The Daily: 22 October 2024

Here is something to consider. If you do a very brief survey of headlines, you will see that today, at this very instant, most of the world is actively engaged with recovery from an “historic natural disaster” of some form or another. That is, most of the world is cleaning up after a deadly mess and considering how or if to rebuild. Most of the world is coping with loss and trauma and devastation. Right now, there are billions of people directly affected by fire, flood, storms, and so on and on and on. Chances are fairly slim that you don’t know someone who has suffered recently. Chances are fairly high that you do know someone who is suffering right now.

This tears me apart. But has anyone else noticed the persistent framing? Historic natural disaster. My teeth grind just typing that.

Consider these terms. First… natural? All I can say to headlines that include that word is: are they serious? Does anyone believe that this is natural? Is this how Earth works? Do we see this sort of thing in the geological record? Yes, atmospheric carbon concentrations fluctuate. Yes, temperatures have gone up and down. Yes, there have been fires, floods, droughts, storms, extinctions, and many more disasters. Some were even on global scale. But no, there has never been a time in the history of this planet when change was happening simultaneously to so many vital Earth systems and geographic regions at such a fast rate that nothing alive had the time to adapt. Nor have there been very many times when changes of this magnitude have happened even at slower rates. Pretty much just five times. This is the sixth. The others were not good times to live through. Not many managed that miracle.

Moreover, this isn’t something that is just happening. This is not an effect without a known cause. This is all on us. We are causing this destabilization of the planet. This too is almost unique in Earth history. There have been a handful of times in which the planet was sent into convulsions because of the actions of living entities. Photosynthesis wiped out life as they knew it and changed the composition of the atmosphere and the oceans. Terrestrial plant life once took so much carbon from the atmosphere that they turned this planet into a desiccated chunk of ice. (In which they learned the hard way never to do that again…) But these were changes that happened over hundreds of thousands of years. Other beings could adapt. The system could create ways to equilibrate. Moreover this was not one species, but whole new orders of life, new ways of being. It was equal parts destruction and creation. Where’s the creation now?

No, this is not how the planet works. These are not natural things that happen out there because that’s just the way things are. These are certainly not acts of god… Though that is the order of unnaturalness involved in these disasters. These are actions of humans causing devastation to the entire planet for no reason other than to please humans. Sort of. Some of them anyway. That we are still calling these things “natural” is appalling. That this is a word that makes it into print makes my blood boil. (As you might have noticed…) Believe nothing that follows such a headline. Don’t even waste your time reading it. Even if it’s just a weather forecast, it is all lies with an anti-life political agenda.

But what about “historic”? What does that mean? What do the writers mean for it to mean? Because I think we can agree that historical flooding is not happening in the present tense. Perhaps they are saying that nothing like this has happened in the human past. This is not strictly true, though the scale and frequency of disasters is certainly novel. Still, I don’t think that is exactly what is meant. What seems to be implied in that adjective is that we are making history right now, that these events will be remembered, perhaps remembered as singular, once and done. We struggled. We overcame. We lived to tell the tale. But nothing can be further from the truth (except perhaps “natural”…).

Take the recent flooding in Florida. It was catastrophic in every sense of the term. Homes and lives were wiped out and lost. Some of the effects are just unimaginable, that is, you can’t make this stuff up. A town named Bradenton Beach was covered in sand dunes deep enough to bury cars. This happened overnight. How do you process waking up to something like a hill of sand covering your car, choking the roads, blocking your front door? What do you do with that amount of sand? This isn’t like snow removal where you pile it all up in some out-of-the-way place and let it melt. Sand does not melt. So they are slowly and laboriously scooping it all up and trucking it all away. Imagine trying to get that amount of sand out of your life. (Imagine the places it has penetrated…) And these overnight sand dunes were but one of the minor effects of the one-two punch of Helene and Milton. There doesn’t seem to be an upper limit to the devastation.

But is this history? Does this make history? Will this be remembered in history books and cultural stories? No. Because this is the beginning. We are only beginning to feel the effects. We are nowhere near as bad as it will get. None of us will be alive when it gets as bad as it will get. And we can’t even imagine it, never mind compare it to today. Even today, the bar is constantly shifting to new levels of catastrophe. But today’s flood will be nothing compared to tomorrow.

No, as painful as it is, today is not historic. But there is a more fundamental problem glossed in that headline. What does it imply about continuity? Is that likely? And how exactly is that going to be carried off? Ask yourself: How will history be recorded? In what medium? Stored where and how? In what language? Who is going to do this work in the middle of disaster? And with what money, time and other resources? As things break down, all our current recording systems are going to fail, probably sooner than later, because all our systems are going to fail. That’s what system collapse means. Everything, being linked together, is going to fail together. But history? That will fail first. Because it inevitably will fall much lower in the priority lists than things like hundreds of dead people, collapsed houses, and sand dunes burying Main Street overnight. In fact, there is slight chance that there will be any sort of historical record other than human memory. And human memory isn’t going to remember the beginnings of biophysical breakdown. Human memory will remember the worst. Which is not yet this day. We are not making history. We are laying the unremembered foundations of the future.

I don’t think most people understand this. It’s not just the lying media and disingenuous politicians. It’s that we don’t understand the level of disaster that we have set in motion. Nor do we ever look finitude in the face. We hardly acknowledge our own bodily death. We don’t seem to be capable of accepting that our culture will also die and that we are entering its days of senescence. We seem to think that all this is a temporary hitch, that we’ll get over it. These headlines about historic floods and so on are saying that this is the worst. Not to worry. We’ll get back on our feet. This is as much as we will have to endure of the consequences of our actions before things start to get better. This is history, they say.

Nothing doing. It is not going to get better. In our lives and the lives of our children and the lives of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, it is not going to stop getting worse. That is what biophysical breakdown means. Everything is breaking down. And nobody is going to remember these early days of disaster. Today is a walk in the park compared to the disasters your great-grandchildren will face. We are not making history. If we are remembered at all, it will be as the people who did not change.

Nobody will remember what we thought, what we said, what we printed in all these ephemeral media — most of which will not exist in the future. What we planned and failed to execute, what we meant by our actions, all that will be opaque to the future. If there are people who are trying to see us at all, we will be remembered for what we did. Concrete, physical action. And we have done… mostly nothing.

We have not even tempered our rapacious self-indulgence. We still transport ourselves and all our billions of tons of stuff all around the globe every day. We still take from the entire Earth for trifling wants. Another pair of shoes. A new phone when the old one is merely outdated. Another AI-generated image of what we want to look like. (Or, more precisely, what we want our sexual partners to look like.) We are not producers. We are not creating. We are a consuming culture, an open mouth of endless want. We don’t even repair or repurpose much, but continue to demand new as we trash the old. We are not making history. We are trashing the present.

Despite that, what headlines mean by things like “historic natural disaster” is that everything will be okay. We don’t need to change. This is the worst. It will get better. Or at least someone else will take care of it, clean up the disasters, slow the deterioration, create ways to withstand the current levels of breakdown, and enable us to carry on exactly as we are. Nothing to worry about. Certainly no reason to stop shopping.

But this is not history. This is an inflection point before the times that might be remembered, if there are ways and means to remember. This is the first step over the precipice, the time when people might have responded to the signs and did not. This is the brief hovering at the top of the cliff before gravity speeds everything toward a crash — which might be remembered as historic, but also might not. Because who’s going to remember? And because it won’t be one discreet thing that happens on human time-scales in any case. It will be an evolution, a complete systemic change, a change that happens over thousands of years. All this disaster will settle and things will achieve some new normal that will be completely different from today. But none of it will ever be historic. Because history is recorded… and who is going to do that?

But now? Us? We are not history. These times are not historic. These disasters are not the epic worst that will happen. Nor are they temporary. Indeed, they will never end. Every day for the rest of your life someone you know will be affected by disaster. Every tomorrow will see the back-breaking labor of remediation and recovery. Every yesterday will be better than it is today. And the future will not remember us, except perhaps as the people who kept right on going when the road ran over the edge. And we are this people knowingly and with full intention. With every callous headline, with every dollar spent we declare to the future that we don’t care how they suffer.

Maybe it’s best that they don’t remember us… else, they would curse our name…

---

©Elizabeth Anker 2024