This Changes Everything
Page 21
When the Nauruans themselves took control of their country in 1968, they had hopes of reversing these plans. Toward that end, they put a large chunk of their mining revenues into a trust fund that they invested in what seemed like stable real estate ventures in Australia and Hawaii. The goal was to live off the fund’s proceeds while winding down phosphate mining and beginning to rehabilitate their island’s ecology—a costly task, but perhaps not impossible.11
The plan failed. Nauru’s government received catastrophically bad investment advice, and the country’s mining wealth was squandered. Meanwhile, Nauru continued to disappear, its white powdery innards loaded onto boats as the mining continued unabated. Meanwhile, decades of easy money had taken a predictable toll on Nauruans’ life and culture. Politics was rife with corruption, drunk driving was a leading cause of death, average life expectancy was dismally low, and Nauru earned the dubious honor of being featured on a U.S. news show as “the fattest place on Earth” (half the adult population suffers from type 2 diabetes, the result of a diet comprised almost exclusively of imported processed food). “During the golden era when the royalties were rolling in, we didn’t cook, we ate in restaurants,” recalls Steshia Hubert, a health care worker. And even if the Nauruans had wanted to eat differently, it would have been hard: with so much of the island a latticework of deep dark holes, growing enough fresh produce to feed the population was pretty much impossible. A bitterly ironic infertility for an island whose main export was agricultural fertilizer.12
By the 1990s, Nauru was so desperate for foreign currency that it pursued some distinctly shady get-rich-quick schemes. Aided greatly by the wave of financial deregulation unleashed in this period, the island became a prime money-laundering haven. For a time in the late 1990s, Nauru was the titular “home” to roughly four hundred phantom banks that were utterly unencumbered by monitoring, oversight, taxes, and regulation. Nauru-registered shell banks were particularly popular among Russian gangsters, who reportedly laundered a staggering $70 billion of dirty money through the island nation (to put that in perspective, Nauru’s entire GDP is $72 million, according to most recent figures). Giving the country partial credit for the collapse of the Russian economy, a New York Times Magazine piece in 2000 pronounced that “amid the recent proliferation of money-laundering centers that experts estimate has ballooned into a $5 trillion shadow economy, Nauru is Public Enemy #1.”13
These schemes have since caught up with Nauru too, and now the country faces a double bankruptcy: with 90 percent of the island depleted from mining, it faces ecological bankruptcy; with a debt of at least $800 million, Nauru faces financial bankruptcy as well. But these are not Nauru’s only problems. It now turns out that the island nation is highly vulnerable to a crisis it had virtually no hand in creating: climate change and the drought, ocean acidification, and rising waters it brings. Sea levels around Nauru have been steadily climbing by about 5 millimeters per year since 1993, and much more could be on the way if current trends continue. Intensified droughts are already causing severe freshwater shortages.14
A decade ago, Australian philosopher and professor of sustainability Glenn Albrecht set out to coin a term to capture the particular form of psychological distress that sets in when the homelands that we love and from which we take comfort are radically altered by extraction and industrialization, rendering them alienating and unfamiliar. He settled on “solastalgia,” with its evocations of solace, destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.” He explained that although this particular form of unease was once principally familiar to people who lived in sacrifice zones—lands decimated by open-pit mining, for instance, or clear-cut logging—it was fast becoming a universal human experience, with climate change creating a “new abnormal” wherever we happen to live. “As bad as local and regional negative transformation is, it is the big picture, the Whole Earth, which is now a home under assault. A feeling of global dread asserts itself as the planet heats and our climate gets more hostile and unpredictable,” he writes.15
Some places are unlucky enough to experience both local and global solastalgia simultaneously. Speaking to the 1997 U.N. climate conference that adopted the Kyoto Protocol, Nauru’s then-president Kinza Clodumar described the collective claustrophobia that had gripped his country: “We are trapped, a wasteland at our back, and to our front a terrifying, rising flood of biblical proportions.”16 Few places on earth embody the suicidal results of building our economies on polluting extraction more graphically than Nauru. Thanks to its mining of phosphate, Nauru has spent the last century disappearing from the inside out; now, thanks to our collective mining of fossil fuels, it is disappearing from the outside in.
In a 2007 cable about Nauru, made public by WikiLeaks, an unnamed U.S. official summed up his government’s analysis of what went wrong on the island: “Nauru simply spent extravagantly, never worrying about tomorrow.”17 Fair enough, but that diagnosis is hardly unique to Nauru; our entire culture is extravagantly drawing down finite resources, never worrying about tomorrow. For a couple of hundred years we have been telling ourselves that we can dig the midnight black remains of other life forms out of the bowels of the earth, burn them in massive quantities, and that the airborne particles and gases released into the atmosphere—because we can’t see them—will have no effect whatsoever. Or if they do, we humans, brilliant as we are, will just invent our way out of whatever mess we have made.
And we tell ourselves all kinds of similarly implausible no-consequences stories all the time, about how we can ravage the world and suffer no adverse effects. Indeed we are always surprised when it works out otherwise. We extract and do not replenish and wonder why the fish have disappeared and the soil requires ever more “inputs” (like phosphate) to stay fertile. We occupy countries and arm their militias and then wonder why they hate us. We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder why people can’t afford to shop as much as they used to. We offer those failed shoppers subprime mortgages instead of steady jobs and then wonder why no one foresaw that a system built on bad debts would collapse.
At every stage our actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are unleashing—a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt us. And Nauru knows all about this too, because in the past decade it has become a dumping ground of another sort. In an effort to raise much needed revenue, it agreed to house an offshore refugee detention center for the government of Australia. In what has become known as “the Pacific Solution,” Australian navy and customs ships intercept boats of migrants and immediately fly them three thousand kilometers to Nauru (as well as to several other Pacific islands). Once on Nauru, the migrants—most from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan—are crammed into a rat-infested guarded camp made up of rows of crowded, stiflingly hot tents. The island imprisonment can last up to five years, with the migrants in a state of constant limbo about their status, something the Australian government hopes will serve as a deterrent to future refugees.18
The Australian and Nauruan governments have gone to great lengths to limit information on camp conditions and have prevented journalists who make the long journey to the island from seeing where migrants are being housed. But the truth is leaking out nonetheless: grainy video of prisoners chanting “We are not animals”; reports of mass hunger strikes and suicide attempts; horrifying photographs of refugees who had sewn their own mouths shut, using paper clips as needles; an image of a man who had badly mutilated his neck in a failed hanging attempt. There are also images of toddlers playing in the dirt and huddling with their parents under tent flaps for shade (originally the camp had housed only adult males, but now hundreds of women and children have been sent there too). In June 2013, the Australian government finally allowed a BBC crew into the camp in order to show off its br
and-new barracks—but that PR attempt was completely upstaged one month later by the news that a prisoner riot had almost completely destroyed the new facility, leaving several prisoners injured.19
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.20
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.21
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.22
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.
The Ultimate Extractivist Relationship
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.”23 (Not surprisingly, feminist scholars have filled volumes analyzing the ex–Lord Chancellor’s metaphor choices.)
These ide
as 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.”24
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.25 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.