For Sam Altman, a human being is a meaty device that inefficiently turns energy into intelligence. He said as much on a stage in New Delhi last year to justify the electricity his machines consume. For him, the obvious comparison between the energy necessary to train and run an AI model and the calories a person burns answering basic questions is unjust to the machines. Rather, one should take the full cost of producing a person into account.1 If you think like this, per Altman, then AI has likely already caught up with humans on energy efficiency.2 But contrasting the energy a machine gulps with the energy necessary to grow a human being was only a part of his arithmetic. The full accounting, he insisted, should include the hundred billion people who have ever lived—everyone who learned not to be eaten by predators, helped develop knowledge, and so on. So the entire evolutionary history of human metabolic and cognitive labor should be charged to the account of a single child. If you actually calculated the sum the child owes to the machine, it would amount to something on the order of a million terawatt hours—or something completely unpayable—before she had answered a single question. Needless to say, the common sense objection most of us would make here—that a child is not a server and cannot be compared to one—is precisely the objection Altman’s energetic accounting forecloses. In fact, the notion that a child and a machine can be flattened onto a single energetic measure is the argument he is making.
I want to place this obscene actuarial math beside another, seemingly distant scene, as a way of introducing the doubled logic that binds them. In the early days of 2026, the United States flew special forces into Caracas, abducted the president of Venezuela and his wife, and delivered them to a courtroom in Manhattan, where they were charged with drug trafficking. Trump then said that the US would “run” Venezuela until a leadership it judged acceptable was in place. (As of July 2026, secretary of state Marco Rubio is that leadership, acting as a de facto “viceroy.”3) At the same time, Trump went on demanding the annexation of Greenland, vowing to take it “one way or the other.”4 Neither of his targets are arbitrary of course. Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves on earth while Greenland contains large deposits of rare earth minerals. In each case, there is a stock of energy or strategic matter to be seized.
There is nothing exceptional here. These are merely two contemporary manifestations of a historical pattern that is older and more systematic than any single land grab or any single perverse energy accounting. They were welded together long before, unnamed, on the colonial frontier. I want to suggest that Altman’s arithmetic, the seizure of Venezuela, and the demand for Greenland all depend upon the same underlying structure, on two ways of ordering the world that operate in tandem. I call them counting and clearing. The former literally takes everything into its energetic accounting, living or inert, bison or bauxite, the child and the server. Energy-as-currency is indifferent to whether the energetic quantity was ever alive; indeed, that indifference is the whole point. Clearing acts on what is already there, which is almost always the living: people, prior use, historical metabolic relations, coral, olive groves. Often, the living is cleared in order to count the matter. While counting presents itself as a given, or as a law of nature, clearing declares a decision and presents itself as an act of sovereignty. Both of these grammars were given form in the 1920s, laundered through evolutionary biology, and given their “ecological” twist in the 1950s. Still fused, they continue to operate in tandem, in Caracas, in Greenland, in Palestine, and, unspectacularly, as part of two dry European policies, the Critical Raw Materials Act (2024) and ReArm Europe (2025), in charge of counting and clearing, respectively.
Counting
The energy-counting operation enters modern science as a claim about evolution by the physical chemist Alfred Lotka, most famous for having created mathematical models for predator-prey interactions and competition that remain foundational to ecology.5 But these models were a byproduct of a much larger ambition. What occupied Lotka was the energetics of evolution: evolutionary change treated as a question of how energy is captured, stored, and passed on. Natural selection, on his account, rewards two quantities at once: the speed at which matter circulates through the system and the efficiency with which energy is converted at each step.
His theory was two decades in the making. In the winter of 1901–2, at twenty-one, Lotka had sat in a classroom at the Physical-Chemical Institute in Leipzig where Wilhelm Ostwald taught energetics: the doctrine that energy is the single currency in which every process in nature, the living and the social alike, can be reckoned.6 By the 1920s physics had discarded Ostwald, but his “energetic imperative” (waste no energy, exploit it fully), an explicitly moral and social program, survived the discarding, and Lotka carried it across the Atlantic and into evolutionary biology. In 1922 Lotka published two papers in the same issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Contribution to the Energetics of Evolution” and “Natural Selection as a Physical Principle.”7 Here, he portrayed living things as energy transformers that draw on a finite common stock of sunlight and matter before passing it on. Evolution, Lotka argued, favors the transformers that pull more energy through themselves, capturing a larger share of the stream and routing it into more offspring. The tendency transcends any single organism as natural selection drives the total energy flowing through life as high as the available supply allows.
What is far less known than his models is that, once in the US, Lotka spent his working life as a statistician at Metropolitan Life, an insurance company where, with Louis Dublin, he wrote The Money Value of a Man, calculating the price of a human life by running expected earnings against a mortality schedule.8 The actuarial work and the evolutionary theory that Lotka undertook are basically the same idea at two scales: a single life priced in dollars on the one hand, and all of life priced in energy on the other.
It is no coincidence that Lotka published his two famous papers in the immediate wake of the largest strike wave in American history—the 1919 steel and coal strikes and the Seattle general strike—and of the first Red Scare that was assembled to break it. The Efficiency Movement, with Taylorism at its center, was remaking the workplace into an energy system for managers to tune, calculating every movement and pattern against capitalist valorization. In those years energy was a category of open political conflict in the most literal sense: who controlled the coal and the steel, and how much labor could be drawn out of a worker in an hour. The worker was conceived as a human motor whose fatigue is equivalent to second-law degradation and whose productivity is basically an efficiency coefficient.9 Where Taylorism tuned the worker’s body to yield the most motion per hour, Lotka read all of nature as already tuned that way. One could say that the former framed productivism as a management technique, and the latter as a law of nature.
What is more consequential in the present is how Lotka’s principle—that fitness drives the total energy passing through life as high as the supply permits—got carried further, into the Cold War ecology funded by the Atomic Energy Commission. Howard Odum took Lotka’s energetics and gave it a whole system to measure. He worked it out with his brother Eugene, whose Fundamentals of Ecology (1953) was the first textbook to organize the field around the ecosystem rather than the species or the community as its unit; Howard wrote the chapter on energetics. When the Atomic Energy Commission wanted a coral reef surveyed in 1954, the Odums were the scientists who had just built the method for treating an entire community as one energy budget. The reef was at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the United States had been detonating nuclear weapons since 1948. The Odums measured what they called the “metabolism” of the whole reef. They read the oxygen in the water flowing onto and from the reef, taking the daytime gain as what the community produced and the nighttime loss as what it consumed. A word that had described the chemistry inside a single organism now described an entire reef, treated as one community with one rate of intake and expenditure. Lotka’s picture of the organism as an energy transformer now covered an entire ecosystem.
But every open system has a boundary. Without it there is nothing to measure or count. A reef that a community fishes, walks on, and holds claims to is difficult to bound, and someone would have to argue for where the reef stopped and the people began. Because what the reef produces is eaten ashore and what is eaten ashore returns to the water. In short, the reef and the human community are one metabolism.
But on Enewetak there were no people anymore. In fact, the “accuracy” of the Odums’ measurements rested precisely on the fact that it was cleared of people. The Indigenous people of Enewetak Atoll had been removed by the US Navy seven years earlier and transferred to Ujelang Atoll, 124 miles to the southwest; they’d been told that the move would be temporary.10 On small and resource-poor Ujelang, the community endured near-starvation conditions and epidemics. By the time the Odums arrived, the atoll had absorbed the first full-scale hydrogen bomb test in 1952 and a series of subsequent tests. In fact, the coral that the brothers studied was so radioactive that a piece of it, set on photographic paper in the dark, could expose the paper, printing a picture of itself in its own contamination. The science that reads the living world as a budget of energy was assembled here, on an atoll emptied of its inhabitants and soaked in nuclear fallout. This is a founding move of what became known as “ecosystem ecology.”11 Two decades after the Odums left, the US scraped the contaminated topsoil off the atoll, pushed it into the crater that the 1958 US nuclear explosion had left on Runit Island, and capped it with a concrete dome. The reef whose energy budget the Odums calculated is now the floor of a leaking store of plutonium.12
In February 2017, the Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner performed a poem standing on the concrete dome. Her “Anointed” addresses the place as both an island and a tomb and itemizes what Runit held before nine bombs were detonated on it: breadfruit, crabs in the roots of the pandanus trees, coconuts, watermelon, a chiefly line. Set beside the Odums’ trophic tables for the same atoll, the poem’s list becomes an inventory of severed metabolic relations.13
Throughout the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission remained the largest patron of American ecology because radioisotopes were both the contaminant to be tracked and the tracer that made tracking possible. In other words, the discipline’s postwar trajectory was determined by the development of weapons, and thus the ecological principles that remain hegemonic today are derived from the same program of energy accounting—quite literally the ecology that war built. From the work on Enewetak, Howard Odum developed the rule that would become his signature. Open systems—a reef, a city, an economy—when fed by a constant flow of energy from outside, tend to organize themselves so as to move as much energy as possible: to pull it in, put it to work, and dissipate it at the highest possible rate. Odum and Richard Pinkerton first formalized this principle in 1955, and in 1971, Odum gave it a name: “maximum power principle,” scaling it into a claim about everything from a coral reef to an industrial economy, describing at once the course of evolution and the history of civilization.14 In his later work he went further, calling it a “fourth law of thermodynamics.” Whereas the second law says that a closed system runs towards entropy, Odum’s law says that a system fed from outside does not run down but rather organizes, elaborates, and pulls in ever more energy. In any competition between such systems the winner is the one that burns the most.
Clearing
If counting has a genealogy that runs from Ostwald’s energy currency to Lotka’s law of evolution and to Cold War ecology, clearing has one too, and it takes shape in the same decades, in Germany, out of the same Darwinian and social Darwinist material. Its two main figures are Friedrich Ratzel, the geographer who read the seizure of land as a natural behavior of living organisms, and Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist who made Ratzel’s teachings the foundation of law.
Ratzel held the chair of geography at Leipzig from 1886 and founded what he termed “political geography.”15 In 1874 and 1875 he travelled in North America as a correspondent, and the books he produced from that journey record a continent in the middle of its clearance: Indigenous peoples confined to reservations, Chinese laborers exploited on the Western railways, land passing into cultivation. He returned an advocate of German colonial acquisition. Ratzel was influenced by the eugenist Herbert Spencer, who had coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in 1864. Ratzel’s Politische Geographie (1897) treats the state itself as an organism rooted in soil, its borders peripheral organs rather than lines, and its growth a natural physiological need. In fact, the year before, Ratzel had already set out seven laws of the spatial growth of states: territory expands with culture, absorbs smaller political units, grows by annexing the most valuable ground first, and transmits the expansionary impulse between states like a contagion.16 The Lebensraum he named in 1901 completes this picture. In Ratzel’s view, expansion presents itself as what an organism cannot help doing, and the state’s seizure of land becomes a biological necessity and destiny of the fittest.
What Ratzel had established as organic behavior, Carl Schmitt reconstructed as the foundation of legal order through the state of exception.17 His “exception” was not an abstraction found in legal philosophy but was based on a concrete historical event: the cover under which Noske’s Freikorps killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919, under state-of-siege powers that the Republic had carried over from the Empire. Schmitt’s claim was that a general norm cannot contain the exception in advance, thus a legal order rests on a decision and not on a rule. Politics, in Schmitt’s account, begins by ordering the world into friend and enemy, and the sovereign is whoever can declare the state of exception in which the ordinary order is suspended.
In November 1932 Schmitt delivered the lecture “Strong State and Healthy Economy” to an audience of Ruhr coal and steel employers, who at the time were complaining about wage arbitration and social insurance costs. Schmitt argued that what a functioning economy required was a state strong enough to stand above parties. In other words, a state that can declare the exception is a state that can guarantee throughput: coal out of the ground, steel out of the furnace, wages held down, and nothing interrupting the flow. From here Schmitt’s argument aligns with Ratzel’s idea of the survival of the fittest. Schmitt’s 1939 Großraum treatise was written specifically for a German-dominated continental order. In his Nomos of the Earth of 1950, he finally argues that every legal order begins in an appropriation of land.18 Put differently, law begins as a Landnahme, a land seizure that precedes every rule and that no rule can authorize, because it is the act from which rules are generated.
Frontier
Both grammars, counting and clearing, were already at work on the settler-colonial frontier, as evidenced in Patrick Wolfe’s distinction between franchise colonialism (the plantation, the mine) and settler colonialism.19 Franchise wants the labor of the colonized; it treats the colonized body as an energy transformer and sets it to work in its counting operation. Settler colonialism appropriates the land, and so wants the people on it gone, cleared. To put it crudely, franchise colonialism counts the living, working the body for its throughput, while settler colonialism clears the living to count the land.20
The counting grammar supplies the epistemology that reads inhabited land as empty—not empty of people necessarily but empty of the one activity that counts: the conversion of land into maximized yield. John Locke wrote the template for this logic in 1689: Land left to nature counts as “waste,” and the “wild Indian” who “knows no enclosure” holds no claim to it; what turns ground into property is the yield drawn from it, not the act of living there.21 Locke was not offering an abstract theory of property but a specific justification for appropriation already underway.22 Lotka’s phrase two centuries later, the system expanding into “an unutilized residue of matter and available energy,” is essentially the same principle but spelled out in thermodynamic language, and Schmitt’s Landnahme is the other side of the same coin.
In the settler’s accounting, the metabolism that must be destroyed is presented as unused energetic potential. On the cleared ground of the colony, reciprocal metabolism gives way to unidirectional extraction, to throughput without return. The grass-and-bison commons within which the Lakota lived was replaced by the wheat-and-rail circuit that ships nitrogen and phosphorus to distant cities.
The Grammars at Work
Palestine is where both grammars can be seen operating at once in the present. The counting grammar surfaces in the oldest Zionist self-description, “making the desert bloom,” which recodes the olive, fig, and grain cultivation of the Palestinian fellahin as neglect. The afforestation carried out by the Jewish National Fund—European conifers planted over villages depopulated in 194823—is at once the “higher-yield land use” of the accounting and the erasure of metabolism that was once there.24 Water management imposes the same logic underground: West Bank aquifers are allocated so that the water flow runs toward settlements and away from Palestinian wells. The economist Sara Roy named the condition of Gaza “de-development,” the deliberate prevention of a self-sustaining Palestinian economy.25 We could read de-development as a metabolism strangled rather than maximized. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide” in 1944, in a book on the legal machinery of Nazi occupation, with the extermination of European Jews at its center, defined it as the destruction of the essential foundations of a group’s life. He was not unaware of its colonial origin: the slow killing of Indigenous peoples dispossessed of their habitats to free the best land for European settlement.26
Eyal Weizman’s Ungrounding gives this annihilating logic its most exact form when he describes armored Caterpillar bulldozers turning the farmland of eastern Gaza into a monochrome dust of crushed cement and yellow earth, and bombs driving heavy metals, uranium, lead, and arsenic deep underground, where they will alter the composition of the soil for decades.27 This is the destruction of a metabolic substrate, damage built to be irreversible, the maximum power principle read from its far, genocidal end.
Today, we see the counting grammar return in the perverse “reconstruction plan” for Gaza presented by Jared Kushner at the World Economic Forum in Davos.28 Immediately after the signing of the charter for Trump’s “Board of Peace,” Kushner presented the US’s plan for postwar Gaza: glitzy towers and transportation, digital energy infrastructure and data centers built on Gaza’s ruins, along with a scheme he called “New Rafah.” “We have a masterplan,” he told the audience: one which can only consider the destroyed metabolic substrate as future yield.
Reserve and Rearm
Schmitt is being read again in the present, with reverence and approval, within environmental thought that describes itself as having outgrown moralism and accepted the constraints of geopolitics, and that arrives at rearmament as an ecological conclusion. Pierre Charbonnier argues that the postwar culture of peace was itself energetically catastrophic, and that Europe's ecological transition should therefore be tied to security, pairing what he calls realism with justice. The ban on Russian fossil fuel becomes, for him, an “ecological opportunity.” He arrives there through Bruno Latour, whose Face à Gaïa (2015) opens with Schmitt’s writing on the unity of order and place. Pietro Daniel Omodeo has tracked this reception in detail. He shows that Latour does not cite Schmitt in passing but keeps him as what Latour himself calls an active principle—a Nazi jurist preserved in the laboratory—and that the Schmittian frame runs through Face à Gaïa alongside an appeal to the Austro-fascist Eric Voegelin.29 Omodeo reads Charbonnier’s war ecology as embodying a domesticated Schmitt, one that resumes Malthusian and Schmittian imperatives in a less exterminatory spirit while keeping the tie between security and environmentalism intact. This reading is right. What Latour offers as a metaphysics of struggle, Charbonnier converts a decade later into policy, with the Ukrainian war as its occasion. What results is a form of eco-fascism without a demographic doctrine, one that requires no theory of population since it operates through permitting exemptions, strategic designations, and the legal category of overriding public interest.
What Charbonnier offers as common-sense geopolitical realism is again something already in action, already written into the EU’s current energy procurement. The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act sets targets for rare earths and strategic minerals for electronics and aerospace. By 2030, a tenth of the Union’s annual consumption should be mined within its borders, two-fifths processed there, and no single material should be imported at more than 65 percent from one country (a ceiling written for China). Every one of those figures is a fraction. The difference between the target and what Europe actually needs has to come from somewhere, so the somewhere comes into existence as a leftover, a hole drawn in Brussels for which Serbia, Ukraine, Greenland, Chile, and the Congo are assigned as candidates. This is the colonial frontier’s operation resumed as European policy. But the Act does not only draw an outside. It designates sites within the Union under the same accelerated permitting—in France and Portugal and Czechia and on Sámi grazing land in the Swedish north—and treats them as equivalent ground. The mines, the data centers, and the reserve hubs are distributed across the whole of it. What is distributed unevenly is the capacity to refuse them, which depends on whose claim to the ground counts.
None of this makes Europe sovereign since it still buys its refined minerals from the power the ceiling is written against, and its security from the power currently seeking to annex territory it depends on. The strategic autonomy the Act declares is a form of subordinate participation: Europe has entered the twin transition race, green and digital at once, playing by a rule it did not write, in which the winner is whoever moves the most energy and matter. And the two halves of that race need the same instruments. The emergency that permits Europe to build weapons quickly is the emergency that permits it to build grids and mines quickly, and the minerals secured for defense are the minerals secured for batteries.
If fascism arrived in Europe’s post-socialist periphery in the 1990s as a structural requirement of installing capitalism there, as Rastko Močnik argued at the time, and if fascization was what made the corrupt privatization possible, then what is it now, when the twin transition sends the center back for lithium and land to many of the places that installation emptied and sold?30 Odum’s maximum power principle says the winner is whoever moves the most matter; Schmitt’s sovereign is whoever decides the emergency.
The Critical Raw Materials Act requires ground to put the reserve on, and one of the sites selected is across the water from where I write this. Porto Marghera, the industrial strip on the western edge of the Venetian lagoon, is to become one of the EU’s first storage sites for critical raw materials. Marghera is the site of a massive petrochemical works that poisoned the land throughout the twentieth century and was a site of mass worker organization and rebellion against capital. The vinyl chloride and dioxin are still in the lagoon mud. The reserve of strategic critical earth minerals is to be set down on top of it all. It arrives, in other words, on ground that the count has already finished with. The frontier that Lotka and Schmitt formalized was always supposed to be somewhere else: the eastern territory, the colony, the atoll, Gaza. Here, it is not only the mines on the periphery of Fortress Europe but, perhaps most symbolically, also Venice that once served as a prototype of European colonialism, poisoned by the fascist petrochemical industry and now turned into a zone of extraction by real estate interests, right-wing government machinations, and mass tourism.
A reserve is counted and assembled against an emergency, and in March 2025 the Union declared as much in ReArm Europe (now renamed into the tamer “Readiness 2030”), a plan to mobilize 800 billion Euros for the Union’s rearmament. Defending it, Ursula von der Leyen described an investment that would raise prosperity and even fund hospitals. But she eventually coughed up who it will actually serve: “aerospace giants like Leonardo” and “innovative naval firms like Fincantieri.”31 Leonardo builds weapons systems used in Gaza. Both of the companies she named are on this lagoon.
What to call the confluence of the two old grammars today, when the stock is running low and energy wars are being recomposed under new terms? Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor describe an alliance of tech billionaires, religious fundamentalists, and ethno-nationalists who go beyond exploiting catastrophe, to provoking and planning for it.32 These figures are persuaded that a cleansing collapse is coming, that they will be among the saved, and that the right response to ecological limits is to position oneself above them. Reading this formation of monstrous, supremacist survivalism, reading its program in the bunker, the seabed mine, the private city, the purchased island, Klein and Taylor call it “end times fascism.”
We are indeed facing the fascism of what seem to be the end times from the perspective of the energy predators. I believe this is the maximum power principle arriving at its terminal form because when energy is finite, whoever is already winning seizes the remaining stocks, walls them off, and removes any government that might compel them to be shared. The billionaire buying a New Zealand bunker and the state flying special forces into Caracas simply follow what the two naturalized grammars of counting and clearing—inside of which they were formed—require.
But end times fascism for whom? For all the “non-player characters” who cannot purchase a bunker or found a technological republic in Greenland, there is no deadline, because there is no threshold to cross. The fascist apparatus is already here, counting and clearing. The only question available to us is the one Močnik asked in the mid-1990s: not whether there is fascism, but “how much” fascism there is at any given moment.33 How much of it is built, who built it, on whose land, with which energy, with which count? Who is holding the reserve and for what purpose and for whose benefit?
Sam Altman, in a conversation hosted by Indian Express, New Delhi, February 20, 2026, on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit. See also Anthony Ha, “Sam Altman Would Like to Remind You That Humans Use a Lot of Energy, Too,” TechCrunch, February 21, 2026 →.
This energy-efficiency calculation circulated widely in the days that followed; see, for one version, Sergey Kleftzov, “Ultimately, Sam Altman Revealed What Techno-Oligarchs Really Think About Us Humans,” Predict, February 23, 2026 →.
“NYT: US Secretary of State Rubio Serving as De Facto Viceroy of Venezuela,” Democracy Now, July 13, 2026 →.
Donald J. Trump, address to a joint session of Congress, Washington, DC, March 4, 2025; Trump repeated the formulation to reporters aboard Air Force One in 2026, following the removal of Nicolás Maduro, adding that if the United States did not take Greenland, Russia or China would.
In 1925 Vito Volterra independently took up the analysis of predator-prey interactions, publishing a short discussion in 1926. His equations describing the predator-prey interaction eventually became known as the “Lotka-Volterra equations,” which served as the starting point for further work in mathematical population ecology.
See Wilhelm Ostwald, Der energetische Imperativ (Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1912); and Louis I. Dublin and Alfred J. Lotka, The Money Value of a Man (Ronald Press, 1930).
Alfred J. Lotka, “Contribution to the Energetics of Evolution” and “Natural Selection as a Physical Principle,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 8, no. 6 (1922).
Louis I. Dublin and Alfred J. Lotka, The Money Value of a Man (Ronald Press, 1930).
See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Basic Books, 1990); and Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke University Press, 2019).
The US announced in April 1972 that it would return Enewetak to its Indigenous residents; the radiological cleanup and rehabilitation ran from 1972 to 1980, at a cost of roughly $100 million. A small party returned to an uncontaminated Japtan as early as March 1977. The formal return ceremony was held on April 8, 1980 (some sources cite October 1980 as the permanent resettlement date). Only the three southern islands—Enewetak, Medren, and Japtan—were resettled; 116 homes were built there. Enjebi (north) remained too contaminated for its original dri-Enjebi inhabitants to return, and Runit Island was permanently quarantined.
Howard T. Odum and Eugene P. Odum, “Trophic Structure and Productivity of a Windward Coral Reef Community on Eniwetok Atoll,” Ecological Monographs 25, no. 3 (1955).
Cracks in the cap were reported in 2026, and a 2024 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory study identified storm surges and sea-level rise as the principal vectors for the dispersal of radionuclides across the atoll. See ABC News reporting of March 2026. See also Maveric K. I. L. Abella et al., “Background Gamma Radiation and Soil Activity Measurements in the Northern Marshall Islands,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 31 (2019).
For a video of Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner performing “Anointed,” see →. Directed by Dan Lin, produced by Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, 2018; filmed on Runit Island, Enewetak Atoll, February 2017.
Howard T. Odum and Richard C. Pinkerton, “Time’s Speed Regulator: The Optimum Efficiency for Maximum Power Output in Physical and Biological Systems,” American Scientist 43, no. 2 (April 1955); Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society (Wiley-Interscience, 1971).
Friedrich Ratzel, Sein und Werden der organischen Welt: Eine populäre Schöpfungsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1869).
Friedrich Ratzel, “Die Gesetze des räumlichen Wachstums der Staaten,” Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, no. 42 (1896); Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie (Oldenbourg, 1897).
Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur (1921); in English, Dictatorship, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Polity, 2014). Schmitt distinguishes “commissarial” dictatorship, a temporary measure to restore the constitutional order, from “sovereign” dictatorship, the suspension of the existing legal order to establish a wholly new constitution. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (University of Chicago Press, 2005; orig. Politische Theologie, 1922).
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Telos Press, 2003; orig. Der Nomos der Erde, 1950).
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006).
The distinction is an analytical category, not a clean historical distinction.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Clarendon Press, 1996).
All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, ed. Walid Khalidi (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).
Noga Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948 (Indiana University Press, 2015). On the West Bank aquifers and the three-dimensional administration of resource flow, see Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso, 2007). See also Andrew Ross, The Weather Report (Common Notions 2025) on Israel’s use of water as a tool of colonization in the West Bank.
Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995; 3rd expanded ed., 2016); the term originates in Sara Roy, “The Gaza Strip: A Case of Economic De-Development,” Journal of Palestine Studies 17, no. 1 (1987).
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944). Lemkin’s understanding of genocide as a colonial practice is developed in the unpublished world history of genocide he drafted between the late 1940s and early 1950s, planned for over forty chapters and never completed. See Michael A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005); and John Docker, “Are Settler-Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Re-reading Lemkin,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide, ed. A. Dirk Moses (Berghahn, 2008).
Eyal Weizman, “All They Will Find Is Sand,” London Review of Books 48, no. 7 (April 23, 2026) →; and Weizman, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide (Penguin, 2026).
Middle East Eye staff, “Jared Kushner Unveils ‘Free Market Gaza’ with Coastal Towers and Data Centres,” Middle East Eye, January 22, 2026 →.
Pietro Daniel Omodeo, “Anthropocene Epistemology: Political, Ecological, and Economic Entanglements,” Working Paper 05/WP/2026, Department of Economics, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, ISSN 1827-3580. Omodeo develops a reading of Latour's “dark ecology” and of Charbonnier's war ecology across sections 5–7.
Rastko Močnik, Koliko fašizma?, trans. Srećko Pulig (Arkzin, 1999). The texts collected in this volume were written in 1994.
Ursula von der Leyen, interview with Corriere della Sera, March 29, 2025. Von der Leyen presented Readiness 2030 as an investment program in innovation, research and development, and startups, from which Italy would benefit particularly on account of its established defense industrial base, naming Leonardo, Fincantieri, and Avio.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, “The Rise of End Times Fascism,” The Guardian, April 13, 2025 →.
The formulation was taken up as a curatorial research project by What, How & for Whom/WHW, beginning with “Details” at Bergen Kunsthall in 2011 and continuing as “How Much Fascism?” at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, September 29–December 23, 2012, within BAK’s Former West program, and at Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp, October 5–November 11, 2012, cocurated with Mihnea Mircan. The project extended through “Beginning As Well As We Can (How Do We Talk About Fascism?),” 2012–14, with Tensta konsthall, Stockholm, and Grazer Kunstverein, Graz.