Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
— 1 John 4:1
Natural disasters
In 1999, we lived in Raleigh, North Carolina. That was the year that Hurricane Floyd, a Category 2 storm, stalled over Eastern North Carolina and raised the levels of every river east of the Piedmont to “500-year” levels. Fifty-one people were killed and whole towns washed away. I was working with Bob Hall then, a researcher at the Institute for Southern Studies. We were following the coverage of the storm’s damage. In response to the media referring to Floyd as a “natural disaster,” Bob said that it wasn’t natural at all. At least not in the magnitude of its damage.
What was he talking about? Well, for years prior to Floyd (and we’d seen plenty of hurricanes), the state government had been facilitating a development drive, which was underpinned by highway construction. At the Institute, we’d been following this development arc and reporting on the political cronyism that attended it. There was a cycle of campaign cash from developers and “the asphalt lobby” (road builders and their hangers-on) that translated into appointments by the Governor to the State Board of Transportation. There was so much road building in North Carolina, the running joke became that orange caution barrels were the new state flower.
“If you build it, they will come.” As the roads were completed, the cloverleafs grew truck stops and outlet malls. The truck stops and outlet malls grew parking lots. Like bacterial colonies in a Petri dish, the strip malls appeared along with new manufactories and more tract housing. Concrete and asphalt was trucked in by the millions of tons. By the time Floyd arrived, what had once been Sandhill pine forests and pre-coastal wetlands had been massively transformed into the impermeable surfaces of roads, streets, and parking spaces. The land mass that had once been an absorbent sponge was now a hard funnel. As “natural” as the winds and rain may have been, they didn’t happen over natural terrain. Calling anything there a “500-year event” was a joke, given the metamorphosis implemented by “development” in the preceding twenty years.
Earlier this month, a wildfire on the Hawaiian island of Maui — to which our family also has a connection — killed more than a hundred people. The resort town of Lahaina was virtually destroyed. Before the speed and intensity of the fires, some people had to run and jump into the ocean to salvage their own lives. Was this a “natural” disaster? Well, the laws of physics and chemistry were followed, as always, to the letter. But the disaster involved a lot more than physics.
Let’s start at the global level and work our way in.
Anthropogenic (capitalogenic!), carbon-powered, climate change is real. I’ve no patience or time for the deniers. Some are like those old guys found still manning bunkers a decade after the war is over. Some are like people who insist the world is flat. Some are paid “ad-men” who can be trusted about as far as I can throw a sofa. Some are just jackasses, clinging to their hold-my-beer stupidity out of sheer obtuse perversity. Some are afraid, so afraid of what they secretly suspect it all means that they embrace a kind of heroic self-delusion. Simple ignorance I can tolerate; but the rest? Nah.
The US has experienced 24 “500-year rain events” in the last decade. It’s August as I write this. Last month was the world’s hottest on record. This very moment, the temperatures of the world’s oceans are the hottest ever recorded. Earlier this year, the US had its largest three-month tornado streak on record. In Antarctica and Greenland, the two biggest consolidations of global ice, ice-loss has increased six-fold over the last three decades. Scientists expect the Arctic ice cap to have a complete summer melt within the next thirty years. Just last month, New York City saw a fourfold increase in emergency room admissions in the face of a deadly heat wave. It’s complex in its outcomes, because the imposition of every increasing quanta of atmospheric carbon on a highly complex global dynamic will ramify in many expected and unexpected ways — this is common sense — but the simple fact is that this will cause and has caused dramatic changes, disruptive changes, and the equally simple fact is that this rise in atmospheric carbon is caused in large part by late modern societies burning fossil hydrocarbons as energy slaves.
One of the main drivers of fossil fuel combustion is the ever growing global fleet of automobiles. There are 1.7 billion or so of these infernal machines on the road around the world right now, and at currently increasing rates of production — which won’t be sustained — by 2040 that number would theoretically double. In the car-obsessed and car-engineered US, with 4.23 percent of the world’s people, we have 19 percent of the world’s total automobiles. As we noted with regard to Hurricane Floyd, cars need roads and parking space.
To build the cars, we need factories and more cars and more parking lots; and likewise to build roads and parking lots we need gas-guzzling machines along with automobiles to make the roads and parking lots, as well as more machines to mine, mill, and otherwise process the materials for automobiles, construction machines, roads, parking lots, and factories . . . as well as the automobiles, construction machines, roads, parking lots, and factories to make and maintain the houses and offices of the people who make and use all the aforementioned.
Anyway . . . with all this heating, what happened this year in Maui began with record Pacific heat. Not just the ocean warming that fed the storm which whipped up the winds that fanned the flames through Lahaina, but record droughts and heat that have plagued Maui for the last two years. Prior to the heat, Maui had been exploited by settler agriculture firms to grow sugar and pineapple. Economic fate and fatigued soils led to the abandonment of sugar cane and pineapple in the nineties, and what grew on these wastelands was buffel grass, guinea grass, and molasses grass — species brought to the island by settler ranchers in the nineteenth century as forage. These African species were ravenously invasive and quickly spread from the former plantations into every crack and crevice of the island, crawling right up to the doors of residents. These grasses go nuts with growth during rainy season, then dry out into highly combustive tinder when the rains stop. When one fire started, then nearby Typhoon Dora sent 80 mile-per-hour winds across the dry island, the perfect firestorm ensued.
“Natural” disaster?
Amalgamated causation
Carbon is the scientific deal we talk about as a “driver,” but it starts well before carbon and ramifies long after carbon. I said above that denial of “climate change” is stupid — which it is — but there’s more than one way to be stupid. The machines that use the fossil hydrocarbons didn’t make themselves, and the fuel didn’t climb out of the ground and demand, “Burn me!” This is why some people — me included — won’t say the word “anthropocene’ to designate the latest and most environmentally disruptive era in history without qualifying it or replacing it by “capitalocene,” a coinage of Jason Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life. All this shit was motivated by something, something that changed after the fifteenth century, and that something was the transition to a globalizing economic paradigm that chased profit before all else . . . capitalism, that is, with both its motivations and its ever-transforming and escalating technologies.
Capitalism is more than the name of some “system” as seen from above. It’s also a mindset, an ideology that functions like bovine spongiform encephalopathy, eating holes in our brains until our speech is reduced to echolalia, whereupon we repeat the phrase “market solutions” like lobotomized zombies.
Last month, we had air quality alerts every day here in Southeast Michigan, because we were blanketed in the smoke of (iirc) 137 simultaneous Canadian wildfires. Droughts, heat domes, and high winds . . . again. In 2020, Australia burned. In 2021, Siberia burned. In both years, Amazonia burned. In 2020, California had its biggest recorded wildfire; in 2021 its second biggest; in 2018 its third; in 2020 its fourth; in 2020 its fifth, sixth, and seventh. You get the picture.
2023? Don’t get me started! This year in Phoenix, they reached 118 degrees Fahrenheit during a stretch of three weeks with temps above 110. People received third-degree burns from touching metal or falling on the pavement. Miami hit a record of 44 days above 90. Rome, Italy hit a record of 109, while Palermo hit its own record of 116. As this is written there are large swaths of water in the Gulf of Mexico with surface temperatures of 90 degrees, and one reading near Key West was 101 (the coral reefs taking one hell of a beating). Sanbao, China hit 126! The ten warmest years on record, according to NOAA, happened between 2010 and 2023.
There are two forms of recursive pile-on effects in action here.
One is capitalism and its insatiable need for “growth,” which accelerates the the development of entropic processes, geologic, ecologic, atmospheric, and biospheric. This acceleration is accomplished through general purpose money, a dissolving sign without referent that expedites exchange via the reduction of all things to price. This growth paradigm is now so entrenched that there is simultaneously neither anyone or any single body in control nor a dram of political will to take the kinds of drastic steps that would be necessary to interrupt it. The Biden administration’s latest initiative, which claims to include climate mitigation, awards $173 billion in pre-tax subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
The other recursive pile-on effect is environmental. Heat begets heat, “productive” entropy begets the geometric expansion of entropic practices. Technomass (think concrete and asphalt) retains heat (the reason cities are warmer than their surrounds). Air conditioning to deal with extreme heat actually contributes to warmer temperatures outside.
The most terrifying scenario of all is something called runaway warming. Runaway warming is when a “tipping point” is reached wherein warming quits being the effect of a cause (greenhouse gases introduced by industrial and agricultural activity) and becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Locked into the world’s permafrosts are unknown quantities of carbon (estimates are around 1.4 trillion tons for just the Siberian Shelf) that can be converted into methane, a gas that is 84 times as powerful a greenhouse vector as carbon dioxide per molecule over a period of twenty years. When the permafrost melts, as it is now melting, this carbon-methane cocktail is being progressively released. Though some methane is routinely released even from frozen mass in the arctic, no one currently knows how much greater the releases of methane will be as permafrost continues its deliquescence.
Here’s what we do know. Carbonaceous material, like dead plants and other organic matter, decay when thawed. Microbial activity with oxygen (aerobic) will convert that organic material into atmospheric carbon. Microbial activity underground, without oxygen (anaerobic), will produce methane. Methane forms bubbles that then migrate to the surface. Because we cannot be sure how far or fast this process will go, we simply cannot know if or when such a tipping point might arrive. Climate scientists have consistently said this is unlikely; but in recent years, more and more climate scientists have walked back their own certainties about this. Some credible researchers think we could reach a “point of no return” as early as 2042. Nineteen years. Surely within most readers’ lifetimes (probably not mine, but definitely my kids and grandkids).
Sea ice that’s melting reflects heat from the sun back into space, so there’s that, too. Less reflection, more absorption, greater acceleration of warming. This is not some linear process, but a multi-directional, multi-dimensional cascade of ever more generalizing collapse — an architectural cataclysm that is synchronously (or increasingly asynchronously) geographic, biospheric, economic, social, cultural, and political.
Paradoxically, generalized warming could lead to unseasonably cold weather in some places. What we do know to nearly an absolute certainty is that some of our grandchildren will live to see, conservatively, a rise of eight degrees Fahrenheit in global average temperature. That may not sound like much, but it is, in combination with the consequences of sea level rise and ocean acidification (which reduces net oxygen in the atmosphere and destroys oceanic biomes), downright apocalyptic.
Crop failures, migrating diseases, deadly heat waves, killer storms, extreme drought, uncontrollable wildfires, catastrophic floods, degraded air quality, losses of potable water and arable land, food shortages, and population migrations will have not only their direct effects, but will inevitably result in economic catastrophes compounded by political destabilization — the latter almost certainly characterized by a drift toward increasing authoritarianism and ever more draconian population control measures, which will likely in turn lead to civil strife, even civil wars. Few people today recognize, for example, the key role that water — not ideology or even “religion” — played in the Syrian Civil War, and continues to play in the brutal Israeli occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians.
“Natural” disasters?
The diabolic spirit
In 2018, Wipf and Stock published my book, Mammon’s Ecology — Metaphysic of the Empty Sign. In it, I made the claim that money — as what Alf Hornborg called an eco-semiotic phenomenon — is one of the “powers and principalities” referred to by Paul in his biblical epistles. I’ll explain.
Mammon’s Ecology was in many respects extremely materialistic. I employed a lot of what people call science — climate science, as well as an in-depth account of energy science. Megajoules and energy carriers and endosomatic-versus-exosomatic and entropic-versus-negentropic. . . all that stuff. But influenced heavily by Hornborg’s eco-semiotic thesis, I strayed off into semiotics, even postulating something called a semiosphere where there can be no doubt about its reality; but it can neither be observed nor measured in a laboratory or accounted for by physics. In this way, by demonstrating that even what we routinely recognize as part of the “material” world is beyond the ken of physical science, I hint at some notion of the spiritual, which can be understood only analogically, and which gives strict materialists the sense of being trapped in a kind of dark ontological quicksand.
[D]uring the twentieth century, a Hungarian linguist named Thomas Sebeok, teaching at Indiana University, took Uexküll’s idea of the Umwelt and merged it with his own lifelong interest in something called semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols as well as the way they are interpreted. What Sebeok claimed was that all living things respond to signs. Language is just one form of sign-system, but bees communicate direction and distance to each other, plants take cues from soil temperature, etc., and for each organism each sign has a meaning. These signs and meanings connect everything with everything else. When two or more organisms are operating together through signs, like the flower’s color and the smell of its pollen attracting the butterfly, you have a semiosphere, a semiotic world, or a world of signs, which joins one world-in-self, or Umwelt, with the world-inself of others, like others and unlike others.
So we are not only constituted by those material flows we spoke of earlier, as individuals with things going into the body and things going out of the body; we are likewise constituted — and connected — by flows of signs within semiospheres — sign-worlds full of meaning. Signs are received and interpreted, and then we signal outward again. A dog will wag its tail to invite you and raise its hackles to warn you. Sign. Interpretation. Response.
A sign has meaning because it refers to something. I say “book” (verbal sign) and I point at the book (somatic sign), and you know that it is this book to which I refer. We are brought together by signs through their referents, the things to which they refer. In the same way that we are shared through our physical environment, exchanging various materials, we are shared through our cultural environment by signs linking us to each other by referents. Simple signs like an odor or a color or a motion, then more complex signs like pointing at the book, and more complex signs still, like the word book which symbolizes the thing itself, or the highly complex contents of the book’s story, or by a piece of music, a dance, a game, a law, a bureaucratic maze of procedures, etc. As a Christian, I am connected to other Christians through a story, and that story, as multiple and nested meanings, itself ramifies — or branches out — through other aspects of my life and the life of other Christians, because we try to “live into” that story.
One of the main theorists of semiotics, or the study of signs, Charles Pierce, broke this down into a simple schematic. There is the signifier (I), the sign (point), the referent (to the book), and the interpretant (you infer what I mean). Right now, I am the signifier, the collection of textualized worlds constitute the signs, the subject of money as an ecological phenomenon is the conceptual referent, and you — the reader — are the interpretant. We share a semiosphere in the way we share a biosphere, or ecology, through a complex web of meaningful relationships.
Here is a forewarning as we continue . . . Remember the problem with two-ness or dualism? That mental China-Wall between the subject and object only scalable with mathematics [Descartes], and how that same wall has been placed between nature and culture? We tend to believe, based on our mental habits from a dualistic culture, that the semiosphere — symbols, language, and other cultural constructions — are separated from natural phenomena — that aspect of being which responds with perfect theoretical predictably to natural laws. But what we are saying here is that the semiosphere and the biosphere share a reality and are thoroughly penetrated one by the other. (pp. 69–70)
A hat tip to Ted Lewis, Executive Director of the International Jacques Ellul Society, for the “Greek insight” that follows.
For the early Greeks, words are “thrown” into what I’ve called the semiosphere. (We get the word “ball” from the Greek vol, or throw) Sym-bol, from the Greek σύμβολο, sým-volo, means to throw (volo) with (sym). Para-ble, from the Greek παραβολή, para-volí, means to throw beyond. Dia-bol, from the Greek διάβολο, diá-volos, means to throw apart, or divide. Diablo — the devil — is a divider, and in scripture he divides using the tactics of temptation, accusation, and deceit.
When I say a “diabolic spirit,” in the context of the “semiospheric,” I don’t mean the kind of demon we all remember from The Exorcist — an independently subjective and gratuitously sadistic spook.
I suspect every reader has either experienced addiction (ours is an addiction-based society) or known someone who has. We all know, then, that the question of agency is confounded by the experience of being captive to an external force (medically analogized as “my disease”), of losing one’s agency to something beyond themselves that behaves as if “it” — even in its immateriality — has a kind of cruel agency of its own. Diabolic possession here (dividing one from oneself and others) is not Pazuzu occupying little Regan McNeil, but the manifestation of what the New Testament called “a power,” a spirit that gives the deceitful impression of having come from one’s own agency. If you’ve ever seen two people in an escalating quarrel, they more and more appear to be possessed by the same spirit in their division. The one demon becomes manifest through the combatants, and it’s obvious that they become less and less themselves as they’re captured by it. The great Reform theologian Karl Barth referred to “the commodifying spirit of Mammon,” which was the thesis of the aforementioned book. Deceit is when the symbol’s outer appearance belies its substance, when the stated motive is a cloak for the real motive, and it’s a tactic of division.
Who are some of the powers? Leviathan? Mammon? (Ellul) Technique? What did Ivan Illich say about consumer culture? That it would turn us all into slaves of envy and addiction?
I was (am?) an addict in several forms, and like most of us who managed to quit this or that, we are most sensitively attuned to others committing the same errors of which we ourselves were most guilty. One of the things that pings my chimes nowadays is when people make sweeping statements of like, “If we end industrial agriculture, carbon emissions would be cut by X percent.” These ideas are not possible. We measure “possibility” materially, yes, but we leave out the all-important semiosphere: the vastly immeasurable, folding, flowing, multiplex conglomerations of signs, symbols, meanings, motives, and manipulations that hold our biotic materiality with all its conundrums together like some immensely powerful dark energy . . . impossible to pin down for measurement (or control), but still firmly in command.
There is one story that goes, “It’s all about power,” which is true but not in the way people mean. Climate catastrophe, catastrophe denialism, and political inaction are operations of power; but the power of a spirit that transcends any particular powerful person or institution and eludes simplistic “solution.”
Everyone is worried these days about AI becoming somehow independently self-aware and gaining an agency that transcends then captures us. I guess people have never experienced a power outage, reminding us all that the boogyman of AI is just a fragile little phantom that can be poofed away by pulling the plug. Mammon (capital?), on the other hand, has taken on a life of its own, since quite some time ago, as a diabolic spirit. It literally divides wholes into smaller and smaller parts; it dissolves ecosystems and uproots people from all trace of tradition and place. Hornborg called general purpose money a “communicative disorder,” because it is an “empty sign,” a piano that plays one note, a semiotic force that, through the reduction of all things to price, “allows us to trade rain forests for Coca-Cola.”
With precious few exceptions, every exchange now designed to accumulate general-purpose money contributes to disembedding, or uprooting; and every time the so-called market for something becomes saturated and quits producing profit, more and more things are commodified. It is like cancer spreading (growth!). Coca-Cola can be bought with the same general purpose money acquired through and facilitative of the systematic destruction of a rain forest. In relation to nature and natural systems, profit always rewards most what is most wrong!
Markets and machines are what Ilya Prigogene called dissipative structures. They take in, or eat, order created by nature — like negentropy — and shit out disorder, or entropy. Virtually all technology does this. Money is the semiotic accelerator of these dissolutions, producing the cataclysmic speed about which Paul Virilio warned.
General-purpose money is a sign with no referent; there is nothing that says to it, “Stop here,” the way my words, “See that tree” stop at the tree. Money allows things to be carved out from their natural setting (their context) in order to be sold as commodities. Biospheric systems, under attack by this “empty” semiotic phenomenon, then, eventually collapse, because the irreducible wholes have been dissolved into disembedded bits which can no longer relate to those things upon which they once co-depended. The displaced pawpaw plant has no ground frost to break its dormancy, no walnuts to kill out competitors or give them much needed shade, no carrion nearby to draw flies and pollinate it.
Scientifically, what a solvent does is (1) create a cavity between one part and its neighbors, then (2) remove that part through the insertion of the solvent. The more money that’s accumulated, the greater the environmental destruction. The more money that is accumulated, the greater the dissolution of traditional communities which are constructed around and upon material-biological systems. We’ve been disembedded from family and place, ourselves now also commodities, for sale to the highest bidder, and re-embedded in an abstraction called “the market” that is on a path to the commodification of everything, that “commodifying spirit of Mammon.” That dia-bolic spirit of division.
Maui is still smoldering, and the vultures of capital are already stalking the island trying to buy up people’s land for pennies on the dollar. Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism” is growing inside biospheric collapse like maggots in the belly of a corpse.
It never rains in Southern California
Got on board a westbound seven forty-seven
Didn't think before deciding what to do
Oh, that talk of opportunities, TV breaks and movies
Rang true, sure rang true
Seems it never rains in southern California
Seems I've often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California, but girl, don't they warn ya?
It pours, man, it pours
Out of work, I'm out of my head
Out of self respect, I'm out of bread
I'm underloved, I'm underfed, I want to go home
It never rains in California, but girl, don't they warn ya?
It pours, man, it pours
Will you tell the folks back home I nearly made it?
Had offers but didn't know which one to take
Please don't tell 'em how you found me
Don't tell 'em how you found me
Gimme a break, give me a break
Seems it never rains in southern California
Seems I've often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California, but girl, don't they warn ya?
It pours, man, it pours— Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood
*
Capitalism — the spirit of Mammon joined with the spirit of Leviathan and the spirit of Ellul’s Technique— isn’t just sawing off the limb upon which we all sit, it’s doing it over a bask of crocodiles.
Today — August 21, 2023 — an historic storm has walked up from the Pacific into Southern California and is dumping rain onto hills already denuded and eroded by wildfires. It’s flooding from San Diego to Las Vegas. British Columbia is on fire, and the smoke is so bad in parts of Washington that the air has been declared hazardous to breathe for everyone. There are air quality alerts in Washington, DC, today, on the east coast . . . from more Canadian wildfires. (I remember when people could move out of the city to escape the air pollution. No mas.) The overheated Gulf of Mexico is fueling a storm with Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in its sights. I talked to my sister yesterday, who’s in Arkansas, and they’ve had wet bulb readings of 122 degrees. She’s seventy with MS. Half an hour in her back yard could kill her. Houston broke a heat record yesterday. Biloxi is expected to break its annual record for triple-digit days this year. Minnesota is warning residents of heat indices up to 107, which is expected to buckle roads. Earlier this month, the combination of heavy rains and decades of ill-advised dam construction in China resulted in floods that displaced more than a million people.
It’s climate, but it’s so much more.
Photos from Global Citizen