Dreaming the World

A cloudy, chill day; the rain has stopped for the moment. We may have snow later but it will likely not stick. Last Tuesday I awoke to a brilliant reddish sky; sure enough the old mariner’s saying proved correct and by evening we were in the midst of a storm. Hopefully all this rain will replenish the water table.

We have settled firmly into January and February arrives soon. Winter has yet to appear, we continue to set new high temperature records, seemingly weekly; any promise of winter finally coming must be taken with a great deal of skepticism.

I’ve been thinking about the capitalocene and the destruction it has brought. Last night we watched the current episode of All Creatures Great and Small on PBS. The program focused on the destruction of tens of thousands of war horses by the British at the end of WWI, and the impact of that action on those who had cared for and loved the horses. The rationale for the slaughter was that it would cost too much to bring them home; they were expendable even after offering heroic service.

Predictably, I could not get to sleep afterwards. The massacre of the horses, like that of the buffalo, was an act of economic convenience. I guess those who cared for the horses should not have been shocked given the total disregard for life exhibited by the generals who had sent so many men and horses into hopeless, and mortal, combat.

Of course, WWI, like most wars, was irrational, if predictable. And as in most wars, the only ones who profited from it were the arms dealers and black marketers.

The destruction of the horses marked the transition of farming in Britain from small scale, horse drawn, agriculture to what is now factory farming. With the transition from horses to tractors came the destruction of the hedgerows and the near complete disruption of ancient ecosystems, generating the collapse of Britain’s wildlife. Sadly, the destruction continues apace, driven by capital and a growing population.

Recently there has been a good deal of writing about Disaster Capitalism and its impact on individuals, communities, and ecosystems. There’s money to be made from suffering; the result is a form of capitalism that essentially creates disasters in order to generate profits, the impacts of climate change being one example, the destruction of family farming another. (True family farms are much more environmentally friendly than factory farms.).

It seems to me one cannot separate disaster capitalism from colonialism, as if one looks at the past five hundred years through the disaster capitalism lens, colonialism and its impacts come into focus as a program of systemic violence against people and ecosystems, all in the name of profit. Looking forward, the capitalocene promises an accelerating cycle of destruction, apparent innovation, and ecosystem collapse, resulting in incomprehensible suffering.

Yet the impacts of the marriage of disaster capitalisms and colonialism remain essentially invisible to many. Think for a moment about the frequent truck commercials aired on tv, in which a vehicle tears wantonly through wilderness. The commercials promise fun and power over Nature but ignore the inevitable environmental impact of those fun rides. (I suspect they also fuel the problem of dirt bikes going off path and destroying vulnerable ecosystems in our local parks, making spring without wildflowers more likely.)

Disaster capitalism flourishes by selling the destruction of the very communities our lives depend on. Strangely, like so much evil, it does so while remaining invisible in plain sight.