The haunting story published this morning by Anchorage News Daily—”As permafrost thaws, Western Alaska village cemeteries sink into swampland,” and reported by Bethel public radio station KYUK—is about one of the consequences of our rapidly changing climate. The “thawing [of Alaska’s] Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta’s permafrost” is causing the cemeteries of area villages to sink. The article is focused on one particular community in the delta—the Kongiganak, or Kong. The loss of ice in the soil means that water is reclaiming their land and coffins are falling deeper and deeper into the rising water. The situation is so bad for the living and the dead, that the living have stopped burying their dead. The coffins are left on the ground because any digging makes the situation worse. The area is becoming a swamp. This transformation of the land will certainly change the composition of the ecosystem.
KYUK reports that…
…white crosses stick out of the sunken ground at odd angles, some of them almost completely submerged in the brackish water. “After we dug down 6 feet, it created a lake around it,” [a villager] Andrew said. The swamp appeared about 10 or 15 years ago and then expanded, swallowing the graves around it… Another woman, Hannah Jimmy, said that her parents, aunts, uncles, sister and best friend are all in the cemetery, buried together in a single row. They’re underwater now.
as the climate changes, that permafrost is starting to thaw. Kong’s cemetery is melting and becoming a swampy lake. https://t.co/2aG2rCsi2n
— Jeff Milo (@milo_jeff) December 17, 2017
After reading this story of our moment, which is more and more haunted not by ghosts from the past but from a future that’s unknown—and these ghosts are so frightening, they even trouble the rest of the dead—I think you should also read what I consider to be the most important passage in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me:
Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.
In a recent article post by The Guardian, the philosopher Cornel West characterized Coates’s pessimism as “apolitical,” and compares it with Malcolm X’s pessimism, which he claims was “neither cheap nor abstract” but “earned, soaked in blood and tears of love for black people and justice.” But there is nothing abstract about “the noose” that American consumption, habits, living patterns, automobiles “have around the neck of the earth.” And the connection Coates makes between white supremacy and climate change has great explanatory value, and it links his work and thinking to the last great black American work to articulate a black politics that addresses the environmental crisis, Marvin Gaye’s 1971 LP, What’s Going On.
Lastly, there is little or nothing in Malcolm X that faces the “metabolic rift,” the growing rift between unlimited capitalist accumulation and a finite nature, that Coates describes at the end of his short book—which, by the way, is dedicated to a person who may live to see an earth completely transformed by American capitalism, his son.
X’s pessimism still has a future. Coates’s does not. This is what troubles West. But if we look back at the previous centuries, we find that the massive social changes that improved the lives of common people all followed some world-wide violent or economic catastrophe. What we know for sure right now is there’s no existing democracy or political institution that can stop or reverse the growing metabolic rift, which at present is primarily powered by American white supremacy.
My pessimism, however, must not be confused with catastrophist politics; mine, and I think that of Coates, concludes that a system that concentrates enormous amounts of social power into the hands of a few individuals by the means of state-managed property and cash relations can only be eliminated or radically changed by a global-scale catastrophe. That’s what’s happening, brother.
