Anthropocene... again

With stuff half-inched from Mike Davis. One of the quirks of basic capitalist alienation is that natural disasters are personalised, almost personified while man-made disasters are treated as natural.

In Ecology of Fear you read about the general indifference to tenement fires in South Central LA, while chaparral fire threatening to engulf Malibu inspires incredible panic. Class bias plays an obvious role, it leads to the strange situation where Malibu residents feel let down by nature doing exactly what it's been doing for millennia.

A more modern example, the recent spate of earthquakes on the Pacific Rim inspired common trepidation, that the planet is somehow righting a wrong, wreaking revenge on its inhabitants. Artful quacks managed to link this to the arrival of comet Elenin in the inner solar system, suggesting we are living through some cursed conjunction.

But the point about the emergence of the anthropocene, where the combined influence of humanity is greater than all natural forces on Earth, human and natural forces are intertwining as never before. For thousands of years cold, dry Aleutian air has done battle over California with occasional jets of warm, wet El Nino air; the result has been tornadoes raging through the valleys of Southern California. Human development has not only disturbed (and possibly enhanced) the El Nino cycle, it has placed giant urban heat islands in Southern California, huge industrial, financial and residential districts, altering the climate in unpredictable ways and placing huge numbers of people right in the dip of a tornado alley.

Despite our best efforts it is still difficult to abstract humankind from nature.