Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Climate Crisis
My final paper for Encounter with the Divine Feminine is on a topic near and dear to my heart and, I imagine, to the hearts of anyone who would care to read this blog. It is a discussion of how capitalism and colonialism created climate change, and what we must do if we are to survive it.
The prompt was “Is the divine feminine relevant today? How?” My thesis is that the divine feminine is not just relevant but critically necessary to the survival of our species. I defined divine feminine as “the body of qualities the current system subjugates” — the feminine, the natural, the indigenous; everything that gets othered — and reasoned that the current system made climate change, which nowthreatens our survival. Only by embracing the antithesis of the establishment can we escape and undo it; the “divine feminine” is necessary to overcoming global warming. In many ways it is the continuation of the ideas I started exploring here. I stuck to capitalism and colonialist white supremacy, but I think it could easily be extended to racism more generally, the patriarchy, and other systems.
Here it is:
In our increasingly integrated world, there exists a global system of power. The system is actually systems: multiple ideologies interacting and collaborating to create a pervasive dominant paradigm. Despite great cultural variations and significant dissenting factions, the system remains largely intact and functional.
All the subsystems of the establishment have something critical in common. Each is built upon a series of fundamental dichotomies, in which one quality is considered good, right, and desirable, and the other bad, wrong, and despicable. This has created a collection of almost universally denigrated qualities. The sum of these qualities forms my vision of the divine feminine.
Recently, an important new development has come to light — the very consequences of this dominant system may now be its undoing. Global climate change poses an enormous threat to the continued survival of our species, and is the product of the status quo. I will explore how two subsystems of the dominant paradigm — imperialist white supremacy and capitalism — lead directly to the climate crisis.
The divine feminine is the opposite of the current world order and the cure to the crisis at hand. The contemporary role of the divine feminine, should we choose to embrace it, is to enable a radical shift to sustainability, equality, and survival.
Imperialist white supremacy may not seem like a direct cause of climate change, but the worldview of the colonizer rests upon assumptions that justify the abuse of the earth. Namely, white supremacy dictates that desecration of the land is a definitional component of civilization, meaning that environmental sustainability can be demonized as savagery. In the eyes of the nineteenth century American colonizer, “Indians were perfectly at home in nature. They had a primitive, pre-conscious, pre-civilized innocence” (Rogin 114). That is, American Indians were considered “pre-civilized” because they were comfortable in nature; the state of being civilized meant explicitly becoming “separated from the earth” (Rogin 114).
The second part of this belief is the idea that, as supposedly civilized people, colonizers are entitled, and perhaps even obligated, to impose to their way of being on indigenous peoples. The imperialist decides to forcibly separate the aborigine from nature, allegedly out of a desire to edify. From Columbus to Andrew Jackson, colonizers “undertook to enforce their ways upon the people of the New World” (Brown 2).
It is no coincidence that the United States is, for now, the largest contributer of carbon dioxide (Eilperin). The American empire was created through four hundred years of white supremacist colonization, which is inherently incompatible with environmental sustainability. Because he has defined civilization and progress as the process of becoming divorced from nature, the path of the colonizer is necessarily one that moves farther and farther from harmony with the earth, causing more and more environmental degradation. For this reason, the process of colonization leads inevitably to the process of pollution. Today, as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter, polluting at levels that were unimaginable to the American Founding Fathers, the United States is the most “civilized” nation ever to exist.
If white supremacy is a social ideology, capitalism is its economic twin; it dovetails perfectly with the colonization process. The European invaders found the American Indians in “the stage before private property” (Rogin 116) and two hundred years later considered some tribes to be “actual, practical Communists” (qtd. in Brown 376). Capitalism is dependent upon the profit motive, which rests on the assumption that individuals have private property, and that each has an inherent drive to accumulate more.
If goods are communal, the profit motive is turned on its head. Rather than accumulating wealth to hoard individually, a person would work collaboratively with others to generate wealth for the community. Individuals might still be motivated by profit, but, in the absence of private property, would not have the opportunity to make choices that are individually beneficial but communally devastating — pollution and environmental degradation, for example. While poisoning a water supply or filling the atmosphere with gasses might fit well into a plan for personal profit, neither is ever compatible with a quest for collective prosperity. Shared wealth would require attentive care of the natural world to ensure that resources remain abundant.
The culture of the United States, however, is very much the opposite of this. It is a society divorced from nature, in which the only concept of wealth is private. In this context, we can expect companies to do anything that yields immediate, individual profit, without regard for the consequences for the community or the future. Because the cultural definition of progress is control of the natural world, it is almost inevitable that technological and economic advancement would come to mean advancement in the direction of increasing abuse of the planet. And, in fact, the most lucrative ventures of the last few centuries have been extremely polluting. Oil is the most obvious example of this. Petroleum does more than just run our cars, trucks, and airplanes — these vehicles are also made out of oil, at least in part, because plastic is made of petroleum. Because all our current practices by and large use non-renewable energy sources that emit greenhouse gasses, petroleum products, like all others, create far more pollution than meets the eye. A car pollutes as it drives, but the gasoline in the car already generated greenhouses gasses as it was pumped, shipped, refined, and shipped again. Similarly, every part inside the car harmed the earth as the raw materials were gathered, shipped, manipulated, shipped, assembled, and shipped for sale.
So far, the devastation created by the capitalist system doesn’t seem to affect corporate profits. In 2005, oil companies “reported record profit . . . before and after the hurricanes struck the United States” (Bajaj) — so companies can make money even in the midst of climate disasters. This means that the system is unlikely to destroy itself before unacceptable casualties takes place. Capitalism hasn’t undone itself yet, and, depending upon how highly one values human life, unacceptable costs may have already been paid. In 2003, some 15,000 people died in France alone because of a heat wave (King 176). The following year, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed a devastating 55,000 people (Lennard, Tran, and agencies), and in 2005, one of the afore mentioned hurricanes killed over 1,300 (“Katrina”). Whether one chooses to link these specific incidents to global warming or not, they make it obvious that climate disasters of every variety are intolerably catastrophic.
So the system must be undone by other means. Because its progress in this direction has been inevitable, there is no reason to expect that the established order will produce different results in the future. In order to overcome the climate crisis, we must abandon the current world order in favor of its opposite: the body of qualities that it has subjugated and victimized. The establishment is a doomsday machine. The antidote is its antithesis — the divine feminine, the archetypal Mother Goddess who embodies a completely different way of being. The divine feminine loves and honors all that has been so brutalized under the current regime, all that has been the Other: the natural, the sustainable, the harmonious, the indigenous. The generous and the communal, the feminine and the gentle, the dark, the earthbound, and the corporal.
If we are to establish a sustainable world order, in which our species can manage to do more than struggle to survive, it will have to be radically egalitarian. The models that cause oppression are the same models that cause widespread abuse of the planet. We will have to reject all of them, not just limited sections. When this abandonment happens, something will need to fill the vacuum of power. That something must be the divine feminine: the aspects of ourselves that have been subjugated for hundreds of years. Greed must be replaced with generosity, hierarchy with community, the impulse to dominate with the impulse to partner. These qualities alone are compatible with sustainability and survival.
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Works Cited
Bajaj, Vikas. “Oil Companies Report Surging Quarterly Profit.” International Herald Tribune. 28 Oct. 2005. 17 Nov. 2007. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/28/business/shell.php
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
Eilperin, Juliet. “World’s Power Plant Emissions Detailed.” The Washington Post. 15 Nov. 2007. 17 Nov. 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/14/AR2007111402010.html
“Katrina death toll may never be known.” USA Today. 10 Feb. 2006. 2 Dec. 2007. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-10-katrina-death-toll_x.htm?csp=34
King, David A. “Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?” Science 303.5655 (2004): 176-177
Lennard, Jeremy, Mark Tran, and agencies. “Tsunami deaths top 55,000.” Guardian Unlimited. 28 Dec. 2004. 2 Dec. 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/tsunami/story/0,15671,1380318,00.html
Rogin, Michael Paul. Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 1991.
5 Comments
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Emily said,
December 2, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Wow, that was really amazing and satisfying to read. Good job.
Daisy said,
December 2, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Ugh, thank you so much. It nearly killed me, but I’m happy with how it turned out.
R.P.Saraf said,
December 18, 2007 at 4:04 am
Drop The System Like A Hot Coal (On Being Instead of Doing) « Our Descent Into Madness said,
January 1, 2008 at 6:37 pm
[…] As I’ve tried to say before, if we are to survive we must do the opposite of what we’ve done, of what we’re doing. We must reject the dominant values wholesale. Working inside the superstructure is not enough and the Revolution isn’t coming. […]
Derek Wall said,
January 13, 2008 at 3:39 pm
thanks for this….take a look at what we are up to in the Ecosocialist International and I highly recommend you look at Debal Deb…http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2007/12/debal-deb-at-last-real-green.html
People get ready…capitalism is utterly disfunctional but from free software to the restoration of the commons…a new system is being born
this is good as well http://climateandcapitalism.com/
Hugo Blanco is good as well, google him you will be surprised and encouraged