On the evening of October 30, 1938, thousands of Americans received the scare of their lives when CBS Radio News announced that Earth was under attack by aliens. What they actually heard was a fictionalized drama based on H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel “The War of the Worlds.” But so convincing was Orson Welles’ narration that many listeners believed him.
Since that day, there have been innumerable accounts in literature and movies of alien attacks, all of which, thankfully, have had no basis in fact.
But today and for some time now, a real war of the worlds has been taking place right under our noses. It is not an interplanetary war but the war on Earth between the world of nature and the world of humans. It has been an increasingly violent and destructive war, which only promises to become far worse unless we, humans, drastically change our relationship to nature.
On January 26, columnist Mickey Friedman published an important article in The Berkshire Edge on the recent megafires in Los Angeles. The thrust of his essay is that while there were immediate human errors that contributed to the disaster, the real underlying cause was manmade climate change. Severe drought and winds, fueled by climate change, combined with fire to produce one of the most destructive wildfires we have ever seen. He lays blame for the climate crisis on ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies. He also cites, in general terms, human ignorance, arrogance, and greed.
Mickey is dead right about all of this, and I couldn’t agree more.
But, unfortunately, the underlying cause goes even deeper than the specific reasons he mentions. The root cause of climate change is industrial capitalism and the civilization it has produced. Capitalism created the modern world but in so doing brought with it climate change. Its unrelenting pursuit of accumulation, the never-ending chase after more profits and capital, has led to the plunder of the planet’s natural resources, resulting in an increasingly hotter and more threatening environment. The truth could not be clearer for those open to it: The metabolism of capitalism and the metabolism of nature are incompatible. They are antithetical, and they now have us locked in a world war we can’t win because nature can’t be tamed. Camus observed that we live in a cold and indifferent universe; nature doesn’t care about our fate. If because of our folly we become extinct, she won’t bat an eyelash.
The origin of the megafires in Los Angeles and climate change goes back to the second half of the 18th century when industrial capitalism was born in England. Its most striking feature was the appearance for the first time in history of large factories. The factories needed to burn significant amounts of coal to operate, and thus serious, long-term climate change was underway.
Over the next 250 years, capitalism spread its wings like no other economic system before it. It installed its factories and businesses throughout the world, developed global markets, and invented consumerism, by which shopping became a mania. With these developments, the use of fossil fuels skyrocketed, and with it the saturation of the atmosphere with CO2. By one estimate, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, coal has been responsible for 46 percent of all manmade greenhouse gases.
A few years ago, I read a book by the British anthropologist James Suzman. In it he describes the lives of the Ju/’hoansi, who were hunter-gatherers well into the 20th century. What struck me more than anything else about them was how completely different their approach to nature was from ours. They only took what they absolutely needed to survive and left the rest alone. Contrast this with our approach based on a philosophy of more is not enough!
I am not suggesting that we go back to being hunter-gatherers, which is neither possible nor desirable. But I am asserting that capitalism is responsible for the environmental crisis and that its way of being in the world is incompatible with the ways of nature. I don’t believe that a technological fix is possible, because climate change is too big and complex. The only thing that will save us is what Bill McKibben emphasized over 30 years ago in his classic study “The End of Nature”: restraint. But capitalism knows no restraint, so the war of the worlds will continue until we either cast capitalism aside or nature utterly vanquishes us.
