It has been more than 150 years since Marx in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte wrote that all historical events occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. No doubt this is true on the scale of world history, but on the scale of this year we have witnessed the order reversed, with farce preceding tragedy.
Farce: In mid-March, as the coronavirus pandemic forced the world into lockdown, a meme emerged on Twitter: “nature is healing. we are the virus.” Often accompanied by pictures of wild animals roaming empty streets or plants sprouting up in the cracks of neglected sidewalks, the phrase (at least before parody rendered it meaningless) was supposed to argue that human society is at least as dangerous to the natural world as the coronavirus pandemic is to human society. If we slow down for even a few days, went the logic of the meme, the natural world will surge back to health.
Tragedy: Six months later, millions on the West Coast awoke to find themselves beneath an orange sky. Only a month or so into fire season, a complex of wildfires along the West Coast had already burned at least 3 million acres and destroyed hundreds of thousands of structures, including in parts of Washington and Oregon that had previously been spared. After decades of botched fire management, in the twentieth year of a mega-drought, and amid a record heat wave, nature was healing.
This is not just a cute joke on my part. The coronavirus pandemic and the wildfires in California really are two symptoms of the same problem. The outbreak in Wuhan, like the 2002 SARS outbreak in Guangdong and the 2014 ebola fever outbreak in Guinea, began when a human made physical contact with a diseased bat living in the wild; in the case of SARS and the novel coronavirus, the area where that contact occurred was one that had recently experienced a period of rapid urbanization. Meanwhile, in California, thousands more homes are built every year in what is known as the wildland-urban interface, the hinterland where flammable brush forest edges up against built-up suburbs and subdivisions. Thus the cause of both these catastrophes is less an objective change in the workings of the natural world than it is a tendency by modern society to encroach onto nature’s territory. And even more dangerous than the encroachment itself is our assumption that just by living in a place for a while we somehow make it ours.
“God makes floods; man makes disasters”—that’s what a climate adaptation expert in coastal Virginia told me when I interviewed him earlier this year. It’s not that we built a heretofore stable society that is now being overwhelmed, Day After Tomorrow-style, by some unstoppable natural force, but rather that we have built a fundamentally unstable society that is now showing its instability, a society whose daily operations depend on infrastructure and property situated in perennially vulnerable places. Think of Wall Street and the Embarcadero, both built on reclaimed land. Think of Turkey Point power station in Miami and the Port Fourchon oil complex in Louisiana. Think of the hillside town of Fountaingrove in the Bay, which burned down fifty years ago in a fire started by a deer hunter’s cigarette and was rebuilt only to burn down again in 2017 during the Tubbs Fire, caused by sparks from a power line.
Prior to the 1800s, the Native American tribes that lived in California allowed millions of acres of forest to burn every year in order to prevent brush from accumulating on the forest floor, causing seasonal fires that dwarfed even what we are seeing in the Bay Area this week. An observer who visited California as late as 1898 wrote that ‘‘of the hundreds of persons who visit the Pacific slope in California every summer to see the mountains, few see more than the immediate foreground and a haze of smoke which even the strongest glass is unable to penetrate.’’ But when the federal government pushed the tribes out of California and instituted a regime of fire suppression, they created the conditions that today threaten hundreds of thousands of people and homes. God makes fires, man makes disasters.
The blazes on the West Coast are only the latest echoes of an event that I believe will eventually be seen as a harbinger for the next century of climate change: Hurricane Katrina. Recall that what made Katrina so deadly was not just the composition of the storm itself, but also the place where it struck: the floods that all but obliterated New Orleans occurred when the storm surge breached the faulty levee system built by federal government engineers between the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain, allowing water to pour down into a city that even in normal times sits about ten feet below sea level. If we had never tried to keep the water out, we would not have been so devastated when the water tried to come back in. Meanwhile the city of New Orleans itself was and remains a petri dish of racial and economic inequality, and when the hurricane struck, it struck along those lines. Even today the Black neighborhoods of the city still look like wastelands, while thousands of the poor New Orleanians who were displaced by the storm have moved permanently to Houston, a city six times the size of their former home but no less vulnerable to flooding.
In New Orleans as in Fountaingrove and Paradise, nature is healing: it was we who sowed the wind and it is we who have reaped the whirlwind. Thus the red sky over San Francisco this week, which seems to express the anger of a wounded earth, should really strike us yet another expression of the profound indifference of nature, the big easy persistence with which the natural world destroys itself and creates itself anew. In the long run, everything is going to be fine, just not for us.
What I’ve Been Writing
I had an exclusive in The Guardian about an old lawsuit against postmaster general Louis DeJoy. In the lawsuit Louis’s brother Dominick accuses Louis of defrauding him out of his stake in the family’s logistics company, forging bank accounts and hiding paperwork to force Dominick out. It was the sale of that company that allowed DeJoy to become a Republican mega-donor and make the connections that got him the Postmaster General job.
I have a longgggg print feature about ghosts and why we see them in the forthcoming issue of Popular Science, which should be on newsstands next week. It won’t be online for a while, so mask up and go get it.
My New Republic mini-column this month is about Laura Loomer, QAnon, and the long future of Trumpism.
What I’ve Been Reading
My friend Samantha Schuyler reported out an incredible deep-dive into the last days and legacy of Toyin Salau. (Jezebel)
My friend Gaby Del Valle has an equally incredible feature on video court hearings and the deportation machine. (The Verge)
My friend Jasper Craven has been doing incredible work at his newsletter The Battle Borne covering veterans’ issues. (The Battle Borne)
And my friend Eleanor Cummins has an equally incredible feature on the danger and awkwardness of male wellness products. Having experienced some hair loss this summer, I felt this one. (Slate)
Jay Kang on the NBA bubble protests and the contradictions of non-Black basketball fandom. Great essay. (NYRB)
Lisa Miller on the two lawyers who allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at a police car in early June. (New York Magazine)
Natasha Lennard on Judith Butler on nonviolent resistance. (Bookforum)
A wrenching essay on coronavirus, immigration, and China’s propaganda machine. Impossible to summarize, so just read it. (New Yorker)
The Mexican oil company championed by President AMLO now has more Covid-19 deaths than any other company in the world. (Bloomberg)
A lawsuit claims that storm erosion will soon cause a privately owned segment of the border wall to fall into the Rio Grande. (WSJ)
The real threat to the U.S.P.S. might be Amazon opening post offices of its own. (The Information)
Chairs fucking suck. (The Guardian)