On Fire

by Naomi Klein

A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat.

  MAY 2016

  EDWARD W. SAID LONDON LECTURE

  EDWARD SAID WAS NO TREE hugger. descended from traders, artisans, and professionals, the great anticolonial intellectual once described himself as “an extreme case of an urban Palestinian whose relationship to the land is basically metaphorical.” In After the Last Sky, his meditation on the photographs of Jean Mohr, he explored the most intimate aspects of Palestinian lives, from hospitality to sports to home décor. The tiniest detail (the placing of a picture frame, the defiant posture of a child) provoked a torrent of insight from Said. Yet, when he was confronted with images of Palestinian farmers (tending their flocks, working the fields), the specificity suddenly evaporated. Which crops were being cultivated? What was the state of the soil? The availability of water? Nothing was forthcoming. “I continue to perceive a population of poor, suffering, occasionally colorful peasants, unchanging and collective,” Said confessed. This perception was “mythic,” he acknowledged—yet it remained.

  If farming was another world for Said, those who devoted their lives to matters like air and water pollution appear to have inhabited another planet. Speaking to his colleague Rob Nixon, then at Columbia University, he once described environmentalism as “the indulgence of spoiled tree-huggers who lack a proper cause.” But the environmental challenges of the Middle East are impossible to ignore for anyone immersed, as Said was, in its geopolitics. This is a region intensely vulnerable to heat and water stress, to sea-level rise and to desertification. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change predicts that unless we radically lower emissions and lower them fast, large parts of the Middle East will likely “experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans” by the end of this century. And that’s about as blunt as climate scientists get. Yet environmental issues in the region still tend to be treated as afterthoughts, or luxury causes. The reason is not ignorance, or indifference. It’s just bandwidth. Climate change is a grave threat, but the most frightening impacts are a few years away. In the here and now, there are always far more pressing threats to contend with: military occupation, air assault, systemic discrimination, embargo. Nothing can compete with that; nor should it attempt to try.

  There are other reasons that environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer—it was a key part of the Zionist “back to the land” pioneer ethos. And in this context, trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation. It’s not only the countless olive and pistachio trees that have been uprooted to make way for settlements and Israeli-only roads. It’s also the sprawling pine and eucalyptus forests that have been planted over those orchards, and over Palestinian villages. The most notorious actor on this has been the Jewish National Fund, which, under its slogan, “Turning the Desert Green,” boasts of having planted 250 million trees in Israel since 1901, many of them nonnative to the region. It has also directly funded key infrastructure for the Israeli military, including in the Negev Desert. In publicity materials, the JNF bills itself as just another green NGO, concerned with forest and water management, parks and recreation. It also happens to be the largest private landowner in the state of Israel, and despite a number of complicated legal challenges, it still refuses to lease or sell land to non-Jews.

  I grew up in a Jewish community where every occasion (births and deaths, Mother’s Day, bar mitzvahs) was marked with the proud purchase of a JNF tree in the name of the honored person. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to understand that those feel-good faraway conifers, certificates for which papered the walls of my Montreal elementary school, were not benign—not just something to plant and later hug. In fact, these trees are among the most glaring symbols of Israel’s system of official discrimination, the one that must be dismantled if peaceful coexistence is to become possible.

  The JNF is an extreme and recent example of what some call “green colonialism.” But the phenomenon is hardly new; nor is it unique to Israel. There is a long and painful history in the Americas of beautiful pieces of wilderness being turned into conservation parks, and then that designation being used to prevent Indigenous people from accessing their ancestral territories to hunt and fish or simply to live. It has happened again and again. A contemporary version of this phenomenon is the carbon offset. Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organizations. A forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of green human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree huggers should be seen in this context.I

  And there is more. In the last year of Said’s life, Israel’s so-called separation barrier was going up, seizing huge swaths of the West Bank, cutting Palestinian workers off from their jobs, farmers from their fields, patients from hospitals—and brutally dividing families. There was no shortage of reasons to oppose the wall on human rights grounds. Yet, at the time, some of the loudest dissenting voices among Israeli Jews were not focused on any of that. Yehudit Naot, Israel’s then-environment minister, was more worried about a report informing her that “The separation fence . . . is harmful to the landscape, the flora and fauna, the ecological corridors and the drainage of the creeks.”

  “I certainly don’t want to stop or delay the building of the fence,” she said, but “I am disturbed by the environmental damage involved.” As the Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti later observed, Naot’s “ministry and the National Parks Protection Authority mounted diligent rescue efforts to save an affected reserve of irises by moving it to an alternative reserve. They’ve also created tiny passages [through the wall] for animals.”

  Perhaps this puts the cynicism about the green movement in context. People do tend to be put off when their lives are treated with less respect than flowers and reptiles. And yet there is so much of Said’s intellectual legacy that both illuminates and clarifies the underlying causes of the global ecological crisis, so much that points to ways we might respond that are far more inclusive than current campaign models: ways that don’t ask suffering people to shelve their concerns about war, poverty, and systemic racism and first “save the world,” but that instead demonstrate how all these crises are interconnected, and how the solutions could be, too. In short, Said may have had no time for tree huggers, but tree huggers must urgently make time for Said, and for a great many other anti-imperialist, postcolonial thinkers, because without that knowledge, there is no way to understand how we ended up in this dangerous place, or to grasp the transformations required to get us somewhere safer. So, what follows are some thoughts, by no means complete, about what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world.

  • • •

  He was and remains among our most achingly eloquent theorists of exile and homesickness, but Said’s homesickness, he always made clear, was for a home that had been so radically altered that it no longer really existed. His position was complex: he fiercely defended the right of Palestinians to return, but never claimed that home was fixed. What mattered was the principle of respect for all human rights equally and the need for restorative justice to inform our actions and policies. This perspective is deeply relevant in our time of eroding coastlines, of nations disappearing beneath rising seas, of the coral reefs that sustain entire cultures being bleached white, of a balmy Arctic. This is because the state of longing for a radically altered homeland, a home that may not even exist any longer, is something
that is being rapidly, and tragically, globalized.

  In March 2016, two major peer-reviewed studies warned that sea level rise could happen significantly faster than previously believed. One of the authors of the first study was James Hansen, perhaps the most respected climate scientist in the world. He warned that, on our current emissions trajectory, we face the “loss of all coastal cities, most of the world’s large cities and all their history”—and not in thousands of years from now but as soon as this century. In other words, if we don’t demand radical change, we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.

  Said helps us imagine what that might look like as well. He often invoked the Arabic word sumud (“to stay put, to hold on”), that steadfast refusal to leave one’s land despite the most desperate eviction attempts and even when surrounded by continuous danger. It’s a word most associated with places like Hebron and Gaza, but it could be applied equally today to thousands of residents of coastal Louisiana who have raised their homes up on stilts so that they don’t have to evacuate, or to Pacific Islanders whose slogan is “We are not drowning. We are fighting.” In low-lying nations like the Marshall Islands and Fiji and Tuvalu, they know that so much sea level rise is already locked in from polar ice melt that their countries likely have no future. But they refuse to concern themselves with only the logistics of relocation, and wouldn’t relocate even if there were safer countries willing to open their borders—a very big if, given that climate refugees aren’t currently recognized under international law. Instead, they are actively resisting: blockading Australian coal ships with traditional outrigger canoes, disrupting international climate negotiations with their inconvenient presence, demanding far more aggressive climate action. If there is anything worth celebrating in the Paris Climate Agreement—and sadly, there isn’t enough—it has come about because of this kind of principled action: climate sumud.

  But this only scratches the surface of what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world. He was, of course, a giant in the study of “othering,” what is described in his 1978 book Orientalism as “disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region.” And once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion. Because the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction.

  What does this have to do with climate change? Perhaps everything.

  We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools—of ranking the relative value of humans—are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.

  • • •

  Fossil fuels aren’t the sole driver of climate change—there is also industrial agriculture and deforestation—but they are the biggest. And the thing about fossil fuels is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that they require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies can be sacrificed to work in the coal mines, people whose lands and water can be sacrificed to open-pit mining and oil spills. As recently as the 1970s, scientists advising the US government openly referred to certain parts of the country being designated “national sacrifice areas.” Think of the mountains of Appalachia, blasted off for coal mining because so-called mountaintop removal coal mining is cheaper than digging holes underground. There must be theories of othering to justify sacrificing an entire geography—theories about the people who lived there being so poor and backward that their lives and culture don’t deserve protection. After all, if you’re a “hillbilly,” who cares about your hills?

  Turning all that coal into electricity required another layer of othering, too, this time for the urban neighborhoods next door to the power plants and refineries. In North America, these are overwhelmingly communities of color, black and Latino, forced to carry the toxic burden of our collective addiction to fossil fuels, with markedly higher rates of respiratory illnesses and cancers. It was in fights against this kind of environmental racism that the climate justice movement was born.

  Fossil fuel sacrifice zones dot the globe. Take the Niger Delta, poisoned with an Exxon Valdez worth of spilled oil every year, a process that Ken Saro-Wiwa, before he was murdered by his government, called “ecological genocide.” The executions of community leaders, he said, were “all for Shell.” In my country, Canada, the decision to dig up the Alberta tar sands, a particularly heavy form of oil, has required the shredding of treaties with First Nations, treaties signed with the British Crown that guaranteed Indigenous peoples the right to continue to hunt, fish, and live traditionally on their ancestral lands. It required it because these rights are meaningless when the land is desecrated, when the rivers are polluted and the moose and fish are riddled with tumors. And it gets worse: Fort McMurray, the town at the center of the tar sands boom, where many of the workers live and where much of the money is spent, was just decimated by an infernal blaze, entire neighborhoods burned to the ground. It’s that hot and that dry. And that excess heat has something to do with the interred substance being mined there.

  Even without such dramatic events, this kind of resource extraction is a form of violence because it does so much damage to the land and water that it brings about the end of a way of life, a slow death of cultures that are inseparable from the land. Severing Indigenous people’s connection to their culture used to be state policy in Canada, imposed through the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families to boarding schools where their language and cultural practices were banned and where physical and sexual abuse was rampant. A recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on these residential schools called them part of a system of “cultural genocide.”

  The trauma associated with these layers of forced separation—from land, from culture, from family—is directly linked to the epidemic of despair ravaging so many First Nations communities today. On a single Saturday night in April 2016, in the community of Attawapiskat (population two thousand), eleven people tried to take their own lives. Meanwhile, DeBeers runs a diamond mine on the community’s traditional territory; like all extractive projects, it had promised hope and opportunity.

  “Why don’t the people just leave?” the politicians and pundits ask. Many do. And that departure is linked, in part, to the thousands of Indigenous women in Canada who have been murdered or gone missing, often in big cities. Press reports rarely draw a connection between violence against women and violence against the land (often to extract fossil fuels), but one exists.

  Every new government comes to power promising a new era of respect for Indigenous rights. They don’t deliver because Indigenous rights, as defined by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, include the right to refuse extractive projects, even when those projects fuel national economic growth. And that’s a problem because growth is our religion, our way of life. So, even Justin Trudeau, Canada’s woke young prime minister, is bound and determined to build new fossil fuel projects—new mines, new pipelines, and new export terminals—against the express wishes of Indigenous communities who don’t want to risk their water, or participate in further destabilizing the climate.

  The point is this: our fossil fuel–powered economy requires sacrifice zones. It always has. And you can’t have a system built o
n sacrificial places and sacrificial people unless intellectual theories that justify their sacrifice exist and persist: from the Doctrine of Christian Discovery to Manifest Destiny to terra nullius to Orientalism, from backward hillbillies to backward Indians. We often hear climate change blamed on “human nature,” on the inherent greed and shortsightedness of our species. Or we are told we have altered the earth so much and on such a planetary scale that we are now living in the Anthropocene, the age of man. These ways of explaining our current circumstances have a very specific, if unspoken meaning: that humans are a single type, that human nature can be essentialized to the traits that created this crisis. In this way, the systems that certain humans created, and other humans powerfully resisted, are completely let off the hook. Capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy—those sorts of systems.

  Diagnoses like this also erase the very existence of human systems that organized life differently, systems that insist that humans must think seven generations in the future; must be not only good citizens but also good ancestors; must take no more than they need and give back to the land in order to protect and augment the cycles of regeneration. These systems existed and persist, against all odds, but they are erased every time we say that climate disruption is a crisis of “human nature” and that we are living in the “age of man.”II And they come under very real attack when megaprojects are built, like the Gualcarque River hydroelectric dam in Honduras, a project that, among other things, stole the life of the land defender Berta Cáceres, who was assassinated in March 2016.

  Some people insist that it doesn’t have to be this bad. We can clean up resource extraction; we don’t need to do it the way it’s been done in Honduras and the Niger Delta and the Alberta tar sands. Except that we are running out of cheap and easy ways to get at fossil fuels, which is why we have seen the rise of fracking, deepwater drilling, and tar sands extraction in the first place. This, in turn, is starting to challenge the original Faustian pact of the industrial age: that the heaviest risks would be outsourced, offloaded, onto the other, the periphery abroad and inside our own nations. It’s a pact that is becoming less and less tenable. Fracking is threatening some of the most picturesque parts of Britain as the sacrifice zone expands, swallowing up all kinds of places that imagined themselves safe. So, this isn’t just about gasping at how ugly the vast tailing ponds are in Alberta. It’s about acknowledging that there is no clean, safe, nontoxic way to run an economy powered by fossil fuels. There never was.