Loss of land is an existential loss. Land is our natural habitat, so when the amount of habitable land is diminished, we get the sense that we’ve collectively shrunk along with it. That our potential to build, grow, discover, and love has suddenly found itself with less range. The land is part of our being, so when any of it gets taken away we feel like part of our being has been taken away too.
The European settlers have enough land to ensure them, at least in a relative sense, against the worst impacts of the sea level rise and habitable territory shrinkage which are accelerating amid the climate crisis. They have an entire continent that they could go back to if they chose. The indigenous peoples on this continent don’t have this luxury. And since Africa continues to be under the throes of a colonial occupation that’s currently expanding through AFRICOM, the Africans here don’t quite have this option either. For all colonized peoples, vast swaths of their land are held from them by the clutches of empire. Rendered inaccessible to them for centuries prior to global warming, and turned towards the devilry of the imperialists.
From the torture that takes place in the land that Washington illegally occupies around Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, to the unparalleled human rights abuses which take place within the U.S. prisons that are built on stolen Native land, to the slaughter of civilians that’s perpetrated by the U.S. military bases in Africa and elsewhere, the land of the colonized has been perverted towards the twisted machinations of capital.
Now, the imperialists have twisted even the weather so that much of this land will be inaccessible throughout the rest of our lifetimes. The U.S. military is the world’s single largest institutional user of petroleum, making the U.S. empire the earth’s greatest enemy. An enemy that’s consequently shrinking its own coasts. Global average sea levels have risen by 8 inches since 1900, with (conservative) research indicating that every inch of sea level rise means the loss of around 2.5 meters of beach. And University of Copenhagen’s Niel Bohr currently believes sea levels could rise as much as 1.35 metres by 2100.
Looking at a flood map of just 1 meter of sea level rise, where large parts of California’s Central Valley have become submerged, Florida’s Everglades National Park has become essentially nonexistent, and the bridge to the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts has become closed off, gives a sense of what this loss is going to look like. Plus, much of the land which won’t be underwater is nonetheless going to be rendered uninhabitable; a National Academy of Sciences study from last year estimated that should emissions continue unabated, the area of land with inhospitably hot temperatures — as in, more than 84 degrees Fahrenheit on average — will rise from the present amount of 0.8% to 19% in 2070. That’s one-fifth of the planet’s currently livable land rendered unlivable.
For the settlers who inhabit America’s colonial states, this loss is going to be minor compared to what the U.S. empire’s victims — both within U.S. borders and abroad — will experience. The impacts from land loss are multiplied by the disproportionate poverty, preexisting lack of access to land, and centuries of historical trauma that colonized peoples have. This process is already well on its way. For example, since the 1950s, the indigenous Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe in Louisiana has lost 98% of the island it’s long lived on to subsidence and saltwater intrusion.
This is an early part in the loss of hundreds of thousands of square miles of land that’s expected to occur within Louisiana throughout this century due to rising sea levels alone. The rising of the ocean is just one of the ways capitalism and imperialism are reducing the area’s landmass, with the canals and channels carved out by the oil and gas industry accelerating the erosion.
As shown both by the story of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, and by the fact that flooding disproportionately impacts black neighborhoods (a consequence of the phenomenon where poorer communities tend to be forced to live in lower-lying areas), the colonized are in the most danger from sea level rise. The many are going to suffer far more than the few, with the few — whether they’re the wealthy elites who’ve fled to luxury bunkers or the white landowners who retain their precious resources by terrorizing colonized peoples with fascist militias — comforting themselves by asserting their dominance with more brutality than ever.
And even the First World proletarians will suffer less than the proletarians of the Global South. As a climate analysis from several researchers at Open Democracy concluded last year, without international solidarity with these victims of imperialism, the First World proletariat will also be complicit in this eco-fascist campaign to sacrifice those most vulnerable:
Gross inequality and injustice are fundamental to climate change. The vast majority of emissions have bolstered the livelihoods of a small number of middle-class and, most of all, extremely wealthy Westerners. Meanwhile the majority of impacts will hit places like African nations or India, which emits at most a seventh as much CO2 per person as the US. Considerations of racial, social, and environmental justice therefore need to be a central part of any response, because not discussing them is still taking a stance…If it is understood that collapse in Western nations would only come alongside much worse outcomes in developing ones, then [a] passive response…is tantamount to lifeboat ethics.
This calls to mind the fictional dystopian futures described by Marquette University’s Gerry Canavan in his essay Snowpiercer and Necrofuturism, an analysis of the science fiction story where the last humans have concentrated into a train that’s segregated by class. As Canavan assesses, there are parallels between this and The Hunger Games, where an aristocratic dictatorship has emerged in a future North America that’s been shrunken by sea level rise:
In The Hunger Games franchise, after some unspecified disaster that has seemingly reduced the population of America to a handful of tiny districts populated by perhaps a few hundred thousand people, children are forced to fight each other to the death as a means of social pacification and narcotization…The bleak future of Snowpiercer results from a failed attempt at geoengineering. A chemical, CW-7, is dispersed in the atmosphere in an effort to control the speed of global warming, but it is too effective, freezing the entire globe: “All life became extinct,” the title sequence explains, accompanied by the rumble of a train engine. Diegetic news clips provide a guide to how this situation unfolded, to how technological capitalism destroyed the planet twice: it destabilized the climate by making it dangerously warmer, then destabilized the planet by releasing CW-7 (undoubtedly produced by some private corporation in the first world, as we are told over the objections of environmentalists and nations in the Global South). This is the cruel optimism at the heart of necrofuturism: there is no hope of averting a future of collective death because the only possible solution to the problem is precisely the cause of it.
Within such depictions of a dramatically shrunken world, where humanity has been reduced both in numbers and in the ground which it can inhabit, the ruling regimes are engaged in a perpetual reaction against the populations they rule. Seemingly due to their knowledge of existing as a tiny version of the empires which preceded them. Their historically miniscule scale makes them lash out in existential terror, stomping on the faces of those they control as if to compensate for their lack of scale. The existential horror that humanity shares over being so diminished is used as a rationale for obeying the will of the ruling class, which claims that its continued rule is the only thing stopping total annihilation.
These tales help us make sense of the real, far more horrific dystopia that our world’s shrinking of land is creating for us. A dystopia where the genocidal logic of settler-colonialism gets applied to a situation where the bourgeois settlers are losing the land they’ve stolen, ironically as a result of the environmental destruction which their own capitalist-imperialist system is creating. Because the settler-colonial occupation — and its supporting socioeconomic system of capitalism — can’t go on without the plunder of the Global South, those who Canavan called the “partisans of the established order” keep doubling down on imperialism. Which means doubling down on the militarism, corporate extractivism, and excess production that are shrinking the world.
And just as in Snowpiercer, because the nature of capitalism makes it so that the world’s destruction is treated as inevitable, the “solutions” to the crisis are assumed to be more of what capitalism produces. Namely measures that preserve the position of the ruling class, which during the U.S. empire’s decline increasingly entail the inward turn of imperialism. As the imperialist power structure keeps getting cut off from more land through events like the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, or the victory of socialism last year in Bolivia, it intensifies the exploitation of the imperial core’s proletariat. The neoliberal policies of austerity, privatization, wage cuts, and tax cuts for the rich are all part of this. It also turns more towards primitive accumulation, further tapping into oil reserves, utilizing forced labor within ICE detention centers, and stealing oil from countries like Syria.
The fact that these measures consistently come at the expense of the colonized — indigenous communities are having their water and food supplies imperiled because of oil extraction projects, and the ICE prisoners are indigenous migrants from the south — shows how imperialism is indeed turning inwards. And the fact that all of these measures in some way relate to the climate crisis — the military plans to drill for more oil after the Arctic becomes ice-free, those indigenous migrants are climate migrants, and the theft of Syria’s oil follows a conflict which a drought inflamed — shows just how intimately this process is related to the planet’s destruction. It’s a reaction to the crisis that colonialism itself brought about, and that colonialism can only respond to by sacrificing even more of humanity and the natural world.
Faced with the climate crisis, colonialism views parasitism as the solution, even though parasitism is what caused the crisis in the first place. What comes from this is very much a dynamic of lifeboat ethics, where the survival of colonialism’s benefactors is seen as more important than an effort to ensure the survival of all. How clearer is this made than by the fact that the places most likely to remain habitable in the event of catastrophic warming are mostly lands which have been grabbed up by the settler-colonial bourgeoisie? As researchers from the Global Sustainability Institute assessed this year:
The British Isles, Scandinavia, Patagonia, Tasmania and the South Island of New Zealand are identified as locations that migrants may seek to relocate to…With the global average temperature increased by 4 °C, much of the land in the tropical and subtropical latitudes may become unproductive and depopulated, and inundated coastlines are common throughout the world with Scandinavia, the British Isles and New Zealand identified as potential lifeboats. Using the perspective of the Gaia Hypothesis, northern Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, New Zealand and the British Isles (along with mountainous regions at lower latitudes) may remain habitable through the persistence of agriculture and may therefore act as ‘lifeboats’ for populations of humans.
The wealthy bunker-builders have picked New Zealand as their primary place for escaping after civilizational collapse, and last year many of them fled to their shelters on the island in reaction to Covid-19. This usage of a settler-colonial state to make the rich escape consequences for their actions — like how the settler-colonial states in Patagonia, Tasmania, Canada, and Alaska will be used — serves as a rationale for colonialism’s land theft. The partisans of the established order view the stealing of these lands as justified, because this provides capitalism with locations to continue its operations. And preserving capitalism — or at least their status under capitalism — is seen as more important than the loss of humanity’s habitat. It’s a vision for the future that’s based around spite, as will be apparent under the brutal regimes capitalism imposes within the little zones of control it holds onto.
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