by Chris Hedges
“We have a kitchen about fifty blocks from here where we cook and deliver hot food,” Ferebee said. “We take food along with supplies out to distribution hubs. There is a distribution hub about every thirty or forty blocks. When I first went out, I was giving water to people who had not had water for six days.”
She sat in front of a pile of paper sheets headed “Occupy Sandy Dispatch.” Various sites were listed on the sheets, including Canarsie, Coney Island, Red Hook, the Rockaways, Sheepshead Bay, Staten Island, and New Jersey. As we spoke, Roman Torres, forty-five, came up to the table. We began to speak in Spanish. He told me he sang on weekends in a band that played Mexican folk music. He had pulled his van up in front of the church, and he told Ferebee he was ready to make deliveries. Torres had been coming two days a week to transport supplies.
“Can you go anywhere?” Ferebee asked Torres.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Can you do a couple of drop-offs at the Rockaways?” she inquired.
“Yes, if someone comes with me,” he said.
Torres fixed himself a cup of coffee in the church kitchen while volunteers carried boxes from the basement outside into the rain. They loaded the boxes into the back of his van.
“We can’t ever get enough electric heaters, cleaning supplies, tools, and baby supplies,” Ferebee lamented.
I walked up the stairs to the communications and dispatch room. I ran into Juan Carlos Ruiz, a former Roman Catholic priest who was born in Mexico. He took me to his small apartment, and we had a coffee at a small wooden table. Ruiz was the church’s community organizer. It was his decision once the storm hit to open the doors of the church as a relief center. He did not know what to expect.
“It was Tuesday night,” he said. “We got three bags of groceries and two jars of water. It was the next morning that volunteers began to appear. By the first weekend, we had over 1,300. It was organized chaos. There was all this creative energy and youth. There was an instant infrastructure and solidarity. It is mutual aid that is the most important response to the disasters we are living through. This is how we will retain our humanity. Some members of the church asked me why these [volunteers] did not come to the church service. I told them the work they were doing was church. The commitment I saw was like a conversion experience. It was transformative. It restores your faith in humanity.”
The consequences of worsening climate change, along with stagnant and declining economies, will trigger mass migration, widespread famine, the spread of deadly infectious diseases, and levels of human mortality that will dwarf those of the Black Death, which between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries ravaged Asia and Europe. In the fourteenth century alone, the Black Death is estimated to have taken 200 million lives. Scientists now fear that changing climate patterns could lead to its reemergence. Black rats, the bacterium’s hosts, have already reappeared in Great Britain.7
Rising sea levels and soaring temperatures will make parts of the planet uninhabitable. More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if we continue to refuse to respond to climate change, estimates a report commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a partnership of twenty developing countries threatened by climate change. The thawing of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will see the steady rising of sea levels by an estimated 2.3 meters (7 feet, 6 inches) in the next 2,000 years, assuming temperatures stay at current levels. The rising sea levels will create chaos across the globe as coastal cities and island states are flooded.8
As poorer societies around the globe unravel—many of them no longer able to impose the order of organized states—and as our own depressed communities are wrecked, shoddily patched back together, and then wrecked again, the same inchoate hatreds and bloodlusts for vengeance and retribution that I witnessed in disintegrating states such as the former Yugoslavia will be unleashed. Crisis cults, those bizarre messianic movements defined by a belief in magic and mystical religious fervor, will arise, as they did in medieval and Reformation Europe and among the Sioux at the end of the Indian wars. The armed thugs and gangs of warlords—which were common in the war in Bosnia—will storm through blighted landscapes looting, pillaging, and killing. This is already a reality to those affected by the severe droughts in Africa. Recent migrants, religious and ethnic minority groups, undocumented workers, foreign nationals, and homosexuals, indeed all who do not conform to the idealized image of the nation, buttressed by a mythical narrative about a lost golden age, will become the enemy and, for many, the cause of our distress.
Hunger and constant drought, especially in the poorer parts of the globe, will force populations to carry out armed raids and internecine wars to survive and lead many others to flee for more temperate zones. An estimated 200 million climate refugees, most from the equatorial regions of the globe, will descend by the middle of this century on Europe and other industrialized countries, according to figures cited in a study from Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network.9 The industrialized states, anxious to preserve dwindling resources and avoid being overrun by destitute hordes, will become ringed fortresses. Democratic rights and constitutional protections will most likely be obliterated. This may be the best we can hope for. The worst will be the complete collapse of our ecosystem and the extinction of the human species. Neither scenario is pleasant.
No act of rebellion can be effective, much less moral, unless it first takes into account reality, no matter how bleak that reality. As our lives become increasingly fragile, we will have to make hard decisions about how to ensure our own survival and yet remain moral beings. We will be called upon to fight battles, some of which we will have no hope of winning, if only to keep alive the possibility of compassion and justice. We will depend on others to survive. This is not the world most of us desire, but it is the world that will probably exist. The greatest existential crisis we face is to at once accept what lies before us—for the effects of climate change and financial instability are now inevitable—and yet find the resilience to fight back.
Civilizations have followed a familiar pattern of disintegration from Sumer to Easter Island. The difference this time is that there will be no new lands to conquer, no new people to subjugate, and no new resources to plunder. When the unraveling begins, it will be global. At first, parts of the globe will be safer and more amenable to life. But any sanctuary will be temporary.
One of the most prescient portraits of our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s novel about a doomed whaling voyage, Moby-Dick. Melville paints our murderous obsessions, our hubris, our violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction in his chronicle of the quest by a demented captain, Ahab, for the white whale. Melville, as William Shakespeare was for Elizabethan England and Fyodor Dostoyevsky for Czarist Russia, is America’s foremost oracle.
Melville’s radical book was poorly received when it appeared in 1851, and two years after publication, the unsold copies were lost in a fire in the publisher’s warehouse. Although more copies were printed, the novel never did sell out its first edition of 3,000 copies in Melville’s lifetime. Melville, unable to survive as a writer, took a job working with the US Custom Service in Manhattan.10
It would be some seventy years before the author and critic Carl Van Doren resurrected Melville, praising the originality and importance of Moby-Dick in his 1921 book The American Novel.11 D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature concurred with Van Doren.12 E. M. Forster called Moby-Dick a “prophetic song,” and the critic Lewis Mumford helped enshrine the book in the Western canon.13 William Faulkner, who had a framed print of Rockwell Kent’s Captain Ahab in his living room, said Moby-Dick was the one book he wished he had written.14 Edward Said drew parallels between Ahab’s quest and the folly of empire.15 C.L.R. James wrote a brilliant study of empire, class, commercialism, and Moby-Dick, entitled Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways:
The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.16 Contemporary social critics, such as Greg Grandin in The Empire of Necessity and Morris Berman in Why America Failed, have also turned to Melville to buttress their bleak vision of the voyage we have undertaken as a species.17 In his book Why Read Moby-Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick writes, “Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America.”18
In the book, Melville gives shape to the United States in the form of the whaling ship the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe that was nearly exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s thirty-man crew—there were thirty states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby-Dick, which in a previous encounter dismembered one of Ahab’s legs.
Moby-Dick is narrated in 1850 by Ishmael, a footloose sailor who signs on for a voyage on the Pequod with his new friend Queequeg, a tattooed harpooner from an island in the South Pacific. Queequeg, a self-professed cannibal who consults a small idol named Yojo, exhibits throughout the book a generosity and courage that Ishmael admires. The Pequod leaves Nantucket on a blustery, gray Christmas Day. Ahab, who remains hidden in his cabin until after the Pequod embarks, finally makes his appearance on deck after several days at sea, with his false ivory leg, carved from a sperm whale’s jaw. He incites the crew to hunt down and kill the enormous white whale.
When whales are first sighted near the southern tip of Africa, Ahab’s private and secret whaleboat crew, led by the mysterious Fedallah, suddenly appears from below the hold to take part in the hunt. As the Pequod rounds Africa and enters the Indian Ocean, the crew kill and butcher the whales, then boil down the oil and blubber in a bloody process that Melville describes in detail. Meanwhile, Ahab remains obsessed with finding Moby-Dick and questions passing ships about the white whale. When the Pequod encounters the Jeroboam, a crazed prophet who calls himself Gabriel warns of destruction to all who hunt Moby-Dick.
Fedallah, who Ahab believes has the power of prophecy, predicts that Ahab will see two hearses before he dies. Mortal hands, Fedallah says, will not have made the first hearse. The second hearse will be made only from American wood. Fedallah predicts that Ahab will be killed by hemp, which Ahab interprets to mean he will die on land on the gallows.
As the ship approaches the equator Moby-Dick is sighted, and Ahab launches his whaleboat in pursuit. Moby-Dick smashes the boat. When the hunt resumes the next day, the whale is harpooned. The wounded whale again attacks Ahab’s whaleboat, and Fedallah is pulled into the sea and drowned. On the third day of the hunt, the crew sees Fedallah’s corpse, tangled in the harpoon line, lashed to the whale’s back. The white whale then rams the Pequod, and the ship sinks. The doomed ship and the white whale become the hearses—one made of American wood and the other not by mortal hands—foretold by Fedallah. The hemp harpoon line attached to Moby-Dick whips out of the boat and garrotes Ahab. The other whaleboats, along with the remaining ship’s crew, are sucked into the swirling vortex created by the shattered Pequod. Ishmael alone survives.
Ahab’s grievances in the novel are real. But his self-destructive fury ensures the Pequod’s fate. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation of the earth, and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.
We too see the danger signs. The ecosystem is visibly disintegrating. Scientists from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) issued a report in 2013 warning that the oceans are changing even faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life. The oceans have absorbed much of the excess carbon dioxide and heat from the atmosphere, and this absorption is rapidly warming and acidifying ocean waters. This process is compounded, the report notes, by increased levels of deoxygenation from nutrient runoffs due to farming and climate change. The IPSO scientists call these effects—acidification, warming, and deoxygenation—a “deadly trio” that is causing changes in the seas unprecedented in the planet’s history. The scientists write that each of the earth’s previous five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one part of the “deadly trio.”19 The sixth mass extinction of species has already begun, the first in some 66 million years.20
Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash.21 They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet.
Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense.
The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.22 This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but in fact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.23 The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become.
Yet, like Ahab and his crew, we rationalize our collective madness. All calls for revolt, for halting the march toward economic, political, and environmental catastrophe, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, even with huge swaths of the country living in Depression-like conditions, we bow slavishly before the enticing illusion provided to us by our masters of limitless power, wealth, and technological prowess. The system, although it is killing us, is our religion.
Clive Hamilton, in his Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, describes the dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is now virtually certain.”24 This obliteration of our “false hopes” requires not only intellectual knowledge but emotional knowledge. Intellectual knowledge is more easily attained. Emotional knowledge, which requires us to accept that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery, and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept the impending disaster, to attain the visceral understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality.
The crisis before us is the culmination of a 500-year global rampage of conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth—as well as killing by Europeans and Euro-Americans of the indigenous communities that stood in their way. The technical and scien
tific forces that created unparalleled luxury and unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite are the forces that now doom us. Ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel—thirteen of the fourteen warmest years since weather record-keeping began over a century ago have occurred in the opening years of the twenty-first century—we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism.25
Anthropologists, including Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies, Charles Redman in Human Impact on Ancient Environments, and Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress, have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to the breakdown of complex societies, which usually collapse not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity.26 “One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote.27
The last days of any civilization, when populations are averting their eyes from the unpleasant realities before them, become carnivals of hedonism and folly. Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity assume political control. Today charlatans and hucksters hold forth on the airwaves, and intellectuals are ridiculed. Force and militarism, with their hypermasculine ethic, are celebrated. And the mania for hope requires the silencing of any truth that is not childishly optimistic.