As Dowley put it, wars are now fought in outer space. A nation under attack is usually attacked inside its national borders. Troops may surge across a border, as they did at the outset of both of the Bush wars on Iraq—across their border, not ours—but both of those were accompanied by the aerial bombardment that goes far inside the country. And aerial bombardment is often directed at civilians. Thus war from Mussolini’s bombing of North Africa and the Fascist bombing of Guernica became profoundly asymmetrical. The old idea of a confrontation between two sides is blown away; in its place is an attacker who cannot be attacked directly, though the blows can be parried.
Missiles and more monstrous new inventions like pilotless drones are even directed from afar, often from within the attacking nation. Afghanistan cannot fire missiles back at the headquarters of the drone operators near Las Vegas, Nevada, though in the all-out nuclear wars imagined during the Cold War era, both the United States and the USSR would send nuclear bombs to strategic targets, military and civilian, within the other nation’s boundaries while trying to intercept the incoming missiles. The heroic idea of combat, of bodily skill and equal engagement, of Achilles or Roland or even Wellington and Grant facing risk with physical courage, has some relevance to the ground troops in some places, but nothing to do with the death rained from the skies by these men whose daily lives more resemble those of video gamers. The bunkers are, among other things, an old daydream of an enemy you would face, one who could only hurt you by confronting you, by showing up.
They were built to defend us from wars that never quite arrived on these shores. Central California has been attacked by foreigners a few times, starting with invading Spanish and Mexican attacks on the Native peoples, which consisted largely of skirmishes and one-sided brutalities. (The big campaigns against the Native Californians were elsewhere and later, run by Yankees in events such as the Modoc War and the Bloody Island Massacre.) The indigenous peoples responded, with attacks on the Missions, raids on ranchos, and other acts of self-defense and survival, including an incursion on Mission San Rafael. Events resembling European war with all its pageantry and weaponry came later, when the Spanish-speaking nominal citizens of Mexico had become part of the population to be invaded and displaced.
Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones’s fleet arrived in Monterey—then the capital of the Mexican province—on October 19, 1842. He demanded surrender and got it without firing a shot. Perhaps the fearsome arsenal of the five ships with a total of 116 big guns convinced the small Californiano population that resistance would be unpleasant. The next day 150 Marines marched up the hill to the fort, while the bands played “Yankee Doodle.” The invasion was premature and based on rumors of British competition for the northernmost portion of Mexico. A couple of days later, Jones withdrew his proclamation and acknowledged Mexican sovereignty before the soldiers dispatched from Los Angeles could make much progress up the coast.
Less than four years later, on June 16, 1846, the Bear Flag Revolt began inland with the attack on Sonoma and the raising of a primitive version of what would become the California state flag. A few weeks into the skirmishes by invading Yankees against resident Mexicans, Army Captain John C. Frémont—one of the few government men involved in the revolt—took twelve men with him on an American ship, the Moscow, that sailed south in the Bay to the Presidio of San Francisco. It had been abandoned, and there was no conflict, though there were some squabbles when they marched onward to the hamlet of Yerba Buena and took a few captives. There were larger battles further south as the revolt merged with the war on Mexico, but the Bay Area remained unscathed by major conflict. The newly American region was prepared for defense against coastal attack in the 1850s and 1860s, but the Civil War led to no violence—beyond duels such as the Broderick-Terry duel of 1859—in the locale. The fortifications then and a century later were built for conflicts that never arrived. They are the architecture of grim anticipation, of imagination of things to come that never came.
During the Second World War, there were some grounds to fear Japanese attack. In the wake of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, seven enemy submarines patrolled the Pacific Coast, but Japan decided against a mainland attack for fear of reprisals. A false alert the following May caused the USS Colorado and the USS Maryland to sail out from the Golden Gate to defend the coast from attacks that never came. Late in the war, a Japanese fire balloon—a kind of incendiary device that floated across the Pacific—was shot down by a Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter plane near Santa Rosa with no major damage reported. (Others landed in various places in the American West, and a few inflicted actual damage and a total of six deaths—of a pregnant woman with her five children, out on a picnic: et in arcadia.) War was in the skies, and coastal fortifications were anachronistic.
But the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter was made by Lockheed when it was based in Burbank on the fringes of Los Angeles, back when Los Angeles was producing the airplanes to fight the war and the Bay Area was turning out a warship a day in its furiously productive shipyards. If we think of war as combat and casualties, then it has with small exceptions, such as the Ohlone and Miwok resistance to the missions and the land grabs, been fought elsewhere. But if we think of it as a mind-set, an economy, a way of life—a lot of things that add up to a system—then two things become as evident as a thirty-foot-thick chunk of concrete embedded amid the sticky monkey flower and coast sage of the Headlands.
One is that the Bay Area is entrenched in and crucial to this system, with UC Berkeley running the nation’s nuclear weapons programs since their inception, with defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin (makers, once upon a time, of the Nike missile) clustered in Silicon Valley, with the ring of old bases around the Bay—Mare Island, Hunter’s Point, Alameda, Treasure Island, Hamilton, and the Presidio. The other is that this system is mad. Its madness was perhaps most perfectly manifested in the soldiers or national guardsmen in camouflage who patrolled the Golden Gate Bridge at one phase of the GWOT, the Global War on Terror, a war that in its very name declared hostility not to a group or a nation but to an emotion while seeking—with, for example, heavily armed men in civilian spaces such as Penn Station or the Golden Gate Bridge—to induce that very emotion in the public. That their desert camouflage only made them stand out and that the threats to the bridge were sketchy and remote, while the men with semiautomatic weapons were evident and unnerving, articulates something about war as a state of being. The enemy may be remote, invisible, or even conceptual, but we ourselves as a society devoted to war see ourselves in a thousand mirrors, of which the bunkers are one.
The bunkers were both prophylactics against physical damage by an alien military and part of the damage that is the mind-set of war, the mind-set that induces fear and suspicion, that countenances sacrifices, destructions, and the willingness to engage in acts of violence, that damages a society before the enemy ever touches it. The military left radioactive waste behind at Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyards; dozens of rusting, leaking warships in the Mothball Fleet near Benicia; PCBs at 100,000 times the acceptable level, along with dioxins and other chemicals on Treasure Island; and more. The Headlands and much of the rest of the GGNRA got off lightly, larded only with cement and rust, not with chemicals and radiation. What all these areas have in common is their status as monuments to public expenditure by those in charge of protecting us. There is, for example, the Sea Shadow, a stealth ship built at extraordinary expense in the 1980s and then abandoned without ever being used or even useful. The prototype is in the Mothball Fleet. It is a corollary to the lack of money for libraries and schools in towns like Richmond, whose African-American population mostly arrived in World War II for shipyard jobs and stayed even when the economy withered, despite the growth of the Chevron refineries there that have been refining Iraqi crude since early in the war there. Chevron, whose board member Condoleezza Rice became our secretary of state and led us into that war, Rice, who is back at Stanford, Stanford that helped generate Silicon Va
lley, Silicon Valley that has done so much to develop the new technologies of war. War is everywhere for those who have eyes to see, but in some places it’s hard to miss.
It is good that the bunkers are in the beautiful open space of the coast and good that one of the region’s native sons, Alex Fradkin, has photographed them so eloquently. They should be there; we should pause amid the myriad pleasures that this Mediterranean climate and protected landscape afford to contemplate the presence of death and our own implication in the business. Until something profound changes in the United States, war will never be far away, and even on the most paradisical meander we do well to pause and remember this.
2011
CLIMATE CHANGE IS VIOLENCE
If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it—by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.
But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear super-powers—the United States and Russia—still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.
Or so I thought when I received a press release from a climate group announcing that “scientists say there is a direct link between changing climate and an increase in violence.” What the scientists actually said, in a not-so-newsworthy article in Nature a few years ago, is that there is higher conflict in the tropics in El Niño years and that perhaps this will scale up to make our age of climate change also an era of civil and international conflict.
The message is that ordinary people will behave badly in an era of intensified climate change. All this makes sense, unless you go back to the premise and note that climate change is itself violence. Extreme, horrific, long-term, widespread violence.
Climate change is anthropogenic—caused by human beings, some Climate Change Is Violence much more than others. We know the consequences of that change: the acidification of oceans and decline of many species in them, the slow disappearance of island nations such as the Maldives, increased flooding, drought, crop failure leading to food-price increases and famine, increasingly turbulent weather. (Think Hurricane Sandy and the recent typhoon in the Philippines and heat waves that kill elderly people by the tens of thousands.)
Climate change is violence.
So if we want to talk about violence and climate change, then let’s talk about climate change as violence. Rather than worrying about whether ordinary human beings will react turbulently to the destruction of the very means of their survival, let’s worry about that destruction—and their survival. Of course, water failure, crop failure, flooding, and more will lead to mass migration and climate refugees—they already have—and this will lead to conflict. Those conflicts are being set in motion now.
You can regard the Arab Spring, in part, as a climate conflict: the increase in wheat prices was one of the triggers for that series of revolts that changed the face of northernmost Africa and the Middle East. On the one hand, you can say, how nice if those people had not been hungry in the first place. On the other, how can you not say, how great is it that those people stood up against being deprived of sustenance and hope? And then you have to look at the systems that created that hunger—the enormous economic inequalities in places such as Egypt and the brutality used to keep down the people at the lower levels of the social system, as well as the weather.
People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education—these things are also governed by economic means and government policy. That’s what the revolt called Occupy Wall Street was against.
Climate change will increase hunger as food prices rise and food production falters, but we already have widespread hunger on Earth, and much of it is due not to the failures of nature and farmers, but to systems of distribution. Almost 16 million children in the United States now live with hunger, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and that is not because the vast, agriculturally rich United States cannot produce enough to feed all of us. We are a country whose distribution system is itself a kind of violence.
Climate change is not suddenly bringing about an era of equitable distribution. I suspect people will be revolting in the coming future against what they revolted against in the past: the injustices of the system. They should revolt, and we should be glad they do, if not so glad that they need to. (Though one can hope they’ll recognize that violence is not necessarily where their power lies.) One of the events prompting the French Revolution was the failure of the 1788 wheat crop, which made bread prices skyrocket and the poor go hungry. The insurance against such events is often thought to be more authoritarianism and more threats against the poor, but that’s only an attempt to keep a lid on what’s boiling over; the other way to go is to turn down the heat.
The same week during which I received that ill-thought-out press release about climate and violence, Exxon Mobil Corporation issued a policy report. It makes for boring reading, unless you can make the dry language of business into pictures of the consequences of those acts undertaken for profit. Exxon says, “We are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become ‘stranded.’ We believe producing these assets is essential to meeting growing energy demand worldwide.”
Stranded assets that mean carbon assets—coal, oil, gas still underground—would become worthless if we decided they could not be extracted and burned in the near future. Because scientists say that we need to leave most of the world’s known carbon reserves in the ground if we are to go for the milder rather than the more extreme versions of climate change. Under the milder version, countless more people, species, and places will survive. In the best-case scenario, we damage the Earth less. We are currently wrangling about how much to devastate the Earth.
In every arena, we need to look at industrial-scale and systemic violence, not just the hands-on violence of the less powerful. When it comes to climate change, this is particularly true. Exxon has decided to bet that we can’t make the corporation keep its reserves in the ground, and the company is reassuring its investors that it will continue to profit off the rapid, violent, and intentional destruction of the Earth.
That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field—and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence against places and species, as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
2014
DRY LANDS
The Colorado River and Hydrological Madness of the West
The supply of stories has perhaps been the American West’s only reliable bounty. The difficult thing has been finding people to notice them, let alone tell them well. The Indian wars, still unfinished as tribes continue to struggle for rights, territory, and cultural survival; the resource rushes, the Gold Rush in particular, which turned San Francisco into a cosmopolitan city standing alone in the wilderness; the once astonishingly abundant salmon runs that sustained soil and trees, as well as birds, bears, and humans;
the timber wars; the rangeland wars; the radical labor and environmental movements; the attitudes people adopted toward a harsh, unfamiliar, often-sublime landscape; the evolution of European cultures in a non-European terrain; and the arrival of Asian and Latin American immigrants to shape a hybrid culture: all these have had their occasional historians, though most Americans were raised to believe that history happened somewhere else. The San Francisco Public Library has an overflowing case of books on the East’s Civil War, but only a handful on the war that transferred a million square miles or so of Mexico to the United States, including California and most of what we now call the West.
The central thread in this story of the West is the story of the Colorado River and the attempts to determine what dreams it licenses and which must be left unwatered as it snakes through much of the major nonfiction of the West. The river begins in Colorado with tributaries reaching up into Wyoming, and they gather force and volume as they rush through the magnificent canyons they carved in Utah and Arizona, through Nevada’s southern tip and down California’s backside to—well, thanks to Yankee rapacity, the river doesn’t usually reach the Gulf of California or water much of Mexico anymore. It’s the story of the intermountain West: could it be domesticated for agriculture and settlement, or would its inhabitants become feral, nomadic peoples scattered lightly in a belt of un-European terrain that would divide the West Coast from the sedentary, verdant East? It’s the story of the Hoover Dam and the rise of the extraordinary hydraulic engineering that since the 1920s has come to alter the world from Iceland to India, largely for the worse. Of the rise of industrial tourism as the Grand Canyon became part of the railroad-based restaurant and hotel empire of Fred Harvey. Of the rise of the modern environmental movement: the evolution of ideas about landscape, aesthetics, the public good, and the battles between a boomtown, resource-rush mentality and a minority more interested in long-term planning.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Page 7