July ’24 the hottest month since the birth of Christ?
Advertising departments are trying to re-purpose the slow, huge disaster by slotting the outlandish heat as a 3rd world phenomenon, or the result of foreign religions, or even as science fiction. Distancing the 120 degree and thousands of deaths from profitable industrial toxins has become a priority.
These recent natural disasters are growing in power and evolving into a many-headed hydra. A recent example would be the three hurricanes raging at the same time in the Gulf Mexico. Natural disasters will be equal to governments very soon in power and budget size, and then the Earth will surpass all institutions, even international corporations. Elites will go everywhere all day inside cold cocoons of blasting AC…. Cities will gradually retreat underground.
What about the regular people? What are individuals and families doing as the powerful mishandle the atmosphere is another question. Values of disasters are not measured by industrial researchers in human terms. The cost in billions and number of dead will be in a hurricane report, but the changing values of the survivors, the emergence of gift economies as institutions fail to deliver services, etc. etc. …. this kind human change is not announced, just as the fate of mammals, reptiles, insects and all of life is not worthy of mention in the evening news.
The ‘income’ generated by super storms and wildfires and heatwaves surfaces as different forms of human kindness, for which there is no measuring system in our culture. This confusion will continue for months or years, but the silence will not be able to hold the radical changes down here among the regular folks. This is the time of mass mortality and total re-invention. In other words, the time of Evolution. Disaster capitalism ultimately falls behind the forces that it has triggered, the power of the Earth.
And speaking of assessing the reality around us, what will happen when the Earth is discovered to be a living being with a kind of consciousness and intelligence? People struggling in the path of flood and fire might be more open to accessing their own indigeneity. The Earth as living being has been humanity’s belief for most of our history and pre-history. We’ve been living for four centuries in this armored pocket, which sends out disastrous toxins into the mysterious outside, believing that gods and profits will save us from any consequence. We seem to be making the choice to die rather than admit the outside life has a mind of its own and power that wouldn’t notice us if all 800 Pentagon bases fired their guns at the sky simultaneously. But I digress.
Once the basic belief of all native peoples is returned to, then fascinating possibilities come to mind. What if the gift economies of devastated cities hook up with the indigenous communities…. (Actually this is happening now.) The survivors remaking their neighborhoods and collective identities will cooperate in the removal of the fatal growth economies. We can imagine healthy families wandering from the raped world to re-invent (or return to) their human and Earth relations.
Now we are in Octavio Butler and Ursula le Guin land, the futurists who could take back the idea of having an imagining forward into time, free of the theft of that idea by marketing – “You have a BIG FUTURE IN PLASTICS!”…. As the disasters reform us, and we are busy helping each other survive, we are learning to live in the present tense. We will have to learn how. We will leave the advertisers stranded in the past that they stole in their orgy of nostalgia and their false utopia of a future made of an hypo-expanded American empire. That past and that future are the two department stores offering an infinite Black Friday discount sale.
But as soon as we see the Earth through the eyes of that misnamed Natural Disaster, we are lost to those products. We are radically free to cool ourselves down by the living river.
Rev. Billy