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, by some much more than by 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 of the recent hurricanes in Houston, New York, Puerto Rico; the fires in California and Australia; the typhoons 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, crop failure, drought, flooding, and more will continue to lead—as they already have—to mass migration and climate refugees, 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 the 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 at 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 governed also by economic means and government policy. 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 US 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 inequitable distribution. I suspect people will be revolting against in the future 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. 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 alternative is to turn down the heat.
The same week 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 means that carbon assets—coal, oil, gas still underground—would become worthless if we decided they could not be extracted and burned in the near future. Scientists advise 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, living species, 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, 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 mollusks: scallops, oysters, or 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 living species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by its true 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.
Blood on the Foundation
(2006)
The place where the teenage twins were murdered was beautiful, and the men who killed them and their uncle were to become among the most celebrated in the United States. But on that Sunday, June 28, 1846, the murder site just north of San Francisco was not in the United States. It, like the rest of California and the entire Southwest, was still Mexico, and this is why the two de Haro boys, Francisco and Ramón, were shot down in cold blood along with their elderly uncle, José de la Reyes Berreyessa.
I have imagined it as an image often enough I now see it: the three men standing up against the blue water of San Francisco Bay, wearing serapes, carrying saddles, startled, then stunned, then dead, one by one, as the gunman picked them off. There’s something about those three figures against the water of the pristine bay, stark and symbolic. Blue water. Gold hills. Three upright against the beauty of the place. Then three bodies lying crumpled on the shore. It’s the kind of death sung about in ballads, the kind of death that paintings are made of. No one has made much of this one, though San Rafael–born poet Robert Hass mentioned their deaths in his 1970 poem “Palo Alto: The Marshes (for Mariana Richardson 1830–1899).”
Some accounts put the murder scene at Point San Pedro, the semi-rustic peninsula jutting into the bay; some put it closer to Mission San Rafael, in what is now the town center. All the accounts agree that the three Mexican citizens had rowed across from Point San Pablo, north of present-day Berkeley. News in those days traveled at the speed of a horseman or a boat, and news of the seizure of Northern California’s administrator, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, in Sonoma on June 14 may not have reached many of his fellow Californios—as the Mexican citizens of Alta, or upper, California were called. Berreyessa, however, had heard that his son José de los Santos Berreyessa, the alcade (or mayor) of Sonoma, had been taken prisoner and had rowed over with his nephews to investigate.
The little war had been brewing for a while. President James Polk had major territorial ambition, and he had sent emissary Thomas O. Larkin to encourage the Californios to defect (with their territory) to the United States. At the same time, he had pushed Great Britain to settle the dispute over the Pacific Northwest, acquiring what is now Oregon and Washington for the United States, as well as annexing the newly independent (from Mexico) Texas and starting what our school textbooks call the Mexican-American War. It might more accurately be called the War on Mexico, because we started it. When it was done, Mexico reluctantly ceded nearly half its territory—more than half a million square miles, including what is now western New Mexico and Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and a bit of Wyoming.
Huge swaths of land—which really belonged to the Native nations tha
t had been there long before Spain, Mexico, or Polk—transferred title in those years, and the United States assumed its modern coast-to-coast shape. But the Bear Flag Revolt wasn’t epic or heroic, just a strange squabble that melded into the war against Mexico. It began when a number of Yankee settlers near Sutter Buttes in the Central Valley, inflamed by rumors that a small army of Mexicans was coming to drive out the illegal aliens—the Americans—decided to jump the gun and seize the place. They set out in the second week of June, recruiting as they went, so that about thirty of them stole into Sonoma’s plaza at dawn on June 14.
There, the illegal aliens stormed Vallejo’s home and took him hostage. Some wore buckskin pants, some coyote-fur hats; some had no shoes. One account describes them as “a marauding band of horse thieves, trappers, and runaway sailors.” Vallejo was a man of culture, a rancher, and a reluctant governor, not averse to being annexed by the United States but not inclined to become a prisoner or a second-class citizen. It was his open immigration policy that had created the problem in the first place. They raised a flag with a bear so badly drawn that some of the Mexicans thought it was a pig. A better version remains on the California flag, though the subspecies of grizzly on it became extinct more than eighty years ago. The ironies pile high.
Captain John Charles Frémont, who had entered California illegally with a band of scouts and soldiers, egged on the revolt and then joined it, stealing horses, commandeering supplies, and pretty much doing anything he liked. The morning of June 28, he and his chief scout, Kit Carson, were near the shores of San Rafael when the de Haro twins rowed their uncle across so that he could, by some accounts, visit his son in Sonoma. Carson asked Frémont what to do about these unarmed Californios. Frémont—according to Jasper O’Farrell, who was there—waved his hand and said, “I have got no room for prisoners.” So Carson, from fifty yards away, shot them. As one history relates it, “Ramón was killed as soon as he reached the shore. Francisco then threw himself down upon his brother’s body. Next, a command rang out: ‘Kill the other son of a bitch!’ It was obeyed immediately.” When the uncle asked why the boys had been killed, he was shot down, too. Berreyessa’s son Antonio later ran into a Yankee wearing his father’s serape—the bodies had been stripped of their clothing and left where they lay—and asked Frémont to order its return to him. Frémont refused, so Antonio Berreyessa paid the thief $25 for the garment.
The son remained bitter for the rest of his days. The father of the twins is said to have died of grief. California became part of the United States. Carson, who had participated in a massacre of Klamath tribespeople to the north, would later murder Indians in the Mojave Desert and play a crucial role in the exile of the Navajo and the Mescalero Apache from their homelands. Later he became a popular frontier hero, the subject of many laudatory and partly fictitious books. Frémont’s star rose. He became the 1856 presidential candidate for the newly founded Republican Party. He ran on an antislavery platform, but old scandals, including his commanding the murder of Berreyessa and the de Haros, surfaced. San Francisco surveyor Jasper O’Farrell testified against him in the only firsthand account of the murder, and Frémont failed to carry the state of California. Several more Berreyessa men were murdered by Yankees after the war, and the family lost its vast holdings of Bay Area land. There are far more deaths that history neglects to mention, including the deaths of those crossing the line drawn in the sand after the Mexican-American War. It’s all a reminder of the arbitrariness of borders and the color of justice.
What happened in California more than 170 years ago has everything to do with what is happening now, on the border created then and with the status of Latinos who are often treated as invaders, even when for many of them the story is, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.” There is another monument of a sort to all these characters. Frémont and Vallejo are streets that never quite cross in the northeast of San Francisco. Polk and Larkin run parallel to each other, farther west, crossed by O’Farrell Street. De Haro Street runs across Potrero Hill, farther south in the city, named after the father of the murdered twins, who was also the city’s first mayor. Berreyessa is a man-made lake that arrived on the scene much later. Carson is a pass in the Sierra Nevada, a suburb in Los Angeles, a public school in Las Vegas, and a monument in Santa Fe, while his commander, Frémont, is a city in the East Bay as well as the South Central Los Angeles high school my father graduated from. But these don’t tell the story to those who don’t already know the strange, bloody way California entered the United States.
Death by Gentrification
The Killing of Alex Nieto and the Savaging of San Francisco
(2016)
On what would have been his thirtieth birthday, Alejandro Nieto’s parents left a packed courtroom in San Francisco, shortly before pictures from their son’s autopsy were shown to a jury. The photographs showed what happens when fourteen bullets rip through a person’s head and body. Refugio and Elvira Nieto spent much of the rest of the day sitting on a bench in the windowless hall of the federal building where their civil lawsuit for their son’s wrongful death was being heard.
Alex Nieto was twenty-eight years old when he was killed in the neighborhood where he had spent his whole life. He died in a barrage of bullets fired at him by four San Francisco policemen. There are a few things about his death that everyone agrees on: he was in a hilltop park eating a burrito and tortilla chips, wearing the Taser he owned for his job as a licensed security guard at a nightclub, when someone called 911 to report him, a little after 7 pm on the evening of March 21, 2014. When police officers arrived a few minutes later, they claim Nieto defiantly pointed the Taser at them, that they mistook its red laser light for the laser sights of a gun, and they shot him in self-defense. However, the stories of the four officers contradict one other, as well as some of the evidence, and parts of their stories seem hard to believe.
On the road that curves around the green hilltop of Bernal Heights Park there is an unofficial memorial to Nieto. People walking dogs or running or taking a stroll stop to read the banner, which is pinned by stones to the slope of the hill and surrounded by fresh and artificial flowers. Alex’s father, Refugio, still visits the memorial at least once a day, walking up from his small apartment on the south side of Bernal Hill. Alex Nieto had been visiting the hilltop since he was a child. That evening, March 3, 2016, his parents, joined by friends and supporters, went up there in the dark to bring a birthday cake up to the memorial.
Refugio and Elvira Nieto are dignified, modest people, straight-backed but careworn, who speak eloquently in Spanish and hardly at all in English. They had known each other as poor children in a little town in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico and emigrated separately to the Bay Area in the 1970s, where they met again and married in 1984. They have lived in the same building on the south slope of Bernal Hill ever since. Elvira worked for decades as a housekeeper in San Francisco’s downtown hotels and is now retired. Refugio had worked on the side, but mostly stayed at home as the principal caregiver of Alex and his younger brother, Hector.
In the courtroom, Hector, handsome, somber, with glossy black hair pulled back neatly, sat with his parents most days, not far from the three white and one Asian policemen who killed his brother. That there was a trial at all was a triumph. The city had withheld from family and supporters the full autopsy report and the names of the officers who shot Nieto, and it was months before the key witness overcame his fear of the police to come forward.
Nieto died because a series of white men saw him as a menacing intruder in the place he had spent his whole life. Some of them thought he was possibly a gang member because he was wearing a red jacket. Many Latino boys and men in San Francisco avoid wearing red and blue because they are the colors of two gangs, the Norteños and Sureños—but the colors of San Francisco’s NFL team, the 49ers, are red and gold. Wearing a 49ers jacket in San Francisco is as ordinary as wearing a Saints jersey in New Orleans or a Yankees cap in New
York. That evening, Nieto, who had thick black eyebrows and a closely cropped goatee, was wearing a new-looking 49ers jacket, a black 49ers cap, a white T-shirt, black trousers, and a belt with the holstered Taser on it, under his jacket. (Tasers shoot out wires that deliver an electrical shock, briefly paralyzing their target; they are shaped roughly like a gun, but more bulbous; Nieto’s had bright yellow markings over much of its surface and a fifteen-foot range.)
Nieto was first licensed by the state as a security guard in 2007 and had worked in that field since. He had never been arrested and had no police record, an achievement in a neighborhood where Latino kids can get picked up just for hanging out in public. He was a Buddhist: a Latino son of immigrants who practiced Buddhism is the kind of hybrid San Francisco used to be good at. As a teen he had worked as a youth counselor for almost five years at the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center; he was gregarious and community-spirited, a participant in political campaigns, street fairs, and community events.
He graduated from community college with a focus on criminal justice, and hoped to help young people as a probation officer. He had an internship with the city’s juvenile probation department not long before his death, according to former city probation officer Carlos Gonzalez, who became a friend. Gonzalez said Nieto knew how criminal justice worked in the city. No one has ever provided a convincing motive for why he would point a gun-shaped object at the police when he understood that it would probably be a fatal act.
After Nieto’s death, his character was also set up for assassination. Like a rape victim, he was blamed for what had happened, and irrelevant but unflattering things were dredged up about his past and publicized. Immediately after his death, the police and coroner’s office dug into his medical records and found that he’d had a crisis years before. They blew that up into a story that he was mentally ill, to make that the explanation for what happened. It ran like this: Why did they shoot Nieto? Because he pointed his Taser at them and they thought it was a gun. Why did he point his Taser at them? Because he was mentally ill. What was the evidence that he was mentally ill? That he pointed a Taser at them. It’s a circular logic that only leads somewhere if your trust in the San Francisco Police Department is great.
Call Them by Their True Names Page 8
