The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (10 page)

The bunkers were both prophylactics against physical damage by an alien military and part of the damage that is the mind-set of war, the mind-set
that induces fear and suspicion, that countenances sacrifices, destructions, and the willingness to engage in acts of violence, that damages a society before the enemy ever touches it. The military left radioactive waste behind at Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyards; dozens of rusting, leaking warships in the Mothball Fleet near Benicia; PCBs at 100,000 times the acceptable level, along with dioxins and other chemicals on Treasure Island; and more. The Headlands and much of the rest of the GGNRA got off lightly, larded only with cement and rust, not with chemicals and radiation. What all these areas have in common is their status as monuments to public expenditure by those in charge of protecting us. There is, for example, the
Sea Shadow
, a stealth ship built at extraordinary expense in the 1980s and then abandoned without ever being used or even useful. The prototype is in the Mothball Fleet. It is a corollary to the lack of money for libraries and schools in towns like Richmond, whose African-American population mostly arrived in World War II for shipyard jobs and stayed even when the economy withered, despite the growth of the Chevron refineries there that have been refining Iraqi crude since early in the war there. Chevron, whose board member Condoleezza Rice became our secretary of state and led us into that war, Rice, who is back at Stanford, Stanford that helped generate Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley that has done so much to develop the new technologies of war. War is everywhere for those who have eyes to see, but in some places it’s hard to miss.

It is good that the bunkers are in the beautiful open space of the coast and good that one of the region’s native sons, Alex Fradkin, has photographed them so eloquently. They should be there; we should pause amid the myriad pleasures that this Mediterranean climate and protected landscape afford to contemplate the presence of death and our own implication in the business. Until something profound changes in the United States, war will never be far away, and even on the most paradisical meander we do well to pause and remember this.

2011

CLIMATE CHANGE IS VIOLENCE

If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it—by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear super-powers—the United States and Russia—still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.

So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.

Or so I thought when I received a press release from a climate group announcing that “scientists say there is a direct link between changing climate and an increase in violence.” What the scientists actually said, in a not-so-newsworthy article in
Nature
a few years ago, is that there is higher conflict in the tropics in El Niño years and that perhaps this will scale up to make our age of climate change also an era of civil and international conflict.

The message is that ordinary people will behave badly in an era of intensified climate change. All this makes sense, unless you go back to the premise and note that climate change is itself violence. Extreme, horrific, long-term, widespread violence.

Climate change is anthropogenic—caused by human beings, some
Climate Change Is Violence much more than others. We know the consequences of that change: the acidification of oceans and decline of many species in them, the slow disappearance of island nations such as the Maldives, increased flooding, drought, crop failure leading to food-price increases and famine, increasingly turbulent weather. (Think Hurricane Sandy and the recent typhoon in the Philippines and heat waves that kill elderly people by the tens of thousands.)

Climate change is violence.

So if we want to talk about violence and climate change, then let’s talk about climate change as violence. Rather than worrying about whether ordinary human beings will react turbulently to the destruction of the very means of their survival, let’s worry about that destruction—and their survival. Of course, water failure, crop failure, flooding, and more will lead to mass migration and climate refugees—they already have—and this will lead to conflict. Those conflicts are being set in motion now.

You can regard the Arab Spring, in part, as a climate conflict: the increase in wheat prices was one of the triggers for that series of revolts that changed the face of northernmost Africa and the Middle East. On the one hand, you can say, how nice if those people had not been hungry in the first place. On the other, how can you not say, how great is it that those people stood up against being deprived of sustenance and hope? And then you have to look at the systems that created that hunger—the enormous economic inequalities in places such as Egypt and the brutality used to keep down the people at the lower levels of the social system, as well as the weather.

People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education—these things are also governed by economic means and government policy. That’s what the revolt called Occupy Wall Street was against.

Climate change will increase hunger as food prices rise and food production falters, but we already have widespread hunger on Earth, and much of it is due not to the failures of nature and farmers, but to systems of distribution. Almost 16 million children in the United States now live with
hunger, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and that is not because the vast, agriculturally rich United States cannot produce enough to feed all of us. We are a country whose distribution system is itself a kind of violence.

Climate change is not suddenly bringing about an era of equitable distribution. I suspect people will be revolting in the coming future against what they revolted against in the past: the injustices of the system. They should revolt, and we should be glad they do, if not so glad that they need to. (Though one can hope they’ll recognize that violence is not necessarily where their power lies.) One of the events prompting the French Revolution was the failure of the 1788 wheat crop, which made bread prices skyrocket and the poor go hungry. The insurance against such events is often thought to be more authoritarianism and more threats against the poor, but that’s only an attempt to keep a lid on what’s boiling over; the other way to go is to turn down the heat.

The same week during which I received that ill-thought-out press release about climate and violence, Exxon Mobil Corporation issued a policy report. It makes for boring reading, unless you can make the dry language of business into pictures of the consequences of those acts undertaken for profit. Exxon says, “We are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become ‘stranded.’ We believe producing these assets is essential to meeting growing energy demand worldwide.”

Stranded assets that mean carbon assets—coal, oil, gas still underground—would become worthless if we decided they could not be extracted and burned in the near future. Because scientists say that we need to leave most of the world’s known carbon reserves in the ground if we are to go for the milder rather than the more extreme versions of climate change. Under the milder version, countless more people, species, and places will survive. In the best-case scenario, we damage the Earth less. We are currently wrangling about how much to devastate the Earth.

In every arena, we need to look at industrial-scale and systemic violence, not just the hands-on violence of the less powerful. When it comes to climate change, this is particularly true. Exxon has decided to bet that we can’t make the corporation keep its reserves in the ground, and the
company is reassuring its investors that it will continue to profit off the rapid, violent, and intentional destruction of the Earth.

That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field—and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence against places and species, as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

2014

DRY LANDS

The Colorado River and Hydrological Madness of the West

The supply of stories has perhaps been the American West’s only reliable bounty. The difficult thing has been finding people to notice them, let alone tell them well. The Indian wars, still unfinished as tribes continue to struggle for rights, territory, and cultural survival; the resource rushes, the Gold Rush in particular, which turned San Francisco into a cosmopolitan city standing alone in the wilderness; the once astonishingly abundant salmon runs that sustained soil and trees, as well as birds, bears, and humans; the timber wars; the rangeland wars; the radical labor and environmental movements; the attitudes people adopted toward a harsh, unfamiliar, often-sublime landscape; the evolution of European cultures in a non-European terrain; and the arrival of Asian and Latin American immigrants to shape a hybrid culture: all these have had their occasional historians, though most Americans were raised to believe that history happened somewhere else. The San Francisco Public Library has an overflowing case of books on the East’s Civil War, but only a handful on the war that transferred a million square miles or so of Mexico to the United States, including California and most of what we now call the West.

The central thread in this story of the West is the story of the Colorado River and the attempts to determine what dreams it licenses and which must be left unwatered as it snakes through much of the major nonfiction of the West. The river begins in Colorado with tributaries reaching up into Wyoming, and they gather force and volume as they rush through the magnificent canyons they carved in Utah and Arizona, through Nevada’s southern tip and down California’s backside to—well, thanks to Yankee rapacity, the river doesn’t usually reach the Gulf of California or water much of Mexico anymore. It’s the story of the intermountain West: could
it be domesticated for agriculture and settlement, or would its inhabitants become feral, nomadic peoples scattered lightly in a belt of un-European terrain that would divide the West Coast from the sedentary, verdant East? It’s the story of the Hoover Dam and the rise of the extraordinary hydraulic engineering that since the 1920s has come to alter the world from Iceland to India, largely for the worse. Of the rise of industrial tourism as the Grand Canyon became part of the railroad-based restaurant and hotel empire of Fred Harvey. Of the rise of the modern environmental movement: the evolution of ideas about landscape, aesthetics, the public good, and the battles between a boomtown, resource-rush mentality and a minority more interested in long-term planning.

And it’s the story of the rise of the big cities of the Southwest, notably Phoenix and Las Vegas, whose optimism is inscribed in their names (the immortal bird whose name will surely become ironic during the course of this century and the
vegas
, or meadows, watered by an aquifer that Vegas sucked dry early in its short history). And of the City of Angels, whose situation is not quite as precarious as that of the desert towns, but whose thirst has long outstripped its regional resources and reached the Colorado River, far to its east.

T. S. Eliot’s Mississippi was a “strong brown god.” The Colorado River is more like a ruddy writhing serpent. Or was, since the snake has now been chopped into segments by dams, notably by Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam south of Vegas, each with a gigantic reservoir backed up behind it. Even its red color, its
colorado
, has changed; the sandstone sediment settles behind Glen Canyon Dam, and what was once a hot red river emerges as a cool green one, too cool for many of its species of endangered fish. Occasionally a thunderstorm over a tributary sends down enough sediment to turn it red again for a day or two. Along the way, the river is grabbed and squeezed for water to make the cities explode in the dry lands and to allow the endless arid-land agriculture to produce iceberg lettuces and rice and alfalfa and cotton fields, though in some of those places there is hardly enough rainfall to raise an agave plant.

The water is heavily subsidized so that farmers—mostly large-scale agribusiness enterprises, not Jeffersonian yeomen—can also collect subsidies
to grow stuff that would grow better in lusher places elsewhere. Eighty percent of the Colorado River’s water goes to agriculture. Twenty percent of California’s agricultural water goes to grow low-value alfalfa. The river, in its climate change–driven decline, will strangle all these projects and make a mockery of the two great dams and the reservoirs that were once signs of triumph over it and over nature. The reservoirs and dams are failing now, long on silt, short on water, products of the shortsightedness that has made the West a place littered with projects that seemed like a good idea at the time.