Anthropocene=Violence
06/14/20
From Deep Time Chicago
The dust from the demolition of the Crawford Generating Plant affected the Little Village neighborhood. Image from the Crawford Plant demolition page on the US EPA website, originally captured from a video posted on YouTube by Alejandro Reyes.
Deep Time Chicago is a group of artists and writers exploring how culture can produce change at an hour of profound reckoning, an historical present some call the Anthropocene. We are not interested in the Anthropocene as a conceptual novelty! We are interested in understanding our historical moment and in venturing experimental cultural responses to it. By now, most people comprehend to some degree the ramifications of human interference in the earth systems. We want to make clear that ecological catastrophe is not only a matter of the human appetite for resources or something that humans have done to “nature.” This ecological history is a story of violence perpetrated by some humans against others, of an indivisible triumvirate combining colonialism, racism and capitalism.
The cluster of conditions that the term “anthropocene” seeks to name—rapid warming of the atmosphere and the oceans, disruption of carbon and nitrogen cycles, ocean acidification, mass extinction, chemical pollution, transgenic agriculture, the presence of novel materials like microplastics and cement—all could be classified as “externalities.” An externality is a consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that is not reflected in the cost of goods or services produced. Neither does it diminish profit margins. These consequences are felt most intensely by parties adjacent to the production and consumption involved. Externalities are a big part of what makes capitalist profit possible. Another name for them might be collateral damage.
For an example, take the Fisk and Crawford coal burning plants located in the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods of Chicago, which were finally closed due to years of organizing by PERRO, LVEJO and other activist organizations. Considered a cheap method of generating energy, the business of burning coal produces externalities—costs that are never taken into account on the balance sheets of power companies. Global warming from increased carbon in the atmosphere and air pollution that causes respiratory disorders are two examples. Because these consequences are considered externalities the power company doesn’t have to account for them and the burden falls on a variety of publics. In this case, owing to the location of Fisk and Crawford, people of color and lower incomes suffered more than other residents of the city. Their air was more toxic and people living in those neighborhoods have had disproportionately high levels of respiratory disorders.
This is just one example of the geographical distribution of risk when it comes to the ramifications of environmental degradation. Wherever polluting industries are found, the nearest neighbors are invariably the poor and disproportionately people of color. This logic of segregation is part of what perpetuates the status quo. People who already have more than a fair share of economic power and safety are allowed to live at a distance to environmental crimes. This persists because we continue to view this industrial behavior outside of racial and environmental politics. If those that felt distanced and safe looked more closely, not only at the dismal morality of this situation, but reckoned with the absurdity that "their" air is somehow not "our" air, this could be a different political landscape.
Proximity to heavy industry, refineries, power stations and other polluting entities all contribute to the “preexisting conditions” that make racially and economically disenfranchised populations more vulnerable to Covid-19. Another factor is our two-tiered food system in which healthy, expensive food is only enjoyed by the richer and more educated classes, while a large percentage of the population lacks access to fresh food. Cheap food is the product of subsidies to commodity crops, primarily corn, soy, and wheat. In the end these subsidies chiefly benefit the profit margins of grain cartels and food industries. A great portion of these subsidized monocrops wind up as animal feed; otherwise they become all manner of processed foods. But to make the tons of subsidized stuff appetizing to the human palate, the industry adds salt, sugar and fat. Hence the cheapest food is also the most unhealthy, yielding diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and heart conditions in the people whose budgets keep them on cheap food diets. Again, these factors partially account for the number and severity of Covid-19 cases in communities of color. Add here, the inordinate stress of poverty, a racist healthcare system, and generational trauma. The virus has made both environmental and other forms of racism impossible to ignore.
In some ways zoonotic viruses themselves are an externality of profit-driven environmental practices. In his book Big Farms Make Big Flu, phylogeographer Rob Wallace makes the case that concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are perfect environments for amplifying and spreading novel viruses that may eventually transfer to humans. While this is not the case for Covid-19, there are many cases of novel viruses coming out of intensive animal husbandry which, so far, have just happened to be less contagious and hence less newsworthy. But the emergence of Covid-19 into human epidemiology is related to another disastrous environmental practice: deforestation and increased pressure on wild places. In the interest of mining, road building, and industrial farming, wild ecosystems are invaded. The proximity of the remaining wild animals to the human newcomers becomes another set-up for zoonotic transfer, especially when humans hunt and eat our wild relations.
The Anthropocene must be understood as a result of colonial and racial violence. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), tasked with determining when and where this new geological era started, is a somewhat interdisciplinary team of mostly geologists. Their criteria for setting the date refer to things like novel conditions in the geological record, not explicitly to racial violence. But such violence is deeply imbricated in the circumstances of human caused earth system destruction at least since the dawn of the colonial era. The genocide of native inhabitants of the continents that became the Americas made way for the exploitation of “natural resources” at unprecedented speed. Chattel slavery is considered the first form of cheap energy. Without it, the riches that ultimately supported intensive industrialization, would not have been possible.
As it turns out, the AWG seems to be zeroing in on 1952 as a probable start date for the Anthropocene correlating with worldwide radio-nuclide fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons testing. It is all too fitting that this era would be associated with what is thus far the apex of a death-dealing culture. The Anthropocene is like a slow motion atomic bomb that will affect all of the living and beyond, but on the front lines of this assault are the people already most disadvantaged by a racist global system. The concept of the Anthropocene may be technically defined by geologists, but it is up to us to clarify its origins and manifestations in social violence. Those who profit from that violence will not easily relinquish their stakes. It is up to us to take analysis into action and use our strategic positions, in alliance with others, to dismantle it.
This text was written collaboratively by Deep Time Chicago, an art/research/activism initiative formed in the wake of the Anthropocene Curriculum program at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany. The initiative’s goal is to explore one core idea: humanity as a geological agency, capable of disrupting the earth system and inscribing present modes of existence into deep time. By knitting together group readings, guided walks, lectures, panels, screenings, performances, publications and exhibitions, we hope to develop a public research trajectory, offering a variety of formats where Chicago area inhabitants can grapple with the crucial questions of global ecological change.http://deeptimechicago.org/
Deep Time Chicago worked on this piece with Stella Brown, the Quarantine Times Sunday editor. Each week, Stella selects a member of the Co-Prosperity Sphere Programming Council, in this case Deep Time member Claire Pentecost, to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.