Riding to the end of the planetary landscape

Note: this was originally posted on my Substack on Nov. 30, 2021. I deleted that Substack several months ago and I’m reposting these blogs here so they won’t be lost.

Embarking

It's November: the breezes blow chill, the trees stand bare as needles, and I've been riding the train again. November is Leaf Season here in east-central Massachusetts. When enough wet leaves carpet the train tracks, they cause slippery rail, or "low railhead adhesion" -- with not enough friction between the wheels and the rails, the will skid across the tracks when the 144-ton engine tries to start or stop. I've ridden the train enough that my body's center of gravity remembers the regular rhythms of the stations on the line. When I hear the train brake and anticipate the shift and we slowly, slowly skid past the station, I feel the disquiet in my chest. Through the window I see the dismay on the passing faces before the brakes finally seize the rails. There's a metaphor somewhere, the great symbol of modern industry defeated by a few wet leaves, but as far as the engineer is concerned it's just aggravating.

As I wool-gather at the window my eyes project the illusion of a migratory landscape onto the glass. The train window is the oldest type of glass interface -- predating the film projector lens, the television screen, the computer monitor, the smartphone. Always the deceit of movement on the other side of the border; but the landscape on the other side of the train-window glass exists in our material world. The window cuts an edge between my train seat and the world outside, as if the landscape is moving around me while keeping its distance. Like the movement, this separation is an illusion. Me, the window, the train, the rails, the trees and their wet leaves, the metal fences lining the tracks, the crumbling back-of-the-building parking lots, the yards hosting scattered plastic furniture and children's toys. The city and the wild, the human and the unhuman, all of us clasped together in the Anthropocene.

First stop: Human Landscape

The landscape flickers in my window, humans flicker in and out of landscapes. The landscapes interlock and overlap. Always moving into and across them, that's our personal experience of Planet Earth. As individuals we receive the whole as a series of smudged pieces, as we are received in them. Fragments among fragments, the human and the unhuman marking each other. In the Anthropocene the human marks are everywhere and indelible.

I live in north-central Massachusetts, where the indigenous Pennacook peoples ("the People at the Bottom of the Hill" in Abenaki) also lived. They were sometimes called the Pawtucket or the Merrimack, and were made up of several kin-groups -- the main being Agawam, Nashua, Naumkeag, Pentucket, Wachuset, Wamesit and Weshacum, with some of these having smaller sub-groups. The groups dwelled near each other in something neighborhoods crossed with collectives, where they would negotiate with each other over the rights to gather and use resources on their various plots of land. Families like to quarrel, so Pennacock society was mostly level in order to keep the kin-groups from fighting each other over supplies.

There were two features of the landscape that the Pennacook truly venerated: rivers and forests. Rivers like the Merrimack were lined with fertile soil to grow their squash, corn, and maize. Waterways were also the fastest travel routes -- allowing for long-distance trade by cutting through the rocky domes and sharp eskers of quartz and granite and clearing a path through the marvelous, immeasurable forests.

To explain about the forests, I have to quote from George H.W. Foster:

The extent to which the Massachusetts forest governed Indian life is hard to imagine today. It contributed food directly - fruit, seeds, and acorns and other nuts - and also indirectly, by furnishing habitat for wildlife, headwaters for fish and shellfish, and nutrients for crops grown in forest clearings. Medicines were derived from the forest, as well as housing, which consisted of frameworks of saplings covered by sheets of bark held together by tree-root lashings. Strips of the inner bark of cedar or basswood were used for mats and baskets. Canoes were built from trees felled with stone axes; hollowed out with fire; finished with stone, bone and shell scrapers; and propelled with ash and maple paddles. … Fire was an indispensable tool of the Indian culture. The friction of wooden drills and spindles sparked "touchwood" (often the Polyporus fungus found on tree roots). Cooking fires were fueled with windfalls and deadwood gleaned from the forest. Wildfire was the principal instrument used to maintain clearings for crops, obtain ash for fertilizer, and create conditions favorable for wildlife. … The forest also yielded the primary instruments for taking game: deadfalls were used for making snares; ash, for longbows; elder, for arrows; and tree bark, for quivers.

Those deep rivers and spacious, abundant forests were also the places of the Pennacooks' juxtaposition with the unhuman. For thousands of years the Pennacook painted their dead in red ochre and buried them in cemeteries full of great earthen mounds at the mouth of the Merrimack River. In the wooded swamps, "the abode of owls", the shamans -- the pauwaus -- congregated to seek guidance from beyond. They lived only by the grace of the landscape, reading the rhythms of seasons and migrations, grieving the dead, attending signs and portents. Someone in the twenty-first century might say the Pennacook were "in harmony with nature" as a way of comparing them favorably to our society of late-industrial blight. But nature isn't harmonious. Every ecosystem is a roiling mass of inert and vital matter caught in a throbbing web of birthing, eating, dying, decaying, eroding, invading, evolving. The Pennacook were like the other indigenous people of the Americas: technologically advanced enough to both read and manipulate their terrain in order to thrive in that landscape.

Before the European settlers arrived, there were about 100,000 indigenous Americans in New England, and around 12,000-16,000 of those were Pennacook. In 1524, they encountered a French expedition led by the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verranzano. He had been working his way up the East Coast from North Carolina to Narragansett Bay, looking for a sea route to the Pacific Ocean on behalf of King Francis I. He went back empty-handed, and the Pennacook, in their inland villages by the Merrimack River, had no direct contact with Europeans for the next 90 years.

The Pennacook thrived in their landscape, but the Europeans had struggled in their own landscape for many centuries. Their roads and cities were strata of ruins upon ruins laid by decades of warfare, the land deforested and over-farmed. And of course they had the immunity left behind by generations of plagues, the germs of which they bore from their landscapes in France, Spain, and England all the way to the shores of the Merrimack.

The European diseases started to affect the Pennacook in the 1560s. An epidemic of typhus in 1586 was devastating. As the years went on there were waves of measles, influenza, and diphtheria. A terrible epidemic of what was probably smallpox in 1616-1619 killed hundreds, perhaps thousands. In 1620, the survivors met the English settlers who claimed the land of Plymouth. The Pennacook then numbered about 2,500.

The English settlers spent the 1600s claiming more and more land for themselves. Seeing no alternative, and raised in a society built around defusing conflicts, the sachem Passaconaway left his seat at Naumkeag at the falls of the Merrimack to meet with the English. In 1629, Passaconaway signed a formal treaty of alliance with the colonists and tried to appease them. But the English and the Pennacook had completely discordant ways of existing within their landscapes. To the European settlers the terrain the Pennacook had cultivated for thousands of years was a vast ocean of commodities, with land the most precious of all. The settler is defined by their insatiable appetite for land above all.

Relations with the English kept deteriorating. In 1642 forty Englishmen tried to arrest Passaconaway; when they couldn't find him, they took his son Wonalancet hostage. To see his son again Passaconaway agreed to a "treaty" in 1644 giving the Massachusetts colony claim over the Pennacook landscape. Between more waves of disease and attacks by the English-allied Mohawk, there were about 1,200 Pennacook left by 1660. Colonization made them refugees from their own landscape. They merged with the surviving Abenaki and moved north into Canada where their descendants have lived since. Their home was no longer a human landscape, it was part of a global landscape, claimed and ruled first by the global British Empire and later by the global hegemony of the United States.

Second stop: Globalized Landscape

What happened to the Pennacook has never stopped happening since. Human landscapes remade into global landscapes through colonialism, a combination of theory -- greed, racial bigotry, religious and nationalistic fanaticism -- and practice -- violence. Colonialism is at the core of the modern world, the engine driving the train we're on. Without colonialism, there can be no industrialized Anthropocene, and thus no human-made climate crisis.

I couldn't possibly say anything about the legacy of colonialism and/or industrial society that hasn't been said repeatedly by many people much more intelligent and educated about these topics than I am. So I'm just going to make a few observations about how we as a species got shunted onto our current track, with huge apologies for how over-simplified this is.

Obviously there's been something like a global economy for thousands of years. That economy was based on long-distance trade between people living in localized human-scaled landscapes. Colonialism changes that equation by demanding the mass production of particular commodities so they can be traded between nation-states, empires, and corporations in order to generate vast profits. In order to do this colonizers need land, and to take it, they will dispose of the people already living there. They will kill them, displace them, or violently compel them to produce their desired commodities. This terrible cycle might have somehow slowed or even stopped after, say, a thousand years when all the colonizable land on Earth was taken or the amount of labor and profit wrung from colonized people hit its maximum possible output. But industrialization swapped the old wood-fired steam train with a coal-burning engine. Industrialization dramatically increased productivity and output with almost no upper limit, as long as the factories could be built and staffed and the fuel to run them was extracted. Computerization put us on a diesel train by increasing productivity per output even more, and finally in the Internet Age we're on a modern high-speed railway.

After the era of colonialism seems to end -- in, say, the 1970s -- there's no going back to a pre-colonizer economy. Every human landscape on Earth is somehow, some way touched by the global economy. (On the train I ride the conductors work for Keolis Commuter Services, part of a multinational transportation company based in France; the engines and cars were mostly built by Kawasaki Rail Car, Inc. (Japan) then rebuilt by Alstom (Germany). The steel in the rails could have come from numerous countries, maybe more than one.) This has been so commonplace to everyone in the US since the 1990s that we no longer think much about it. It's too large to really comprehend, we just assume that most non-perishables in the US are assembled somewhere in China, a country that most Americans no essentially nothing about except that "it's where COVID came from" and a lot of think-tank types want us to go to war with them for some reason. It's impossible to truly grasp the idea that your landscapes, the particular spaces you call home, don't really belong to you. They don't "belong" to anyone -- they're part of an invisible, incomprehensible ever-shifting mass of globalized landscapes. Zoom out far enough to the singular massive unseen global landscape and that is the essence of the late Anthropocene.

Twenty years ago this was Our Exciting Future. In the 2000s this was there was a lot of "borderless world" propaganda about the global economy, how it had the potential to make everyone in the world into an entrepreneur or startup CEO if they are savvy enough. Instead we got the Walton Family, seven people collectively worth $244 billion in 2021 US dollars. A little less than it would take to wipe out hunger for the entire world, but not by much. The world's richest people are $5 trillion richer than they were in 2020. As of this writing 5,207,634 people have died from COVID since the WHO started counting. A bit less than a trillion dollars per death. This is part of the "late" in the late Anthropocene.

The other part of what makes this moment the late Anthropocene is our climate. As you probably know: "2020 was the second-warmest year on record based on NOAA’s temperature data, and land areas were record warm. Averaged across land and ocean, the 2020 surface temperature was 1.76° F (0.98° Celsius) warmer than the twentieth-century average of 57.0°F (13.9°C) and 2.14˚F (1.19˚C) warmer than the pre-industrial period (1880-1900). Despite a late-year La Niña event that cooled a wide swath of the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2020 came just 0.04˚ Fahrenheit (0.02˚Celsius) shy of tying 2016 for warmest year on record. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005."

The Earth's climate is by definition a global phenomenon, what changed is the legacy of colonialization tethering all of human civilization and culture to a global landscape as well. The debates and the anguish around climate change almost never touch on colonialism, maybe because the descendants of the colonizers still hold the commanding heights over the global economy and landscape. But the suffering of the Pennacook show that colonialism is both the genesis and the apotheosis of the Anthropocene. The Pennacook people were at ground zero of colonization, and they were forced to move far north to preserve their lives and their culture. As every environmentalist has been saying at the top of their lungs since at least 1970, homo sapiens has nowhere else to go, no landscapes to migrate to, just the global human and the planetary unhuman clenched together. We're headed down these rails together.

Last Stop: Planetary Landscape

The conversation around global climate change in the West is always about saving the future. Most of the popular discussion in the US -- where about 5% of the world's population still uses up 25% of the world's resources -- has to do with the possible effects on our quality of life. The people all over the world who are suffering the most from climate change don't talk about the future, they talk about saving their present. About In July 2005, the 100 or so residents of the South Pacific island of Tegua, part of the Torres Strait islands, were the first people to be declared climate change refugees when flooding caused by the risen sea level forced everyone on the island to evacuate permanently. Their landscape was no longer a human landscape, or even part of the global landscape. It had reverted to the unhuman, part now of the planetary landscape. On the level of the human and even the global landscapes, human matter at least a little, but the planetary landscape is totally indifferent to the existence of life itself. The planetary landscape will be the Anthropocene's final stop.

The current level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere will, in the next several years, result in the temperature of the entire globe rising between one-half and one full degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. You might not notice a difference of one degree Celsius when you walk outside, but you’ll definitely notice as the various ecosystems of the Earth begin to change. Huge parts of the western and mid-western US will dry out and become vast deserts, blowing dust and sandstorms across thousands of miles. Worldwide, the amount of fresh water available will start to dwindle away as once-mighty rivers vanish into hot mud banks or even miles-long sand-dunes. The permafrost in the tundra and the mountaintops has already begun to crumble and melt, leading to large-scale landslides and destabilized infrastructure. The melting permafrost will eventually dump massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, intensifying the warming effect. The people and animals living in the arctic zones have begun to move southward as their living space melts away around them. Since there’s less and less snow to melt, the summer heat hangs in the air and enters the ground, eventually to return into the energy loop. And less snow means less reflection of the sun’s light back into space, adding to the heat absorbed by the land and sea. As the glaciers retreat, the surface of the ocean gets larger. Since that surface is dark, it absorbs more of the solar energy, raising temperatures even more, which makes it harder for the arctic ice to reform, which in turn raises the temperature still more. And of course all the extra water from the melted ice and snow means islands submerged, coastlines flooded, and hurricanes that are stronger and more frequent. When the globe warms by a full two degrees, summers will be marked by large numbers of deaths from heat stress and wildfires, not to mention the famines from desiccated crops with no water to irrigate them. The forests that don’t burn will stop growing, and the heat-stressed trees will release yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The lack of snow melt runoff from the Himalayas will leave the entire Indian subcontinent desperate for fresh water. Masses of people will start to move across the globe in search of food and water, sparking conflicts with the military forces of wealthier nation-states determined to hoard their own resources. Those masses will also be searching for higher ground as coastal cities flood with sea water. Animal species, especially those that migrate, will also be displaced. By 2050 more than a third of all living species will be facing possible extinction.

As the global temperature passes two degrees of warming from pre-industrial levels, more and more people will go hungry. Mass starvation will eventually become inescapable, as even the crops that can survive in hotter climates begin to die out. The Amazon rain forest will begin to die, depriving air-breathing animals of much-needed oxygen at the worst time. Trees will grow again in the arctic for the first time in three million years as Greenland melts and all the continental glaciers in the northern hemisphere vanish. As the soil gets warmer, bacteria in that soil break down more and more dead vegetation, releasing thousands of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, where it adds to the greenhouse effect. Also adding to the effect is the warmer ocean water, which absorbs less CO2. Around the year 2050, as the global temperature goes up by three degrees, the Earth’s carbon cycle will finally reach a crisis point and throw itself into reverse. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, the Earth’s soil and vegetation will release it. This will dump even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so much that it pushes the global temperature up by another 1.5 degrees Celsius within 50 years. So-called super hurricanes will slam into the flooded coastlines of the world, laying waste to what remains of the coastal cities. Salt water will seep first into rivers and then into the ground water, making farming impossible, while reservoirs evaporate and the global droughts worsen. Wildfires will burn constantly in the dried-out forests and grasslands of the world. Masses of people will roam the land searching for food and water, especially as the Indian subcontinent becomes a dust bowl, triggering larger and more frequent deadly conflicts over precious fresh water and food. The remaining governments will stay in power by promising to repel the starving and parched masses at all costs.

When the global temperature gets more than three degrees higher than pre-industrial levels, the fabric of society will truly start to fray. Antarctica’s ice will be steadily melting, raising the sea level about a meter every 20 years. That may not sound like much, but it will, for example, reduce the UK to a series of tiny drought-ridden islands in the North Sea. The larger coastal cities will transform into island nations. The sheer number of displaced people moving north will overwhelm attempts to provide for them, even in the richest nations, leading to massive, crowded refugee camps. China’s farms will fail, leaving at least a billion people without a regular source of food. Summers will get longer and harsher, making some cities unbearably hot. But air conditioning will be difficult to find, since the rivers powering hydroelectric dams will have fallen, and ramping up fossil fuel power plants would only add to the problem. But that problem will be getting worse anyway, as the arctic permafrost melts away, dumping at least 500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere and raising the global temperature another full degree Celsius at least. This means that if the Earth warms by three degrees, it will inevitably warm by at least four degrees, and probably five.

When the global temperature moves upwards past four degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, the planet starts to become unrecognizable. The ice is gone from both poles, and even in the far Canadian and Siberian north, the summers are long and hot, making agriculture difficult if not impossible. The amazon rainforest has finished its transformation into a vast desert. It’s hard to imagine the massive migrations not triggering military conflicts, rendering even more of the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. Sea water has begun to flow into some continents’ interiors. We might see Mediterranean algae growing in the Arctic Ocean, and palm mangroves growing in the UK and Belgium. When the temperature hits five degrees of warming, the industrialized world will start to revert into hostile tribes jealously guarding their scarce resources. As farming becomes impossible, humans will try to eat whatever they can catch. But hunter-gatherers take up many times the amount of land to sustain themselves, making conflict even more inevitable. Most of the human population might resemble the groups in modern day Somalia and Sudan, where the nation-states have collapsed into constant internal warfare. There is a decent chance that a five degree warmer world will melt the remaining permafrost in the sea beds of the world. If that happens, the global temperature is guaranteed to continue to increase.

If the Earth surpasses five degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, it will resemble the end of the Permian period. We won’t have the Siberian volcanoes this time, but we will have sea water which is so warm less oxygen can dissolve in it. As with the Permian extinction, this anoxic water will suffocate everything from plankton to sharks. Warmer water also expands, raising the sea levels even higher. And of course the warmer water would lead to even stronger hurricanes, causing massive flash floods across any land still above sea level. Gases long trapped in the sea bed will be released, creating shock waves as huge bubbles of methane hydrate shoot up through the water and hundreds of feet into the air. The shock waves from these exploding gas bubbles will trigger yet more gas eruptions. Methane is a greenhouse gas, but unlike carbon dioxide, methane is flammable, and will ignite in the air at concentrations of 5 percent or more. Lightning would ignite the methane in the atmosphere, sending giant fireballs shooting through the sky. A single methane fireball would have the power of a tactical military explosive. A larger fireball might have the power of 108 megatons of TNT, one hundred thousand times more powerful that the entire global stockpile of nuclear weapons. Anyone who survived these hellish explosions would eventually find themselves unable to breathe as silent, invisible clouds of hydrogen sulfide, released from the stagnant ocean, rolled in from the coasts and slowly across the remaining continental surfaces. And perhaps that’s just as well, for soon they would be riddled with cancerous tumors, as the ozone layer disappears completely and the radiation from the sun bathes the entire Earth in a deadly glow.

Disembarking

If I wanted to lie to you, this would be the part where I say: it's not too late for us to hit the brakes, fix the climate, and stop the Anthropocene. But you know that's not possible. 2008 was the year most climate scientists recognized that even if all greenhouse gas emissions on Earth could be halted immediately and simultaneously, it was already too late to stop the greenhouse effect from kicking in. The earth’s temperature will continue to rise for thousands of years to come. The protest movements and international discussions have come to nothing. Wealthy individuals, with wealthy nations following their lead, have already begun to make their own long term strategy evident. Rather than engage with the global community and treat climate change as a problem common to all humanity, one they mostly caused, they're building massive infrastructure projects like walls and other barriers, investing in powerful military forces, and popularizing rhetoric that excludes and demonizes refugees, immigrants, and other outsiders. The plan is to make their nations into fortresses. The super-rich are investing in what one observer called detachable infrastructure, like ships, submarines, planes, and space craft, which they can use to escape from the environmental and social impacts of the climate crisis. But there's no "outside" of the global landscape. Nobody gets to exit the Anthropocene train until it's reached its destination, wherever it ultimately ends up.

However: if we're honest about how colonialism is at the root and the heart of the Anthropocene -- how it put us on these rails in the first place, which were always going to lead us to this destination -- that provides us with a place to start as we try to imagine an alternative. Colonialism has the effect of defining all relations between humans, and between the human and the unhuman, as essentially property relations -- selfishness as the core of human nature. Systems of legality, governance, even morality are founded on concepts based in property relations, in order to, for example, limit the power of the state. This is a total oversimplification of course but you get the idea. The Pennacook didn't subscribe to this view of human nature. They adjudicated their disputes by collectively agreeing to maintain equitable access to resources. Doing this allowed them to maintain a democratic, stable society for centuries. They're not the only people who imagine a different kind of human nature. It means thinking past the Anthropocene, not just stopping the train or changing tracks but getting on a whole new train altogether. If there is hope for the human landscape after the Anthropocene, and I wouldn't have written all this if I thought otherwise, this is it. If that sounds impossible, consider that the colonial era only started in 1500 and the industrial era only started around 1800. In September 2021, scientists found human footprints in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, that are about 23,000 years old.

You and I might not be there to see it, but the train rolls on.