This Changes Everything (28 page)

Amnesty International has called the camp on Nauru “cruel” and “degrading,” and a 2013 report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees concluded that those conditions, “coupled with the protracted period spent there by some
asylum-seekers, raise serious issues about their compatibility with international human rights law, including the prohibition against torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Then, in March 2014, a former Salvation Army employee named Mark Isaacs, who had been stationed at the camp, published a tell-all memoir titled
The Undesirables.
He wrote about men who had survived wars and treacherous
voyages losing all will to live on Nauru, with one man resorting to swallowing cleaning fluids, another driven mad and barking like a dog. Isaacs likened the camp to “death factories,” and said in an interview that it is about “taking resilient men and grinding them into the dust.” On an island that itself was systematically ground to dust, it’s a harrowing image. As harrowing as enlisting
the people who could very well be the climate refugees of tomorrow to play warden to the political and economic refugees of today.
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Reviewing the island’s painful history, it strikes me that so much of what has gone wrong on Nauru—and goes on still—has to do with its location, frequently described as “the middle of nowhere” or, in the words of a 1921
National Geographic
dispatch, “perhaps the
most remote territory in the world,” a tiny dot “in lonely seas.” The nation’s remoteness made it a
convenient trash can—a place to turn the land into trash, to launder dirty money, to disappear unwanted people, and now a place that may be allowed to disappear altogether.
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This is our relationship to much that we cannot easily see and it is a big part of what makes carbon pollution such a stubborn
problem: we can’t see it, so we don’t really believe it exists. Ours is a culture of disavowal, of simultaneously knowing and not knowing—the illusion of proximity coupled with the reality of distance is the trick perfected by the fossil-fueled global market. So we both know and don’t know who makes our goods, who cleans up after us, where our waste disappears to—whether it’s our sewage or
electronics or our carbon emissions.

But what Nauru’s fate tells us is that there is no middle of nowhere, nowhere that doesn’t “count”—and that nothing ever truly disappears. On some level we all know this, that we are part of a swirling web of connections. Yet we are trapped in linear narratives that tell us the opposite: that we can expand infinitely, that there will always be more space to
absorb our waste, more resources to fuel our wants, more people to abuse.

These days, Nauru is in a near constant state of political crisis, with fresh corruption scandals perpetually threatening to bring down the government, and sometimes succeeding. Given the wrong visited upon the nation, the island’s leaders would be well within their rights to point fingers outward—at their former colonial
masters who flayed them, at the investors who fleeced them, and at the rich countries whose emissions now threaten to drown them. And some do. But several of Nauru’s leaders have also chosen to do something else: to hold up their country as a kind of warning to a warming world.

In
The New York Times
in 2011, for instance, then-president Marcus Stephen wrote that Nauru provides “an indispensable
cautionary tale about life in a place with hard ecological limits.” It shows, he claimed, “what can happen when a country runs out of options. The world is headed down a similar path with the relentless burning of coal and oil, which is altering the planet’s climate, melting ice caps, making oceans more acidic and edging us ever closer to a day when no one will be able to take clean water, fertile
soil or abundant food for granted.” In other words, Nauru isn’t the only one digging itself to death; we all are.
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But the lesson Nauru has to teach is not only about the dangers of fossil fuel emissions. It is about the mentality that allowed so many of us, and our ancestors, to believe that we could relate to the earth with such violence in the first place—to dig and drill out the substances
we desired while thinking little of the trash left behind, whether in the land and water where the extraction takes place, or in the atmosphere, once the extracted material is burned. This carelessness is at the core of an economic model some political scientists call “extractivism,” a term originally used to describe economies based on removing ever more raw materials from the earth, usually for
export to traditional colonial powers, where “value” was added. And it’s a habit of thought that goes a long way toward explaining why an economic model based on endless growth ever seemed viable in the first place. Though developed under capitalism, governments across the ideological spectrum now embrace this resource-depleting model as a road to development, and it is this logic that climate
change calls profoundly into question.

Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking. It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continue. Extractivism is the mentality of the mountaintop remover and the old-growth clear-cutter. It is the reduction of life into objects for
the use of others, giving them no integrity or value of their own—turning living complex ecosystems into “natural resources,” mountains into “overburden” (as the mining industry terms the forests, rocks, and streams that get in the way of its bulldozers). It is also the reduction of human beings either into labor to be brutally extracted, pushed beyond limits, or, alternatively, into social burden,
problems to be locked out at borders and locked away in prisons or reservations. In an extractivist economy, the interconnections among these various objectified components of life are ignored; the consequences of severing them are of no concern.

Extractivism is also directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones—places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be
poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed, for the supposed greater good of economic progress. This toxic idea has always been intimately tied to imperialism, with disposable peripheries being harnessed to feed a glittering center, and it is bound up too with notions of racial superiority, because
in order to have sacrifice zones, you need to have people and cultures who count so little that they
are considered deserving of sacrifice. Extractivism ran rampant under colonialism because relating to the world as a frontier of conquest—rather than as home—fosters this particular brand of irresponsibility. The colonial mind nurtures the belief that there is always somewhere else to go to and exploit once the current site of extraction has been exhausted.

These ideas predate industrial-scale
extraction of fossil fuels. And yet the ability to harness the power of coal to power factories and ships is what, more than any single other factor, enabled these dangerous ideas to conquer the world. It’s a history worth exploring in more depth, because it goes a long way toward explaining how the climate crisis challenges not only capitalism but the underlying civilizational narratives about
endless growth and progress within which we are all, in one way or another, still trapped.

If the modern-day extractive economy has a patron saint, the honor should probably go to Francis Bacon. The English philosopher, scientist, and statesman is credited with convincing Britain’s elites to abandon, once and for all, pagan notions of the earth as a life-giving
mother figure to whom we owe respect and reverence (and more than a little fear) and accept the role as her dungeon master. “For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings,” Bacon wrote in
De Augmentis Scientiarum
in 1623, “and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again. . . . Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering
and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his sole object.”
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(Not surprisingly, feminist scholars have filled volumes analyzing the ex–Lord Chancellor’s metaphor choices.)

These ideas of a completely knowable and controllable earth animated not only the Scientific Revolution but, critically, the colonial project as well, which sent ships crisscrossing the
globe to poke and prod and bring the secrets, and wealth, back to their respective crowns. The mood of human invincibility that governed this epoch was neatly encapsulated in
the words of clergyman and philosopher William Derham in his 1713 book
Physico-Theology
: “We can, if need be, ransack the whole globe, penetrate into the bowels of the earth, descend to the bottom of the deep, travel to the
farthest regions of this world, to acquire wealth.”
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And yet despite this bravado, throughout the 1700s, the twin projects of colonialism and industrialization were still constrained by nature on several key fronts. Ships carrying both slaves and the raw materials they harvested could sail only when winds were favorable, which could lead to long delays in the supply chain. The factories that
turned those raw materials into finished products were powered by huge water wheels. They needed to be located next to waterfalls or rapids which made them dependent on the flow and levels of rivers. As with high or low winds at sea, an especially dry or wet spell meant that working hours in the textile, flour, and sugar mills had to be adjusted accordingly—a mounting annoyance as markets expanded
and became more global.

Many water-powered factories were, by necessity, spread out around the countryside, near bodies of fast-moving water. As the Industrial Revolution matured and workers in the mills started to strike and even riot for better wages and conditions, this decentralization made factory owners highly vulnerable, since quickly finding replacement workers in rural areas was difficult.

Beginning in 1776, a Scottish engineer named James Watt perfected and manufactured a power source that offered solutions to all these vulnerabilities. Lawyer and historian Barbara Freese describes Watt’s steam engine as “perhaps the most important invention in the creation of the modern world”—and with good reason.
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By adding a separate condenser, air pump, and later a rotary mechanism to an
older model, Watt was able to make the coal-fired steam engine vastly more powerful and adaptable than its predecessors. In contrast, the new machines could power a broad range of industrial operations, including, eventually, boats.

For the first couple of decades, the new engine was a tough sell. Water power, after all, had a lot going for it compared with coal. For one thing, it was free, while
coal needed to be continually re-purchased. And contrary to the widespread belief that the steam engine provided more energy than water wheels, the two were actually comparable, with the larger wheels
packing several times more horsepower than their coal-powered rivals. Water wheels also operated more smoothly, with fewer technical breakdowns, so long as the water was flowing. “The transition
from water to steam in the British cotton industry did not occur because water was scarce, less powerful, or more expensive than steam,” writes Swedish coal expert Andreas Malm. “To the contrary, steam gained supremacy
in spite of water being abundant, at least as powerful, and decidedly cheaper
.”
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As Britain’s urban population ballooned, two factors tipped the balance in favor of the steam
engine. The first was the new machine’s insulation from nature’s fluctuations: unlike water wheels, steam engines worked at the same rate all the time, so long as there was coal to feed them and the machinery wasn’t broken. The flow rates of rivers were of no concern. Steam engines also worked anywhere, regardless of the geography, which meant that factory owners could shift production from more remote
areas to cities like London, Manchester, and Lancaster, where there were gluts of willing industrial workers, making it far easier to fire troublemakers and put down strikes. As an 1832 article written by a British economist explained, “The invention of the steam-engine has relieved us from the necessity of building factories in inconvenient situations merely for the sake of a waterfall.” Or
as one of Watt’s early biographers put it, the generation of power “will no longer depend, as heretofore, on the most inconstant of natural causes—on atmospheric influences.”
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Similarly, when Watt’s engine was installed in a boat, ship crews were liberated from having to adapt their journeys to the winds, a development that rapidly accelerated the colonial project and the ability of European
powers to easily annex countries in distant lands. As the Earl of Liverpool put it in a public meeting to memorialize James Watt in 1824, “Be the winds friendly or be they contrary, the power of the Steam Engine overcomes all difficulties. . . . Let the wind blow from whatever quarter it may, let the destination of our force be to whatever part of the world it may, you have the power and the means,
by the Steam Engine, of applying that force at the proper time and in the proper manner.”
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Not until the advent of electronic trading would commerce feel itself so liberated from the constraints of living on a planet bound by geography and governed by the elements.

Unlike the energy it replaced, power from fossil fuel always required
sacrifice zones—whether in the black lungs of the coal miners
or the poisoned waterways surrounding the mines. But these prices were seen as worth paying in exchange for coal’s intoxicating promise of freedom from the physical world—a freedom that unleashed industrial capitalism’s full force to dominate both workers and other cultures. With their portable energy creator, the industrialists and colonists of the 1800s could now go wherever labor was cheapest
and most exploitable, and wherever resources were most plentiful and valuable. As the author of a steam engine manual wrote in the mid-1830s, “Its mighty services are always at our command, whether in winter or in summer, by day or by night—it knows of no intermission but what our wishes dictate.”
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Coal represented, in short, total domination, of both nature and other people, the full realization
of Bacon’s dream at last. “Nature can be conquered,” Watt reportedly said, “if we can but find her weak side.”
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