Meanwhile, underwater heatwaves are increasing dramatically and putting marine life at risk (particularly in the northeast Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the western Pacific) by killing kelp forests, seagrass meadows, and coral reefs, and adversely affecting fish, mammals, and seabirds. See Damian Carrington, “Heatwaves sweeping oceans ‘like wildfires,’ scientists reveal,” The Guardian, March 4, 2019 →.
Damian Carrington, “Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds,” The Guardian, October 29, 2018 →.
Carolyn Beeler, “After his life’s work burned, audio recordist links California fires to the ‘extinction of whole habitats,’” PRI, November 20, 2018 →.
Deborah Bird Rose, “What If the Angel of History Were a Dog?” Cultural Studies Review 12, no. 1 (2006): 67–78.
Ted MacDonald, “National broadcast TV news mentioned climate change in less than 4 percent of California wildfire coverage,” mediamatters.org, November 16, 2018 →.
See Mike Davis, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Environmental History Review 19, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 1–36. In his searing investigation of resource inequality, Davis explains: “Both politicians and the press have allowed the essential landuse issue—the rampant, uncontrolled proliferation of fire suburbs—to be camouflaged in a neutral discourse of natural hazards and public safety. But ‘safety’ for the Malibu and Laguna coasts, as well as hundreds of other luxury enclaves and gated hilltop suburbs, is becoming one of the state’s major social expenditures, although—unlike welfare or immigration—it is almost never debated in terms of trade-offs or alternatives … Needless to say, there is no comparable investment in the fire, toxic, or earthquake safety of inner-city communities. Instead, as in most things, we tolerate two systems of hazard prevention, separate and unequal” (33). Davis’s social-justice-framed analysis remains ever relevant today.
This essay was first a presentation given in December 2018 at a Princeton symposium entitled “Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective,” organized by Karl Kusserow.
See →.
David Wallace-Wells, “UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That,” New York, October 10, 2018 →.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016), 46.
PG&E has also been found responsible for other recent disasters in California, including the 2017 North Bay Fires (killing forty-three people and destroying 14,700 homes), the 2015 Butte fire (killing two and destroying nine hundred structures), and a 2010 gas line explosion in San Bruno (killing eight and injuring fifty-eight people), for which it was fined $1.6 billion and found guilty of six felony charges.
Quoted in Bill McKibben, “How Extreme Weather is Shrinking the Planet,” New Yorker, November 26, 2018 →.
Quoted in Oliver Milman, “Climate change ‘will inflict substantial damage on US lives,’” The Guardian, November 23, 2018 →.
Oliver Milman, “Trump officials accused of using deadly wildfires to boost logging,” The Guardian, November 28, 2018 →.
T. J. Demos, “To Save a World: Geoengineering, Conflictual Futurisms, and the Unthinkable,” e-flux journal no. 94 (October 2018) →.
“Major Collection of Photobooks Destroyed in California Wildfire,” artforum.com, November 26, 2018 →.
A group of Brazilian scientists estimate that Bolsonaro’s plans for deforestation will release approximately 13.12 gigatons of carbon between 2012 and 2030, while the US, with all its airplanes, automobiles, and coal plants, released approximately 5 gigatons in 2017. See →.
“A New Form of Slavery? Meet Incarcerated Firefighters Battling California’s Wildfires for $1 an Hour,” Democracy Now, September 12, 2018 →.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 21.
See Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism,” Cultural Studies 31, no. 2–3 (2017).
Umair Haque, “Why Catastrophic Climate Change is Probably Inevitable Now,” Eudamonia & Co., October 10, 2018 →.
Chris Saltmarsh, “5 Reasons I’m Not Joining the ‘Extinction Rebellion,’” Novara Media, November 18, 2018 (my emphasis) →.
Saltmarsh, “5 Reasons.”
McKibben, “How Extreme Weather is Shrinking the Planet.”
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, “Bolsonaro, Trump, Duterte … La montée d’un carbo-fascisme?” Libération, October 10, 2018 → (in French).
Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017).