be net profit makers for universities because their tuition charges easily cover their costs. Science labs, run on national grants, are loss makers because their overheads are not fully covered by those grants. A report from the University of California showed that UC lost $720 million on overheads when “winning” $3.5 billion in science grants–in a year when the system had an $813 million shortfall. In other words, almost all the budget crisis in California was due to underfunded science labs.

Lemann ices the cake by concluding:

Where higher education is actually underpriced is in the top-tier schools. That may sound offensive, but price is determined by what people are willing to pay, and the top twenty-five or so schools in the country could charge even more than they do.

I don’t think even the Ivies are making that kind of an argument. All this is supposed to lend force to Lemann’s support for the continuation of “lower” student loan interest at 3.4%. In fact, all that is lower is the rate of extortion, because the Federal Reserve loans money at a steady 0.1% at present. It only costs the government notional dollars that it might have extracted from students. Let’s think instead about the cost of unlevied taxation on capital gains, all subject to ceiling of 15% tax and realize the absurdity of this argument.

More puzzling is the lengthy discussion of climate justice in the LRB by Malcolm Bull. Bull appears to want to make a Left case for being a climate skeptic, although his piece takes a carefully weighted path. His LRB editor got the tone right with the headline: “Must we save the world?” There’s a very English cleverness and irony there that serves to wash over some worrying positions.

At the outset Bull asks of global warming: “Are humans causing it? Almost certainly.” Almost? There’s no reputable source that holds otherwise any more, even if there are well-funded climate skeptics at the Heartland Institute and elsewhere to give the illusion of debate. In the US alone, 15,000 temperature records were set this March. Bull asserts that warming is being offset by the “the protective effect of sulphate aerosols.” That sounds nice doesn’t it? These aerosols, which Bull speculates “could in theory be pumped into the atmosphere indefinitely for the sole purpose of reducing global warming,” are very toxic. You’ll know them better as things like sulfur dioxide, a by-product of burning coal that are well-known to cause asthma, emphysema, bronchitis and other respiratory conditions with potentially fatal effects. So perhaps not such a good idea after all.

This is the tendency of the writing here: not transparently refutable but taking a path of most resistance to climate change analysis. Bull concentrates solely on temperature increase as the index of climate change, while most in the field now look at parts per million of carbon dioxide, changing pH levels in the sea, ice melt, desertification and so on.

This tactic causes much of the analysis in the piece to be off target. There is an extensive discussion of the ethical relationship between present emissions policy and the future. This misses the point that climate change is now, it’s already happening and it’s too late to reverse, as Bill McKibben graphically puts it in his book Eaarth:

We’re not going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed. We’re like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 30 and had the heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue.

Or if you think that’s corny how about this: according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2009

changes in surface temperature, rainfall and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide levels are completely stopped.

Writing in 2012, Bull prefers to put it this way:

As for rises in sea level, the 2007 IPCC projections range from 18 to 59 centimetres – which is not enough to submerge anywhere other than the lowest-lying areas.

Which is to say, Pacific islands, Manhattan, Pakistan, Florida, Holland and other low-lying areas: too bad. And to ignore how sea level rise affects the salinity of the soil, the magnitude of storms.

Flooding in Koror, Palau--"move on, nothing to see here"

In the end, I don’t think such outcomes are Bull’s central concern. Like some others, he worries most about the political future:

what climate change most conspicuously undermines is not the nation-state but democracy, for it requires supranational institutions at a time when there is no supranational democracy, and allows that at a national level the interests of future generations might take precedence over those of the current one.

This is the carbon dictatorship theory–that in order to control what is now out of control extraordinary measures will be required and they could only be dictatorial.

I would say that the global social movements have shown a very different set of possibilities. It is just as conceivable that a move away from the high consumption, fossil-fuel driven, debt accumulating permanent crisis might occur. Such a scenario would make it imaginable that carbon debt be taken as seriously as bond market debt. Direct democracies might be thought of as our last best hope, which could certainly do no worse than any of the current social systems. If we’re going to get from here to there, then quite frankly, we’re going to need a different kind of intellectual to help us think how to do it.

 

 

Climate and the Commons

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Huni: once one island, now two

Occupy Theory has decided to set up weekly themed assemblies. Like Barcelona, only with about 39,900 fewer people: so come along, Sunday at noon in Washington Square Park. So I’m supposed to come up with some discussion ideas on climate and the commons, and thought I might try them out here. They have to be short so it can go on one side of paper. Please comment! Too depressing? Not depressing enough? Clear? not so much? what else should be here? FB, email, carrier pigeon, even here on the blog.

Ideas and Actions

1. In the seventeenth century, English revolutionaries declared “the earth a common treasury for all.” Climate change is the polite name for the one percent robbing the commons. The overdeveloped world as a whole is the “one percent” in relation to the dominated world.

2. Capitalism began with the enclosure of the commons and continues to expand today through the fossil fuel and mining industries. All these actions were and are thefts from the commons. To stop climate change, we have to stop neoliberal capitalism. It is a political choice, not an argument as to who is right or wrong about data.

3. What we call the climate and the economy are both complex systems with real effects. Since the beginning of the industrial era, what we call climate has become the product of the economy. This includes temperature, rainfall, sea levels, drought, ice melt, species extinction, flooding, and other variations in formerly stable conditions.

4. There are no longer such things as nature or the environment. You can argue if there ever were but human action in the industrial era has transformed everything that there is, from the rocks to the air: it is real in the sense that it exists and artificial in the sense that humans made it. What we also now know is that it will do so until it is made to desist.

It’s a Good Thing

1. The response to the neo-liberal destruction of the commons will open a new age of leisure for all. Automated production powered by renewable energy can sustain our needs, including modern conveniences and medicines, without the built-in obsolescence, waste and endless debt-slavery of the current system.

2. For half a millennium, priests, colonizers, industrialists and moralizers of all stripes have been bemoaning the laziness of the common people, while extolling the leisure required by the monk, the scholar and the aristocrat. Reclaiming the commons opens the contemplative life to all those who might want it and ends the necessity of pointless labor.

Another World Is Necessary

1. Agriculture and non-nomadic settlement became possible during a geologically brief window that we are now closing. You can measure it: 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere allowed for the climate our parents remember. Right now we’re at 393 or so. The International Energy Authority says that we’ve already used all the extra fossil fuels that will take us up to 450 parts per million at which point no one really knows what will happen. It has to stop.

2. The Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan flooded last year for the simple reason that there is now more water in the Western Pacific than there used to be thanks to climate change. High sea-level events like tsunamis and hurricanes multiply small sea-level rises by factors of up to 10,000. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced this in Delhi. No Western media reported it.

3. Conservative estimates predict that such sea-level rise will mean 33 million people in the U.S. will have to move, part of 250 million worldwide. That’s one in ten of the current U. S. population. Live in New York? That’s you. And me.

4. Flooding is first affecting the island cultures of the Pacific (see the island of Huni above, divided in two). Indigenous peoples have created the least emissions and are paying the highest price. One-third of the world’s existing spoken languages are found in this region. Capitalism is stealing our cultural commons as well as the air, sea and land. It’s ours and we want it back.

After Striking

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For the first time at OWS you can hear the words “After May Day.” It seems almost surreal after so much planning for this day. When the events of May are over, it’s a fair bet that the global social movements will once again have the world’s attention. What will we do with this second chance? It’s time to begin imagining how to connect our issues.

So as not to lay this on anybody else, I’m going to explore this by means of the most popular topic in my own project–namely student debt–and the least, which would be climate change. How can we avoid being co-opted on the former and ignoring the latter?  No answers, no demands, just questions for the Spring.

Student debt has become a viral topic in the past four months. Barely mentioned in the media until recently, it was theme of the week in the presidential and congressional elections. And what was until this week a mostly OWS slogan is now in the mix:

Romney Super PAC ad

Yes, Mitt Romney’s Super PAC called American Crossroads has used the Occupy Student Debt slogan in an attack ad against Obama. The quote marks in this still I made from their video suggest that they even know where it comes from. The theme of the ad is that while Obama is off being a “celebrity,” real problems have been mounting for American young people.

Obama has indeed done little to mitigate the student debt crisis, although the subject was one of his most reliable applause lines in 2008. Romney has no solution at all, certainly not the one proposed by OSDC: free public education. He knows Obama won’t argue for anything like that. If this meme goes viral across the Right, we risk losing one of the most effective OWS projects.

On the other hand, from micro to macro, climate change is  dropping out of sight in Occupy. When I post about it, as I noticed when I did finally look at the stats before going to Madison, readership plummets. In the Occupy global action week coming up in mid-May, climate is not mentioned at all, no doubt for fear of this alienating effect.

A news item this week seemed to encapsulate this dilemma. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, workers at a French steel plant owned by the multinational giant ArcelorMittal  have been occupying it to try and prevent its closure. However, an article in Le Monde this week clarified why the plant is not opened or closed.

This is a bit complicated, so here’s the takeaway: the steel producers are using climate change carbon credits to make a load of money for doing nothing. In more detail: under the terms of the European Union carbon trading agreement, companies were given a “free” level of pollution in 2005. Emissions would have to be paid for if they exceeded this level but a credit could be achieved by reducing them below it. ArcelorMittal has “reduced” its emissions by simply closing its plants. While some of its credits have been stored, others have been cashed in, allowing them to make $140 million in 2010: for doing nothing at all.

So if François Hollande wins the presidential election and gives ArcelorMittal an incentive to reopen the plant, it will have to be sufficiently large to exceed this free money and all the costs of actually producing. That’s not allowed by the “market,” the same market that gave all these credits to ArcelorMittal in the first place. They can cash them in, or hold the French government to ransom for a few jobs, with any actual steel production being carried out in India without tiresome regulations.

Here we see the pincer movement of financialized capital. The most widely accepted solution to the financial crisis from the Paul Krugman wing of the Democratic Party to the left is economic growth. For the green left, however, growth means more carbon emissions and accelerated climate change. For anarchists, it’s now taken as read that the current permanent expansion of capitalism must collapse because there are not infinite resources to exploit.

However, if you can capitalize total inactivity at technically an infinite rate of profit–and don’t forget all those tax deductions for the declining hardware and the savings on salary–this implosion may allow for a continued rate of profit even if there is widespread climate change.

I don’t have a simple answer to these dilemmas. I do think it suggests that a new form of affinity group is going to have to think how to cross the lines of the existing working groups to imagine a form of systemic critique that goes beyond the perhaps self-evident anti-capitalism. And that’s precisely as not simple as it sounds. The upside is that the space created by the activism of May gives enough time to get on it.

Occupy the Global (Cold War) Imaginary

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One of the most resistant spaces to the global Occupy movement is the global imaginary, by which I mean the way in which we imagine the planet. While the push-back against financial inequality has been very successful, with the 99% vs. one per cent divide now part of the global political vocabulary, we have not succeeded in framing an alternative means of visualizing the planet. That space remains occupied by the Cold War imaginary of binary divides between hostile camps, all underpinned by the threat of nuclear war.

The Nagasaki bomb, 1945

What sets the Occupy way of visualizing against neoliberal financial globalization is its willingness to bring issues together, to embrace complexity and to see patterns of relation. Yet in the case of the largest system of all, Earth, we have failed to shift attention towards the reckless destruction of liveable space in the name of profit. Strikingly, any effort to discuss the degradation of the Earth-system is designated even by radicals as a depressing subject–this from people who love nothing more than to read long essays describing how capitalism is collapsing, poverty increasing, employment disappearing.

So it’s not the depressing nature of the subject as such. It’s the sense that this subject is itself, as it were, futile because the imagined destruction of the planet is already occupied by nuclear weapons and the world they have produced. In this view, the military are the indispensable key to continued safety and it has been an article of neoliberal faith to maintain massive military budgets, while cutting all other areas of government. Thus we imagine we are “safe.” We have to expose this old idea for the peculiar hodgepodge of 1950s militarism and 1980s economics that it is, while espousing the new synthesis of science, anti-poverty, pro-diversity that has emerged in the past decade as a path to a real security that does not depend on world-ending weapons.

The Cold War spectres continue to haunt the earth. Consider how Romney has cited Russia as the greatest enemy of the U. S. More saliently, reflect how overwhelming the transnational governing consensus that Iran must not be “allowed” to acquire nuclear weapons has remained. This is old-fashioned Cold War doctrine: nuclear proliferation is bad, not because nuclear weapons are bad, but because it undermines the deterrence of the superpowers. In short, if “small” nuclear powers might actually use their weapons, then the deterrence of massive arsenals counts for nothing. How that works in the post-Soviet era no one seems to have tried to work out.

The evocation of the nuclear activates a form of pre-emptive dread, in which many of us have literally been schooled. It has been visualized many times but perhaps the 1964 “Daisy” ad for President Johnson did it best.

“Daisy” reminds us of “s/he loves me, s/he loves me not” and all the other binary games that you can play like this. The choice here is simple: to die or not to die. The ad mobilizes a fantasy that by voting we can affect our own destiny in the geopolitics of nuclear weapons. For many, the current crisis in the Earth-system lacks such a vision of solution and so it’s “depressing.” Now the International Council for Science has issued a “State of the Planet Declaration” that allows for us to imagine a different geo-politics. Here are its opening three clauses:

1. Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk. Without urgent action, we could face threats to water, food, biodiversity and other critical resources: these threats risk intensifying economic, ecological and social crises…
2. In one lifetime our increasingly interconnected and interdependent economic, social, cultural and political systems have come to place pressures on the environment that may cause fundamental changes in the Earth system and move us beyond safe natural boundaries. But the same interconnectedness provides the potential for solutions… required for a truly sustainable planet.
3. The defining challenge of our age is to safeguard Earth’s natural processes to ensure the well-being of civilization while eradicating poverty, reducing conflict over resources, and supporting human and ecosystem health.

“Saving civilization” can now be presented as practical the task of ending poverty and the conceptual work of thinking human and non-human systems as being so intertwined as to form one co-dependent network.

You can’t vote for this. You can’t expect the United Nations to enact it. You have to perform this set of changes and it begins very simply by refusing the global and imagining the Earth-system.

Another Brain Is Possible

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Immaterial labor, the knowledge economy, service-based industries, call them what you will but they depend on the brain, in the same way that factory labor depends on the body. It is, then, a symptom of the suicidal autoimmune capitalism that has been forged in the past thirty years that fish, the single food most associated with improving the brain, actually kills it. Our brains ourselves demand a new global system as the precondition for our survival.

Nearly all varieties of fish, long exalted as brain food, contain significant quantities of mercury. The mercury arrives in the ocean as a by-product of coal, used above all in power stations. Washed out of the air into rivers by rain, it accumulates in the sea. It is absorbed by fish and more particularly by carnivorous fish. So the higher up the food chain you go the worse the problem becomes, because fish that eat other carnivorous fish get more concentrated doses. By the time you get to top-end carnivores like tuna, shark, marlin and swordfish, the levels are very noticeable.

But there’s no such thing as a “safe” level. Mercury doesn’t simply harm the brain–it makes it disappear. Here’s a video from the University of Calgary that shows how brain neurons wither and disappear in the presence of mercury–at 2 mins 30 if you want to skip ahead

So let’s say you don’t really worry about rising temperatures, drought and the other indices of climate change: do you care that you’re killing your brain by what you eat?

The dots are easy to join. A fossil fuel based energy economy puts increasing amounts of mercury into the biosphere, which concentrate in the bodies of fish. This toxicity makes the flesh of humanity’s last remaining wild food source unambiguously hazardous for consumption. It threatens the very possibility of human creativity itself. This problem is easy to describe but cannot be solved in the present economic system. Increasingly the choice is between sustaining the greatest number of human lives or the largest profit. The change for the former cannot be achieved by policy, by interstate treaty or by the market. It will either happen post-catastrophe or by systemic change.

Surely this is the usual alarmist stuff from environmentalists we have become so adept at ignoring? Last year Time journalist Bryan Walsh had himself tested for mercury–and found his levels at twice the government recommended limit. He bizarrely adds that this is not a problem for men, presumably because they don’t use their brains. Under heavy pressure from fossil fuel industry and fishing alike, government has simply caved and designated mercury a risk for women and children only.

Still not bothered? Now studies are showing that sharks and other top predator fish are contaminated with BMAA, a neurotoxin related to cyanide that accumulate in human flesh:

A growing body of research suggests there may be a connection between exposure to the toxin and the development of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The bacteria that cause the toxin are naturally occurring: perhaps it’s just an indication that we did not evolve expecting to eat sharks and other animals with extensive rows of teeth that live in the open ocean.

Who eats shark anyway?

Shark fins, second row from the top, China Town NYC

Lots of people, that’s who, mostly as shark fin soup, which now stands revealed as the ultimate autoimmune dish. The fins are, even by shark standards, intensely concentrated sources of mercury and BMAA. The soup is eaten to celebrate special occasions or as a luxury item, mostly by Chinese people. I’m not even going to get into the practice of harvesting fins from sharks that are then thrown back into the ocean to die.

Let’s not get a frisson of superiority here if we don’t eat such soups but restrict our choices to more “sensible” fish. So many “forage” fish, the small fish humans don’t eat but larger fish do, have been fished that the species now face serious risk of extinction. What happens to them? Fish farms grind them up and feed them to their animals–what better way could be imagined to intensify the concentration of mercury and BMAA in the food chain? Your reasoned choice for a farmed salmon or whatever else is just as implicated in the collapse of world fish stocks and the toxicity of top-end fish as shark’s fin soup, just in different ways.

As usual, it’s Africans, least involved in any of this, who are paying the highest visible price. Off the coasts of West Africa, huge quantities of forage fish are gathered by European Union supertrawlers that freeze the fish on board. As such fish constitute a vital food source for Africans, the risks of overfishing are literally life and death for subaltern populations. Yet the European fishing industry is more concerned about Chinese boats than the sustaining of local people. Once again, threats to profit are taken more seriously than threats to people.

We like to say another world is possible. Another one is actively being made right now in which wild species of fish will be close to extinction with their few remaining specimens will be too toxic to eat. Human brains and bodies are suffering. Another world is necessary.

 

Occupy on Ice

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Air bubbles in Tenaya Lake, Yosemite

Breathe in. Relax. Do it again. You just engaged in time travel. In the air that you inhaled will have been molecules released by melting glaciers, ice sheets and tundra that previously circulated tens of thousands of years ago. There’s neolithic air in your blood, air that never before passed through a human body. A little uncanny, isn’t it?

Our bodies seem intensely singular at one level, uniquely “us.” At a different scale, they are assemblages of cells, microbes and atoms of varying provenance. These non-human “actants” (to use Bruno Latour’s term) engage with each other in ways that do not impinge on our consciousness but are cognitive actions. Think for example of the operations of what we like to call the immune system. White blood cells “remember” whether a virus or other form is a pathogen they have encountered before or not and act accordingly. You don’t know what’s happening but your body does.

Indulge me a moment. Let’s imagine that the previously frozen air and your body cells are talking: what are they saying to each other? Get your headphones now, preferably some good ones.

The ice, as we all know, is melting. Moving or melting ice generates a remarkable set of sounds. Artist Katie Paterson has created an installation that gives us the sound of the melting Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland–scroll to the bottom of the page and click play. It’s a harmless enough and familiar noise, trickling water, the clink of ice.

The Vatnajokull glacier

The voice of the moving, shifting ice is intense–Cheryl Leonard recorded it this winter in Yosemite–listen here but give it a moment to load, it’s a large file. Or listen to the sound of the Antarctic ice sheet posted by Andreas Bick–it’s the WAV file close to the top and make sure to be listening around 40 seconds in. Check out how DJ Spooky brings together the African-American concepts of “chill” and “ice”–Ice Cube, Ice-T–with the disappearing ice, the nation state, and climate change:

You might say that these sounds are pure signified–a cacophony of overlaid meaning about time, duration, space, human/non-human interactions, melting, movement and more. Or you could say: this is what climate change sounds like.

What does it say? It speaks back to the human empire. It has long been held that the colonized “cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” So it might say:

"These Romans are crazy" Here’s Obelix from the Asterix cartoon (done before there were graphic novels) using his catchphrase “These Romans are crazy.” Some people see this as anti-imperialist pure and simple, others think it’s Gaullist, which at least has the merit of being anti-NATO. Let’s say that it represents anti-transnationalism. The ice is just saying, “these humans are crazy.”

What he said

Anglophone culture has a short answer to that.

In this view, the imperial project brings benefits to all, including the colonized. The muppet known as Rick Santorum has been saying that responding to climate change is wrong because that would be putting earth over humans (ok, he says “man”). For neoliberalism  that would be to put the People’s Front of Judea in charge of the Roman Empire.

Jane Bennet has suggested that a critical “division of the sensible” is the distinction between “life” and “matter,” the latter often qualified as “mere” or “mute” matter. We can no more hear what the ice in our bodies is saying than the Roman senators could interpret the “noise” made by the plebs.

Rome fell, of course. The human empire is teetering. No statistics: I am told that is depressing. Just breathe.

Law? Or Theatre?

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Another day, another few notches out of the right to assembly in Bloombergistan. A march against police violence was broken up  by–guess what? police violence. Learning from these repeated encounters, an action protesting climate change at the U. N. was a theater of the absurd of arrests, in which the cops had to arrest people claiming to be the one percent.

Cops playing their role at Disrupt Dirty Power

If you’re on the right kind of Twitter and Facebook feeds, you’ll have heard about the unnecessary use of force on the police brutality march. The use of some switchbacks by the marchers in NoHo seemed to irritate the police, who were themselves trying to prevent the march from reaching Union Square about a mile to the north. Of course, it’s not illegal to walk to Union Square but since the middle of this week it has suddenly become illegal to have a rally there, according to mysterious new “rules” that popped up overnight.

In a series of arrests was one of Messiah Hamid, a 16 year-old woman with her shirt lifted by the NYPD. Many present and looking at the photographs were reminded of a similar photograph, known as “the woman with the blue bra”, showing her being dragged away by the military in Egypt. I’m choosing not to reproduce the photograph of Hamid’s arrest because she’s a minor but there were many such scuffles (see below).

Just another violent arrest of a minor in NYC

The sustainability action called Disrupt Dirty Power was designed to force police to arrest participants as part of the action. A group dressed as business executives marched onto the grass at the United Nations and started proclaiming their adherence to free market principles and the pursuit of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Nukes. A ridiculously disproportionate number of police were present and leaped in to make the arrests. However, they had forgotten to bring their van, so the performers had a perfect stage to expound their views to assembled photographers and live streamers.

"The One Percent" address the media

The Disrupt Dirty Power action had a strong narrative to it that was about more than reacting to recent events. It suggested a “join the dots” strategy, in which the connections between social and ecological crisis and the profit-first motif of neoliberalism are visualized. It begins to look as if non-violent civil disobedience with the presumption of arrest is emerging as the next stage of the American Spring. Perhaps it’s better than volunteers who have been trained in civil disobedience should be those arrested than random teenagers. At the same time, is this law? or theatre? If law is a set of agreed principles  y which a society is organized, what’s happening in New York is not the rule of law. It’s an improvised way to maintain law enforcement, which is altogether different.

The contradictions in what the police are doing need to be stressed even in the U. N. action that was designed to involve arrests. For their intervention was so rapid that the second part of the action in which the 99% celebrated the just arrest of the one percent had to be conducted from across First Avenue.

The 99 percent

It’s not even clear under whose authority arrests are made at the U. N. which has autonomy–as anyone who has tried to park in New York knows–but is also subject to local and Federal law. One U. N. security person was present but was about as important as a Vichy cop would have been to the Gestapo. No comparison intended of course.

The action was intended to end with a projection onto the United Nations building by the intrepid OWS projections team. Somehow the police got wind of this and warned organizers that any projection would lead not only to the arrest of those involved but the impounding of the vehicle from which the projections are now done. In what sense is it a crime to project light onto buildings? Vacant buildings at that. By what law do the police get to confiscate expensive equipment and threaten to do so before it is used?

The law is a theatre it is a singularly monotonous one. There is only one line: “order.” The scenes are all the same. So every night at midnight in Union Square when the police put up their new barricade, the Occupiers stage a performance. Tonight: Animal Farm!

 

M17: Why Occupy is Hunger, Climate Change and GMO food

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Storm over GMO corn

OWS and the campaigns against hunger, against GMO food and against climate change are different ways of saying the same thing: capitalism is an autoimmune disease that is now threatening the viability of its host. Occupy signifies here that these issues cannot be contained, let alone solved, by the normative political process, whether at national or interstate level.

It’s important to recognize how far things have gone in the past year. Harper’s magazine tells us:

  • there has been a 33% decline on newspaper mentions of “global warming” and “climate change” in 2011
  • Obama used the phrase “climate change” once in the State of the Union but mentioned “energy” 23 times.

Autoimmune capitalism believes it can afford the planetary degradation that is now under way worldwide and is indifferent to it. European airlines filed this week to be exempted from the EU carbon levy because of a possible trade war with China: in short, climate can only be a priority if it has no impact on capital.

By the same token, there was barely a ripple when Climate Central reported on sea level rise this week:

At three quarters of the 55 sites analyzed, century levels are higher than 4 feet above the high tide line. Yet across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide. In 285 cities and towns, more than half the population lives on land below this line, potential victims of increasingly likely climate-induced coastal flooding. 3.7 million live less than 1 meter above the tide.

There’s a 1 in 6 chance that the Battery in New York City will flood– not far into the future but by 2020. Zuccotti will become waterfront. You can only assume that people either think that these reports are false or that when they happen, there will be benefits because 5 million people will need new homes.

As I’ve often argued, the reason there’s a global movement of which Occupy is the U. S. variant is the interface of climate change and hunger. In 2008, a global food crisis was caused by the interplay of climate-change induced drought;  the switch to biofuels caused by climate concerns reducing the food supply; and the creation of the Goldman Sachs Commodity Futures Index.

This index was allowed to trade in futures as of 1999, on the principle “long only,” i.e. that prices would always rise. Investors included: Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. Foreign Affairs magazine commentator Frederick Kauffman notes:

In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.

What that means is an 80% price rise from 2003-8 that has kept moving upwards. One half of the world’s population spends 50% of their income on food. The real consequences were so-called food riots in 37 countries–they should have been called anti-autoimmune capitalist riots.

From here we can summarize:

•2008 food crisis added 40 million to world hungry list
•2008: 943 million hungry
•2009: One billion hungry
•2008: 100 million Africans move into poverty
•A one-meter sea level rise, now regarded as inevitable, will destroy the Nile Delta
This already disastrous situation is now being exacerbated by the intervention of genetically-modified plants into Africa. The African Center for Biosafety, based in South Africa, reported this week:

Between January 2008 and January 2012, the cost of a 5kg bag [of] super maize meal increased by a staggering 83%. In 2007, the poorest 30% of the population spent approximately 22% of their monthly income on food, including on maize–a staple. The latest figures from January 2012 put this at nearly 39%.

In South Africa, Monsanto has cornered 77% of the seed corn market that generated over R1 billion in revenues, while one in four South Africans is “food insecure,” or hungry, in plain English.

 

In Europe this week, researchers showed that both the genetically modified component of MON810 Bt corn and the Roundup that is sprayed onto that corn kill human kidney cells. So in a particularly telling instance of autoimmune capitalism, the patented seed will either kill you by starvation because you can’t afford to grow it; or kill you by kidney disease because you emmiserate yourself to eat it.

Oh, and by the way? There are plenty of Roundup resistant plants in the U. S. now anyway, about twenty at last count. How could this have been predicted? Because Monsanto found the gene in plants growing downwind of its filthy Louisiana chemicals plant in the first place.

What to do?
For you: do not eat GMO based products–which is likely to mean anything with soy or corn in it, which is to say just about all food industry products. Go organic, go local, grass-fed meat and poultry only.

 

For all of us: be at or with the March Against Hunger tomorrow M17:

 

Seeing against the state

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One night during the Paris Commune of 1871, Louise Michel found that she and an African veteran of the Papal Guard were the only two defenders of a key fort. To pass the time, he posed the question

–What effect does the life we lead produce in you?

–The effect of seeing a shore we must reach, she replied.

–Myself, he replied, it gives me the effect of reading a book with images.

These replies were in “reverse” order to what a certain modernism might lead us to expect. The African soldier gave a reply moving from print culture towards a cinematic imaginary, whereas the French poet created an image of a panoramic landscape that would exceed any one person’s capacity to see. These are deceptively simple images, then, by which to visualize what the Zapatistas would call the “walk” that the Commune was taking.

By contrast, the anthropologist James C. Scott has highlighted the way in which “seeing like a state” means a certain abstracting, centralizing vision. His first example involves seeing a tree simply as timber, compared to all the other known uses for the wood, bark and even leaves of the tree, let alone its existence as a living ecosystem.

How can we imagine seeing against the state, or better yet as a non-state? In a recently translated collection of the essays of Pierre Clastres, originally published in 1980 offers some perspective from that moment in the 1970s that seems to prefigure our own. Clastres was interested in creating a “political anthropology” and saw what he continued to call “primitive cultures” as being an “anti-production machine.” Rather than understand indigenous societies as pre-capitalist, Clastres presented them as radically different:

When the mirror does not reflect our own likeness, it does not prove there is nothing to perceive.

As in the example above from the Commune, the point is not to reduce alterity to a single image, as the state would do, but to multiply them.

In this sense, “primitive” society will always exist, as what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls

the force of anti-production permanently haunting the productive forces, and as a multiplicity that is non-interiorizable by the planetary mega-machines.

There is always, then, another possible world and it already exists and has existed for a long time. Clastres asks, if we set aside the hierarchical gaze of ethnography, “how are we to finally take seriously” societies where power is not associated with control?

In this question, there are two loud echoes. One is Derrida’s haunting question at the opening of Spectres of Marx: “I would like to learn how to live, finally.” Might we then understand that “finally” as meaning: at the end of the long Western metaphysic that has, since Aristotle, presumed that a separation of the political is the distinguishing mark of the human? Here the further echo is with Rancière’s concept of the “division of the sensible” that he tends to see as very long-lasting. To live, finally, without control would mean living in such a way that “the political” was not a separate domain.

Clastres points to the conquistadores, newly arrived in what they called the Americas:

Noting that the chiefs held no power over the tribes, that one neither commanded here nor obeyed, they declared that these people were not policed, that these were not veritable societies. Savages without faith, law, or king.

It’s easy to draw a parallel with the Commune and Occupy encampments, whose anti-production machines were held equally intolerable by the police of their own time. Less easy, but now more necessary, is to take that seriously and add what Philippe Pignare and Isabelle Stengers call “a sense of dread” to that comparison.

While it’s clear that Occupy might prefigure anti-control and anti-state ways of being to a certain extent, becoming anti-production (meaning anti-growth, anti-seeing-as-a-wealth-producer) and pro-sustaining, every day the work is at hand of enacting that seriously. In Argentina, some groups withdrew from confrontations with the state after 2001, according to Marina Sitrin, precisely to develop such possibilities. In Greece, many local governments have collapsed themselves back into their communities, helping people to resist the new electricity tax surcharge to pay back the banks. That is to say, they have ceased seeing like a state.

In the US we’re a long way from that kind of crisis–but also from that kind of altermodern “primitivism.” Here we don’t want to replicate the capitalist frenzy against the very collapse of Greek society that they helped to create but to mark the multiplicity of viewpoints that are now tenuously available in the crisis. I’m not sure we can see that yet.

This week the island nation of Kiribati (pronounced Kiri-bhass) [above] announced that it is buying land in Fiji for its people to move to after their islands flood because of climate change. These “South Pacific” (actually West Central Pacific) islands have been the Western “vision” of non-productive but plentiful societies since the first encounter in the mid-eighteenth century. Without dread, we are standing by as they disappear. Not one print or television outlet covered the news. We can’t see this as here and now, only as there and then.

So it’s a great thing to see that M17, the six-month anniversary of OWS will feature a march to the memorial for the Irish Famine and a further challenge to Monsanto and global corporate food. More on that tomorrow. Seriously.