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The Death of Life?

One wants to break free from the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow . . . ; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.

—Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past”

Reflecting in Remnants of Auschwitz, Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben notes that “human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman.”[1] Besides the value of such a perspective as regards the particularity of the Nazi genocide of European Jews as well as other serious historical crimes, such a consideration could be helpful in terms of the current predicament, for an examination of the degree of inhumanity threatened by prevailing society could perhaps aid humanity in protecting itself against a general lapse into barbarism.

In what follows, climate catastrophe is compared with the horror posed by nuclear conflagration—a horror that is hardly a mere historical one. U.S. antinuclear writer Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982) and The Abolition (1984) are used to navigate this exploration. While world-renowned anarchist philosopher Noam Chomsky is right to state that it is “not pleasant to speculate about the likely consequences if concentrated power continues on its present course,” it is also true that the chance for overcoming brutality and unreason can be helped along by critical inquiry, as Chomsky often stresses.[2]

The central question examined in Schell’s The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition is the implications raised by the existence of nuclear weapons in relation to Earth’s very habitability. The mere existence of such weapons threatens the “murder of the future,” in Schell’s words.[3] In a world imperiled by the factual existence of nuclear arms, the primary responsibility is to reverse the conditions that threaten human survival, because there can self-evidently be no value without human existence, as Schell rightly argues. Just as the right to food is “the first right,” as utopian socialist Charles Fourier asserts—one that underpins all others—human survival is a precondition for all aspects of human social life, not least of these the very “self reflection” Adorno finds to be necessary for the protection of survival itself.[4]

Schell’s harrowing account of nuclear annihilation places future generations, whose potential existence would quite simply be canceled by the death of humanity resulting from nuclear holocaust, at the center of concern. Voiceless and disregarded, future generations thus share much with the nonhuman world and ecosphere, generally understood. Schell movingly expresses the gravity of the situation faced by a nuclear-armed humanity in his reflections on Arendt’s notion of natality—the various beginnings made possible by life. He writes that the annihilation risked by nuclear weapons threatens the “root of life, the spring from which life arises”: birth, or the “power of communities composed of mortal beings to regenerate and preserve themselves in history.” Clearly, such a predicament is far more serious than that posed by individual death, for extinction, in threatening natality, jeopardizes “the continuation of the world in which all our common enterprises ­occur and have their meaning.”[5]

The threat of extinction for Schell is a systemic evil. It follows the legacy of terror and genocide as practiced by the Nazis and other fascist forces—including as a matter of course the U.S. government, the first and only force to have directly employed nuclear weapons against human populations. The existence of these weapons jeopardizes, in the first place, the lives of billions of human beings and the very underpinnings of global ­human society, but their being also threatens a total assault on Earth’s systems taken as a whole. Nuclear arms in this sense amount to the single most advanced weapon in humanity’s general assault on nature. Given that the support systems allowing for the biological existence of the millions of species on Earth would essentially be dismantled by a war involving nuclear arms—that is, a possibility that follows from the very existence of such arms—a nuclear-devastated planet Earth would be capable of supporting only radically simplified life-forms, if any life at all is to survive such an event. Indeed, the extent of human knowledge regarding the effects that can be expected from the hypothetical future event of nuclear war is both vast and alarming, says Schell.[6]

In light of the knowledge available to humans regarding the risks implied by the development and possession of nuclear weapons, the lack of conscious action on humanity’s part designed to resolve the problem of nuclear weapons—abolition—is to Schell a manifestation of social insanity. At times mirroring the critiques of social democracy and other reformist political philosophies raised by Benjamin and others, Schell writes with concern on the tendency to repress reflection on the existence of nuclear weapons. The “normality” sought by ideologies and practices that distract from as well as actively subvert the project of resolving the nuclear threat is in this sense “mass insanity,” since it defends the iron cage that has “quietly grown up around the earth, imprisoning every person on it.” Statist nuclear policy, which seeks to prevent the employment of nuclear weapons by threatening total destruction of a would-be nuclear aggressor by means of nuclear weapons, is drastically bereft of reason, as its effectiveness results precisely from its stated commitment to bringing about nuclear hostilities—an eventuality that could well end in nuclear annihilation. Such a development would be self-evidently absurd and totally unjust. As the destruction of humanity can never be an ethical act—for the drowning of “all human purposes” for “all time” would be the supreme negation of ethical action—it follows that no justification can be had for postures and acts that threaten humanity’s collective suicide by means of nuclear annihilation—conditions that rationally can be expected to “transform the world into a desert,” as Arendt fears, and thus deliver what German philosopher Günther Anders terms “sheer nothingness”: a “rotating globe without any life on it.”[7] That humanity in fact came to endanger itself through the invention, development, and maintenance of nuclear arms constitutes, in Schell’s view, the “greatest collective failure of responsibility by any generation in history.” Under such conditions, “self-congratulation is certainly out of order,” however much people in general may seem to have adjusted to and accepted the monstrousness implied in the threat nuclear weapons hold for life.[8]

The political arrangements Schell analyzes, then, threaten the institution of what he terms the “absolute and eternal darkness” of human extinction.[9] Were there to be a nuclear war, no escape would be possible; that a given society were consciously to have elected to ban nuclear weapons within its territory, for example, would matter little for its fate in light of the possibility of nuclear annihilation originating elsewhere. Under such conditions, writes Schell, there is within the corridors of power “no one to speak for man [sic] and for the earth,” even if both are threatened with destruction.[10] As P. D. James has her character Theo in The Children of Men lament, it would seem that there exists “no security or home for [our] endangered species ­anywhere under the uncaring sky.”[11]

For Schell, the prospect of resolving the terminal threat posed by nuclear destruction can begin only through reflection on this very question—a process likely serving as the basis for his The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition. A means to “salvation” could be made possible if humanity were to “permit [itself] to recognize clearly the breadth and depth of the peril—to assure [itself] once and for all of its boundlessness and durability,” for if the profundity of the threat were to be generally acknowledged, consideration of the “peril of self-extinction” could take the place Schell claims it deserves within our conceptions of being—that is to say, central. Humans may of course choose to “ignore the peril,” though such a position would be patently absurd and grossly irresponsible, writes Schell, given the “danger of imminent self-destruction.” Echoing Marcuse, Schell notes that it is necessary for the possibility of nuclear annihilation to repress any contemplation of the “magnitude and significance of the peril,” since the means that threaten this end can persist only if humanity in general fails to understand the nuclear predicament and act accordingly. The possibility of extinction, then, arises through the dominance of modes of thinking about the problem that “at least partly deflec[t] our attention from what it is.”[12]

Far from subscribing to philosophical idealism, Schell hardly considers the threat of humanity’s collective suicide at the hands of nuclear weapons just “something to contemplate.” He emphasizes that it is instead “something to rebel against” and ultimately defeat. On his account, recognition of the peril posed by nuclear weapons could in concrete terms lead first to the development of a subject that could carry out the abolition of nuclear weapons and second to the reorganization of global human society along lines that would minimize the chance that they be constructed again. Humanity in this sense is called to break with the “resignation and acceptance” with which many persons approach individual death, and come to engage in “arousal, rejection, indignation, and action” aimed at overthrowing the threat of the death of the species by means of nuclear self-destruction.[13]

Despite the enormity of the problem, overthrowing existing social relations is in fact a possibility, claims Schell. It is still possible for humanity to prevail in this sense, on Schell’s account, though the abolition of the threat of nuclear annihilation would demand thoroughgoing sociopolitical change of an unprecedented scale. The chance for such change could begin only through recognizing that the world’s prevailing modes of political organization, in failing to resolve the very real threat posed to life by nuclear weapons, are in “drastic need of replacement.”[14] In place of the exercise of statecraft, people would “reinvent” politics and “reinvent” the world.[15] The action of a self-conscious humanity would institute the principle whereby humans have no right to destroy the “earthly creation on which everyone depends for survival” and would overturn the despair that prevails under conditions in which hope for survival is itself jeopardized. Against the remarkable lack of action on the part of constituted power to ensure survival, then, humanity in general could counterpose a “worldwide program of action for preserving the species.” Such an end demands that the “politics of the earth” be “revolutionize[d],” for only a “revolution in thought and in action” will allow for survival. The choice for Schell is quite simply “extinction” or “global political revolution”: “Our present system and the institutions that make it up are the debris of history. They have become inimical to life, and must be swept away. They constitute a noose around the neck of mankind [sic], threatening to choke off the human future, but we can cut the noose and break free.” Humans in this sense are called to become “partners in the protection of life itself” rather than the “allies of death.” Schell envisions “all human beings” coming together to “join in a defensive alliance, with nuclear weapons as their common enemy.”[16]

Schell’s concern in The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition is not exactly to explore the possible nature of such a conscious political movement, but he does at times make fragmentary comments regarding it. For him, the imperative of survival demands that each person take on a “share of the responsibility for guaranteeing the existence of all future generations.” The institution of action motivated by such maxims would establish a “new relationship among human beings”—one basing itself in a sociable responsibility for others. Indeed, Schell writes that the “first principle” of the movement on the part of a conscious humanity in defense of life would be “respect for human beings, born and unborn, based on our common love of life and our common jeopardy in the face of our own destructive ­powers and inclinations.”[17]

In Kantian terms, no human being, whether currently existing or rationally expected to come into life in the future, would be “regarded as an auxiliary” within the new political world to be fashioned by conscious opponents of extinction. Radical exclusion, that is, would be a reality to overcome in the bringing about of an Earth liberated from nuclear weapons. This point is particularly relevant to a consideration of the fate of potential future generations, whose very future birth is imperiled by nuclear weapons. “Love,” in Schell’s view, “can enable them to be,” by resolving the arrangements that threaten to “shut [them] up in nothingness” forever.[18]

According to Schell, the abolition of the state form is central to the task of resisting the total darkness of nuclear annihilation. Those societies that possess nuclear weapons have placed a “higher value on national sovereignty” than on human survival, writes Schell, as they are “ultimately prepared to bring an end to [humanity] in their attempt to protect their own countries.” In a real way, the threat of extinction follows from the division of the world’s peoples and territories into sovereign states, for the state and its war-making capacities have been preserved even following the advent of nuclear arms, at the cost of all human life. The alternative to such death as proposed by Schell is that the world’s states relinquish their sovereignty, destroy nuclear weapons, dismantle offensive military capabilities, and establish a global political system in which violence has ceased to be the final arbiter.[19]

Prior to a look at current climatological findings, some commentary on Schell’s views as presented here is in order. The similarities between Schell’s account of the threat of nuclear annihilation and the present climate predicament should be fairly clear, since they are “two of a kind,” as Schell himself recognizes in a January 2010 interview.[20] The perpetuation of dangerous human interference with Earth’s climate systems, like the prospect of nuclear war, would be “irredeemably senseless,” and may even threaten oblivion for humanity.[21] If we are to attempt to even begin resolving the threats posed by climate change and nuclear arms—if we are to avoid becoming “the allies of death” and “underwriters of the slaughter of billions of innocent people”—we must rebel with the aim of overthrowing that which exists, as Schell and other commentators rightly note—and as our own reason and conscience would demand.[22]

Besides the justified urgency that motivates Schell’s works, much of the commentary he makes on the socio­political implications of the nuclear arms problem bears consideration. It is the historical division of the world into sovereign states that raises the threat of nuclear annihilation in the first place, and it is the perpetuation of this state system that defends the capitalist mode of production threatening climate catastrophe. “The state of death is identical to that of sovereignty,” Benjamin writes—or at least it threatens to be so.[23] The nuclear danger continues to exist as long as nuclear weapons and the states that protect them exist too; as Chomsky observes, it has effectively been a “miracle” that nuclear arms have not again been directly employed against persons since their first use in August 1945.[24] Similarly, the threat of irradiation of the biosphere that would follow from the related problem of a full-blown meltdown at any one of the hundreds of the world’s nuclear energy plants lives on, as the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima-Daichi site reminds us. This risk persists insofar as such technologies are generally found to be acceptable.

Considerations regarding human vulnerability to these various threats have guided popular mobilizations in opposition to technological madness in antinuclear movements past and present. This movement from below—desde abajo y a la izquierda (“from below and to the left”), as the neo-Zapatistas put it—would do well to heed Schell’s call for an association to overthrow social exclusion, both for the presently suffering social majorities and the expected future generations, and in so doing, institute a political act of love and respect. Particularly important for this end, as Schell contends, is the task of examining the depth of the peril and the darkness it promises. To contemplate recent climatological findings on the current and possible future state of Earth’s climate systems is to confirm Benjamin’s diagnosis of the prevailing state of affairs as amounting to an ­emergency that demands revolutionary resolution.

The Breadth of Climate Barbarism

The need to lend suffering a voice is a condition for all truth.

—Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

In the estimation of world-renowned NASA climatologist James Hansen, “Planet Earth . . . is in imminent peril,” is “in imminent danger of crashing,” precisely because of the dangerous interference since the rise of industrial capitalism by the West and its followers with Earth’s climate systems.[25] This interference—driven primarily by the use of fossil fuels, which in turn have driven economic expansion and attendant explosions of social inequality since the origins of modernity—has caused the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration to rise from a pre­industrial level of 280 ppm to the present 394 ppm. Due to the heat-trapping characteristics of atmospheric CO2, average global temperatures have risen an estimated 0.8°C (1.4°F) since preindustrial times. Because a time lapse of some decades exists between the point at which hydrocarbons are released into the environment and the point at which they in fact contribute to global warming, a great deal more warming can be expected based solely on the emissions that have been caused to date—at least 1.4°C (2.45°F) over pre­industrial average global temperature levels, according to one estimate.[26] The Nobel Prize–winning IPCC estimates in its 2007 Fourth Annual Report that global average temperatures could rise by a total of between 1.1°C and 6.4°C (1.93°F–11.2°F) by the end of this century—though as some commentators disconcertingly note, such predictions may constitute significant underestimates, considering that the various feedback mechanisms that might turn climate change into a self-perpetuating phenomenon—discussed below—are still unquantified and hence excluded from the data on which the IPCC bases its conclusions.[27] Hansen, for one, insists that the global atmospheric carbon concentration must be reduced to no more than 350 ppm, “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization is based.”[28] Australian environmentalists David Spratt and Philip Sutton recommend an even more radical target of 315 ppm, which they associate with an average increase of only 0.5°C (0.88°F) over the temperature that prevailed in preindustrial human history—a goal similar to that endorsed at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held by the Morales government in Cochabamba.[29]

The average global temperature increase of 0.8°C (1.4°F) observed to date has already profoundly affected many of Earth’s peoples and much of the planet itself. While mainstream U.S. media has frantically sought to cast doubt on the responsibility that the warming experienced until now has had for the marked increase in the frequency and destructiveness of recent extreme weather events, a number of climatologists are alleging that such skepticism is unwarranted, in a marked reversal of the reluctance with which many climate researchers have so far approached this question.[30]

Turning to the devastation for which capital-induced climate catastrophe is responsible, some 20 million residents of Pakistan, for instance, were displaced by the unprecedented flooding in summer 2010 that destroyed some 1.2 million homes, killed 1,600 people, and injured over 2,300 others, leaving between one-fifth and one-third of the state’s cultivated farmland temporarily submerged.[31] When the floodwaters receded from Pakistan’s central province of Punjab, silt deposits were left behind, covering large swathes of land previously dedicated to agricultural production.[32] A United Nations Children’s Fund report from September 2010 warned that more than 100,000 Pakistani children were at risk of dying of malnutrition over the subsequent six months because of the floods.[33] A follow-up report in early 2011 found that about one-quarter of the children in the Sindh Province were malnourished, with 6 percent “severely underfed”—rates analogous to those observed in African famines.[34] Flooding in Pakistan in summer 2011, while less apocalyptically disastrous than the preceding year, nonetheless destroyed 100,000 homes, inundated 900 villages, and displaced an estimated 5 million people.[35]

Climate change has been deemed directly responsible, because local scientists have found that warming has steadily shifted monsoon rains to the northwestern regions of Pakistan over the past four decades, away from the larger rivers more capable of absorbing significant rains.[36] Everything else being equal, moreover, a warmer atmosphere can also be expected to produce more violent precipitation events such as these, as warmer air holds more water vapor than does colder air.[37] That constituted power has failed to provide the resources needed for some sort of adequate reconstruction of Pakistan after the floods—that some 8 million affected people lacked basic health care, food, shelter, and schooling a year after the disaster—is entirely unsurprising, however grave the implications for human welfare.[38]

Shifting to the continent of Africa, 2010 also saw the emergence of famine conditions that jeopardized the lives of approximately 10 million residents of Africa’s Sahel region—principally the countries of Niger, Chad, Mali, and Mauritania—as rains failed for a second consecutive year, causing the annual “lean season” between the running down of food stocks and harvest season to come three months earlier than usual.[39] Oxfam representative Caroline Gluck compared the social devastation induced by the famine conditions in Niger to suffering caused by the 1984–85 famine in Ethiopia, which killed 1 million people.[40] As was the case with a similarly severe food crisis that gripped the Sahel in 2005, it is unknown precisely how many actually lost their lives, but an estimated 400,000 children were expected to die from starvation in the months following June 2010 without an appropriate relief response.[41]

Fire conflagrations experienced in much of central Russia in 2010 led to the death of an estimated 56,000 people and destroyed an estimated one-fourth of the country’s arable land, leading Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to declare an indefinite moratorium on grain exportation from Russia, the world’s fourth-largest grain exporter, with serious consequences for food prices—and hence, people’s ability to feed themselves—in importer countries.[42] Those worst affected in this sense reside in Afghanistan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, among other impoverished states.[43] Heat waves were to blame for unprecedented temperatures in South Asia in May and June 2010—53.7°C (128.6°F) at the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan in early June—that killed thousands, though it is unclear if the death toll from these events approached that of Europe in summer 2003, when some 35,000 people succumbed to heat-induced death.[44] The UN Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System dubbed the flooding caused by torrential rains in Sri Lanka in late 2010 and early 2011 a once-in-a-century event; the rains washed away 80 percent of the rice crop on the island country’s eastern Batticaloa district.[45] Additionally, 2010 saw a drought in Amazonia the likes of which had not been experienced for some forty years, with the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon’s largest tributaries, reduced to its lowest levels since records began in 1902 and an estimated eight gigatons of CO2 emitted by dying trees—a greater total amount, it should be added, than the estimated present annual carbon emissions of China, the greatest current emitter of all.[46] In the Arctic, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off Greenland’s Petermann glacier in August of the same year; indeed, the 2010 Arctic summer ice extent was the third-lowest ever recorded, and the same data for 2011 may well match the all-time low observed in 2007—reflections of the “death spiral” into which the Arctic ice has been forced.[47]

Climate change likely also bears responsibility for the disastrous flooding experienced in the U.S. South in mid-2011 and Hurricane Irene that same summer as well as the dry spring in northern Europe and the southwestern United States—the former having brought about the driest April observed since people started keeping records in England in the seventeenth century, and the latter the driest spring in more than a century.[48] Climate overheating is also the likely culprit for the spectacular drought suffered in China in 2011, which drove Chinese authorities to release some five billion cubic meters of water from behind the infamous Three Gorges Dam for irrigation and personal use.[49] Anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate systems is clearly seen as well in the catastrophic failure of rains in the Horn of Africa in 2011 and the attendant drought, found by the United Nations to be the worst in six decades.[50] This devastating event left some 13 million individuals at risk of dying from starvation—a number that included millions of children, thousands of whom have perished to date.[51] It is this event, together with the ongoing torturous civil conflict in the region, that has seen thousands of desperate Somalis arriving daily at the Dadaab ­refugee camp in Kenya, a settlement originally established two decades ago to house 90,000 persons, but now populated by some 500,000; it is this event that has brought about the conditions for the emergence of malnutrition rates of 58 percent among children in Somalia’s Bay region, and thus the potential death of three-quarters of a million people, as the United Nations warns.[52]

These disconcerting events have taken place in just the past two years. In addition to the 2003 heat waves in Europe, episodes of drought in western North America (1994–2004) and Central and Southwest Asia (1998–2003) along with flooding in Europe (2002) are “consistent,” in the IPCC’s words, with “physically based expectations arising from climate change.”[53] It is estimated that China loses 965 square miles to desertification annually; increased sea levels have already begun to sterilize the soils of Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands, hampering the cultivation of taro in both island groups.[54] In Kiribati, rising sea levels are salinizing the water supplies; on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta rivers, they are forcing agriculturists to abandon rice cultivation en masse.[55] Lake Chad in the Sahel has been reduced to 10 percent of its size only forty years ago, and Lake Tanganyika was observed in mid-2010 to have higher temperatures than at any other time in the past fifteen hundred years and is warming at an unprecedented rate.[56] The world’s oceans are 30 percent more acidic now than a century ago.[57] Glaciers across the globe are in steady retreat, with 75 percent of the Himalayan glaciers now classified this way according to a March 2011 study.[58] Temperatures observed in Tibet in 2010 reached highs not previously seen in the past five decades of record keeping.[59] Peru’s glaciers have lost 22 percent of their surface area over the past few decades.[60]

Oxfam reports that flooding and extreme storm disaster events have tripled in impoverished southern societies since the 1980s.[61] As Edward S. Herman and David Peterson note, the genocidal conflict in Darfur may have found some of its basis in the climate change that has already occurred.[62] A recent Columbia University study found that historical conflict in southern societies were twice as likely in years with an active El Niño Southern Oscillation, which in drastically decreasing rainfall patterns over much of the tropics—Africa, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia—simulate the conditions that further climate destabilization can be expected to bring about.[63] Mike Davis’s findings that the historical synergy between late nineteenth-century El Niño events and the onset of capitalist colonialism in India, China, and much of Africa produced the worst famines recorded in human history—ones that killed between 30 and 60 million people—take on new meaning in light of today’s climate change.[64]

To date, then, climate change has proven disastrous, yet the threats posed by climate destabilization will likely be far more severe in the near future. The following examines some of the climatological findings regarding our downward spiral toward climate catastrophe—an eventuality that is promised without a rational and revolutionary intervention to check it.

In its 2007 Fourth Annual Report, the IPCC offers its worst-case scenario of a 6.4ºC (11.2°F) increase in average temperatures by the end of the twenty-first century as being based on the lack of any sort of sensible mitigating policies and the reproduction of fossil-fuel-intensive capitalist growth. The report states that a 2ºC (3.6ºF) increase in average temperatures is associated with an atmospheric carbon concentration of about 500 ppm, a 3ºC (5.25ºF) rise with 600 ppm, and a 5ºC–6ºC (8.75–11.2ºF) increase with 900–1,000 ppm.[65] As has already been noted, humanity presently finds itself tied to a trajectory that would see the realization of this 6ºC increase by the century’s end. The UK Met Office maintains that a 4ºC (7ºF) increase by the year 2060 is entirely possible. Anderson’s predictions for life in a world warmer by 4ºC, mentioned above, is relevant here, as is Hansen and his colleagues’ determination that the current warming rate is progressing between ten and a thousand times more rapidly than the nearly terminal extinction rate at the end of the end of the Permian era.[66]