CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

There Is No Elsewhere: A World Burning

Image by Mike Newbry .

British Columbia, Canada is my home and once again, it’s burning. More than 100 fires were burning across the province as B.C. declared a state of emergency.

Across the border, Washington and Oregon are burning too as wildfires spread through the American West. Across the Atlantic, wildfires have swept through France, Spain, Greece, Croatia and Germany.

And despite all that, so much mainstream discussion about climate change is inadequate.  A whole lot of carbon talk while barely discussing power. And if we want to understand the power which results in a burning planet, eventually we have to talk about white supremacy.

White supremacy is not merely the belief that one race is superior to another. It is a system of power that determines whose relationship to land matters, whose knowledge counts, what land is for, who has the right to extract from it and whose lives and communities can be sacrificed to absorb the consequences. It is the logic that makes it possible for the prosperity of some to depend on the dispossession, exploitation and suffering of others

 Empire’s big trick was that the benefit could remain at the centre while the consequence was pushed outward. 

Land could be taken somewhere else ,forests could be cut somewhere else ,water could be poisoned somewhere else, pollution could be somewhere else.The people living with those consequences could be Indigenous, African, colonized, racialized,  poor. Their lands could become sacrifice zones so that somewhere else could experience itself as prosperous.

This arrangement is made morally possible because white supremacy had already established that some lives matter less than others and so sacrifice zones became part of its architecture.

Climate Change Destroys the Possibility of Elsewhere

Climate change is exposing the physical limits of white supremacy’s........

© CounterPunch