Ecological Justice Border Crossings ~ Part 2 ~ When the Cure Becomes the Disease: Climate Crisis Inflammation
Cara Judea Alhadeff
November 2021
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Our house is on fire...I want you to panic.
—from Greta Thunberg's speech at the 2019 World Economic Forum
The fires, dear Reader, have caught up with us.
As we traveled across the western United States in our LoveBus, the world around us was in flames. The earth was inflamed. The word inflammation originates from the Latin word inflammation, meaning fire. 2020 was a year of the most extreme corporeal and planetary inflammation—relentless firestorms of heatwaves, megadroughts, and acidifying seas, dry thunderstorms that brought no rain, only lightning.[1] Due to the emergence(y) of simultaneous inflammatory diseases and global infernos, we must recognize that
Inflammation is not an inherent enemy...in fact inflammation is a necessary innate response of our body’s immune system, a process that brings the necessary resources required to a specific area to fight an infection or to heal an injury. ...However, an inappropriate inflammatory response can be very damaging and even destructive, and many now believe that inappropriate and out of control inflammatory responses indeed underpin most chronic disease today, including heart disease, diabetes and cancer.”[2]
Inflammation is our corporeal bodies' and our earth body's response to overstimulation—including information overload (whether being inundating by electronic screens—ranging from gas stations and doctor's offices to social media to an app-for-everything) and exponential forms of pollution (greenhouse gas emissions leading to ocean acidification, desertification, as well as the toxic soup of food, water, and soil poisoning through chemicals, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and EMFs). We pride ourselves on being relentlessly busy, yet displace and outsource the lethal labor required to maintain our velocity-addicted infrastructures of horror vacui busy-ness fed by underlying environmental racism and green colonialism.
A direct correlation can be made between our human bodies and entire communities that have been reduced to rubble and ash; immune systems resulting in numerous chronic physical disorders from c-section births,[3] bacteriaphobia, electromagnetic pollution, GMOs, excitotoxins: obesity, extreme gluten intolerance, allergies, asthma, skin disorders, and susceptibility to a slew of infections. Neurological damage includes: motor function deficits, Autism Spectrum Disorder, learning disabilities, allergies, ADHD, auto-immune disease, anaphylaxis, and encephalopathy.[4] This living hell includes insecticide[5] -drift and smoke pollution that drifts thousands of miles.
Wildfires were once integral to the homeostasis of multiple human and non-human ecosystems. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer's storytelling of how her “dad's fire teachings was appreciation for all the woods gave us and a sense of our responsibility for reciprocity.”[6] She shares how the Potawatomi (the Bodwewadmi) means People of the Fire—as a practice of equilibrium, their biocentric cultural legacy entwines with the imbricated powers of fires. Similarly, ildsjel is a Norwegian term for “'fire soul'...a burning force...ready to spread like wildfire, making way for new seeds to germinate.”[7] Due to anthropocentric urban planning and deforestation, agribusiness, and fire suppression,[8] forest fires are deprecated as the enemy. Unlike slow, “prescribed burns,"[9] "controlled burnout with defensible space,"[10] or traditional relationships with fire building and distribution,[11] a wildfire now represents an interdependent system that is no longer in balance.
We must distinguish between acute inflammation—a sign of healing—and chronic inflammation—a sign of long-term, underlying disturbances in which the cure becomes the disease. We are caught in an evolutionary biology double bind: our anthropocentric model of efficiency has created and now sustains a trauma response that no longer serves us—cultural inflammation (extreme poverty-wealth, racism/ ethnic cleansing/ xenophobia, ecocide) and natural-world inflammation (unprecedented megafires). Our modern-industrial lifestyles dictate that our only viable response to climate crisis is adaptation—a result of assimilation. Inflammatory forms of adaptation manifest as corporate ‘green economy,' carbon offsetting, emissions trading, climate-smart agriculture, geo-engineering, and the erroneously-named Renewable Energies Revolution.
In response to the question what causes inflammation in the first place, Harvard's Dr. Ridker states: 'We are witnessing evolutionary biology in action—an adaptive response (inflammation) in the past is now maladaptive in our current modern environment.”[12] Electricity was once used as a healing agent. Certain animals, insects, and plants—for example, use electromagnetic fields for communication, migration, and mating. However, because of the outrageous shift in scale, megadoses of what was once our ally—electricity (both in and of our bodies as well as in and of our planet) is now our greatest threat—the most destructive force we can imagine. As with spurious “renewable” energies, size matters. Like captured animals in a zoo, we imprison and abuse megadimensions of electrical waves—creating Frankenstein-like radio-wave frequencies (RWFs) that are wreaking havoc on our bodies' and our planet's ecologies.
“We live today with a number of devastating diseases that do not belong here, whose origin we do not know, whose presence we take for granted and no longer question. What it feels like to be without them is a state of vitality that we have completely forgotten.”[13] Since 1860 (ironically, the same year oil was ‘discovered’ and the same year Abraham Lincoln extolled the possibilities of wind power), the electrification of the world through telegraph wires (and later in 1889 with the advent of alternating current) created new diseases: “anxiety disorder,” influenza, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.[14]
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Our earth now is almost fully wired. The barbarism of civilization is founded on this barrage of electric vibrations.[15] By 2030, one billion people are expected to get electricity for the first time.[16] We celebrate the possibility and implementation of global access. Ranging from Paul Hawken's[17] meticulously researched Project Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming to ecofeminist activism such as the documentary, “Arise,”[18] we are told that global electrification is the answer to our climate emergency—regardless of cultural erasure and ecological impact. Access to electricity conflated with empowerment through access to “education” leads to conformist assimilation: equality-as-adaptation.
This toxic mimicry neutralizes difference. For example, whiteness is an inflammation of social inequities—a distortion of equality in which blacks must prove themselves to be, as Yuval Noah Harari states in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, “just as good as whites.”[19] This US-style democracy destabilizes the possibility for equilibrium (decentralized, bioregional, rhizomatic practices rooted in bio and cultural diversity). Racial capitalism converts living communities into dead commodities, and dead commodities into private wealth.[20] In the name of “equality,” we sustain taken-for-granted zones of growth-driven consumerism and ultimately hyper-conformism. This masquerade of morality sustains the illusion of progress. In the name of “progress,” we justify the xenophobic and ecocidal construct of “resource.”[21]
The myth of Progress attempts to conform our consciousness and our bodies into self-maximizing capitalist teleologies. Neoliberal “choice-rhetoric” obfuscates how complicity is manufactured. Similarly, Linda Hogan warns us: “Decent people commit horrible crimes that are acceptable because of progress.”[22] In her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt unravels the institutionalized violence of the everyday as society’s normalizing otherwise immoral behavior. Technocratic petro-pharma addictions rely on efficiency to create “equality.” Greenwashing (“renewable” energy), sustained through environmental racism and green colonialism, is rooted in manufactured consent through normalized construction of desire. Taken-for-granted norms—like the concept of efficiency which promulgates doing more, accumulating more, requiring more (resources and time, for example)—is another manifestation of growth-economy habituated obedience (climate crisis adaptation as resignation).
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Although the biblical story of Exodus has served as a model for revolutions across the world, we repeatedly witness that although we can take people out of Egypt, we cannot seem to take Egypt out of the people. Foucault's internalized fascism reflects the effects of behavioral engineering.
to Foucault's warning of “...not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini [...] but also
the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism…[that] causes us to love
power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”[23] Like internalized fascism, the Stockholm Syndrome, in addition to identifying with and defending captors, is a paradoxical psychological phenomenon which displays a radically effective technique to subvert any attempts at self-definition or resistance to neutralizing tendencies. Collusion includes privatization of every corporeal and planetary “resource” (reducing the Commons to privately-owned commodities’), compulsory Eurocentric-model education, and the entrapments of convenience-culture. (In my next Mother Pelican installment, I will return to the complexities of Exodus in the context of those attempting to flee the destructive effects of global technocracy—what I call 5G refugees.)
Two examples of social inflammation are black-on-black gang violence and riots destroying working-class communities resulting in prison encampments primarily populated by black male youth—the disenfranchised strategically positioned to self-destruct. During WWII, similar divisive tactics were used in concentration camps when a few prisoners were chosen as guards—asserting albeit restricted power over fellow prisoners in exchange for limited “privileges.”[24] This calculated practice of divide-and- conquer turns prisoner against prisoner through suspicion and distrust—a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome in which the prisoner with privileges depends on his captors’ favors for survival.[25] Those afflicted with this habituated obedience and internalized fascism syndrome gradually function as though they are isolated units.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault sets the stage for personal action that acknowledges and sheds our inflammatory compliance: “How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?”[26] Internalized fascism is so integral to our cells and psyches we are often not cognizant of its constitutive and formative mechanisms (Fatimah Mernissi). Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of la facultad, “the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities,” urges us to examine our complicity with xenophobic industrial-waste civilization. We must practice homeostatic vigilance.
Like the metabolism of the human body and the earth’s tendency towards homeostasis, the metabolism of our culture must be scrutinized as a relational organism. For instance, as I write in Zazu Dreams: “Tropical coral reefs that provide habitats for thousands of species are under siege; warmer sea temperatures disrupt the delicate symbiotic relationships among coral organisms, sea slugs, and algae. The sea slug (Holothuroidea) feeds on plankton and decaying matter on the ocean floor. Although sea slugs are relatively motionless, by eating the decomposing plant matter, they are essential to maintain algae levels within a homeostatic balance in all marine environments. This is not a crisis only for sea life, but an economic crisis: globally, coral reefs yield over $30 billion annually in products and services, such as coastline protection, tourism, and food. Because of global warming, coral reefs are on the brink of extinction—now identified as the ‘graveyard of the Atlantic.’ As the ocean waters grow warmer due to climate crisis, salinity is accelerating. Maintaining homeostasis has become more challenging than ever before. Marine life that has survived for millions of years are now dying because of increased salt in our oceans.”[27]
Like the forests and oceans of planet earth, our bodies' cells have become collateral damage in the war of efficiency; like our bodies' immune systems, “[t]ropical rainforests and oceans are our two primary global carbon sponges—another manifestation of biological control (homeostasis). Soon, neither will be left to absorb relentless corporate and consumer arrogance.”[28] As all forms of climate chaos/climate crises are interconnected, all forms of climate justice are equally interconnected. Our challenge is corporeal (of body), communal (of community), and planetary (of earth). An urgent embodiment of interdependency between environmental degradation and marginalized ethnic, racial, and economic communities in conjunction with creative and intellectual risk-taking requires multilateral paradigm shifts. These include: reanimating ancient pharmacopeias, cultural biomimicry, the sacred embodied in bioregional agricultural systems, and environmental architectural engineering practices that support our life force (rather than simply “green architecture”)[29] can galvanize people of diverse backgrounds to find allies in unexpected places and generate urgently needed paradigm shifts.
Inflammation is in fact the basis of ethics. Levinas alerts us that ethics is not about arriving at an illusory “common good” (a solipsistic representation), but ethics as the infinite and disruptive act of questioning. Homeostasis is such an equilibrium in flux. Such equilibrium traverses binaries. As we commit to radical (from Latin, meaning root) inquiry, as we disentangle the roots of our colonialist crises—including climate chaos—we must recognize how our complicity with binary-coded status-quo economics (i.e., racial capitalism) undermines equilibrium while it reinforces equality-as-adaptation.
In order to disrupt the normalcy of consumerist more-is-more, a homeostasis invoking symbiotic relationships that already exist in our natural world teaches us that we must learn from our ancient traditions and the kinship of the commons—equality-as-an emancipatory equilibrium. In his book The Disinformation Age, Eric Cheyfitz[30] reminds us that such a life is projected in numerous Indigenous terms that translate as “balance.” For example, the Navajo term is hozho, which in addition to balance means beauty, happiness, and harmony in the place where the personal intersects the social and the natural world. Paul Hawken's emphasis on fire ecology as regeneration reflects this sense of balance.[31]
Equality-as-an emancipatory equilibrium asks: How can we establish new consumption norms rooted in understanding how to live our lives without sacrificing the lives of others? This inquiry is founded on: How can we transform habitual behaviors of privilege and obsessive accumulation, so that we embody compassionate living? By scrutinizing the interrelational roots of our geopolitical, ecological, health, and social crises, we can transform theory into citizen activism with the knowledge that industrial economies are founded on relational malfeasance and interconnected subjugations. This lived consciousness demonstrates embodied energy.[32] How can this dynamic awareness of embodied energy reframe the modern concept of equality? Embodied energy, like the intricacies of the social scientific concepts of true cost, life-cycle analysis, and cradle-to-grave, designates local and global industrial and digital production (extractive mining, agribusiness, physical and economic wage slavery, data mining), consumption (advertising and the construction of desire), and disposal (greenhouse gases and electronic-waste).
In "The Truman Show," Ed Harris' character, the billionaire televisionary, exhorts: "We
accept the reality of the world we are presented." Every institution (ranging from compulsory education
to industrial technology, transportation, entertainment, housing, healthcare, how we eat, excrete, bathe,
etc.) breeds habituated obedience. Manufactured consent through the construction of desire is central to this social-engineering narrative implicit in technocratic imperialism leading to industrial-waste-consumer capitalism: "As technology is assimilated into the structures of the everyday, its ubiquity becomes invisible and necessary. ...We now assume that technology is comfortably omnipresent….[D]isaster will likely be the consequence if the public remains uninformed."[33]
Clearly, we have remained uninformed...or are we?
In reference to the Vietnam War and The Pentagon Papers Daniel Ellsberg exclaimed: “They hear it, they learn from it, they understand it, and they proceed to ignore it.”[34]
Notes
[1] Igniting hundreds of fires, including the largest in California's history, 11,000 lightening strikes in 72 hours struck—spanning the size of 719,000 football fields: https://www.crfd.org/lightningfires.htm. In our practice of shifting our complicity with climate chaos, it is critical for us to contrast these fear-inducing images with indigenous references to "Thunderbird fires, forest fires ignited by lightening" (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Canada: Milkweed Editions, 2013, 361).
[3] See my discussion of the critical importance of vaginal births and primary natural immunity in my “Decolonizing Our Wombs: Gender Justice and PetroPharma Culture,” in Women, Violence and Resistance, Hager Ben Driss, ed. University of Tunis, Tunisia, 2016.
[4] Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland, eds., Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children (New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011), 9.
[5] Rather than “pesticide,” I explicitly choose the term “insecticide” to refer to our kin insects.
[7] Karen O'Brien and Ann Kristin Schorre, “Ildsjel,” in Matthew Schneide-Mayerson, Brent Ryan Bellamy, and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds. An Ecotopian Lexicon, Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019: 127.
[8] A large wildfire is one that burns at least 100 acres of forest or 300 acres of grassland. (National Interagency Fire Center).
[11] Robin Wall Kimmerer shares that when building a fire, “There are no short cuts. It must unfold in the right way, when all the elements are present, mind and body harnessed in unison. ...You must swallow your urgency. ...The people set these fires on purpose, to take care of the land...” Braiding Sweetgrass 361-362). Wall Kimmerer details a beautiful mise-en-scene describing how humans can give back to the land through the art and science of fire.
[13] Arthur Firstenberg, The Invisible Rainbow: The History of Electricity and Life. 2.
[14] Ibid. Tobacco-smoking related lung cancer only developed after 1889.
[15] See also: Hughes, C. H. 1892. “The Epidemic Inflammatory Neurosis, or, Neurotic Influenza.” Journal of the American Medical Association 18(9): 245-49.
[16] Cara Judea Alhadeff, Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene. Eifrig Publishing, Berlin and Pennsylvania, Era 47.
[17] Hawken, along with Noam Chomsky, Rabbi Lerner, Bill McKibben, James E. Hansen, David Orr, Arun Gandhi, Henry Giroux, Karen Barad, SHK-G HumptyHump, Thom Hartmann, Claire Colebrook, Stephanie Seneff, Eve Ensler, James Wines, Antonia Juhasz, and Daliya Kandiyoti endorsed Zazu Dreams.
[18] See section on Bata Bhurij and the Barefoot College in India—specifically their focus on women making and using solar lanterns.
[20] Lierre Keith in Bright Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost It's Way and What We Can Do About It.
[21] See my discussion of Vandana Shiva in Mother Pelican, Sept. 2021 http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv17n09page2.html
[22] Hogan cited in Derrick Jensen, Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture, and Eros (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995), 126.
[29] See Enzo's sacred geometry: www.arcadellavita.it
[30] Cheyfitz, Age of Disinformation: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2017.
[31]Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Penguin: New York, NY, 2021.
[32] Cited from my“Disentangling Green Colonialism: Greenwashing and Environmental Racism in the Renewables Revolution,” in Shifting Climate – Shifting People, Miguel De La Torre, ed., Pilgrim Press: Cleveland, OH, 2021.
[33]Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, DIA Center for the Arts.
[34] 2009 documentary film: The Most Feared Man in America and The Pentagon Papers: Daniel Ellsberg.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, is a scholar/activist/artist/mother whose work engages feminist embodied theory, and has been the subject of several documentaries for international public television and film. In addition to critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era (Eifrig Publishing, 2017), her books include: Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (Penn State University Press, 2014) and Climate Justice Now: Transforming the Anthropocene into The Ecozoic Era (Routledge, forthcoming). She has published dozens of interdisciplinary essays in eco-literacy, environmental justice, epigenetics, philosophy, performance-studies, art, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies’ journals/anthologies. Her pedagogical practices, work as program director of Jews of the Earth, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Her photographs/performances have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, Artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in numerous collections including SanFrancisco MoMA, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Cara is a former professor of Performance & Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Critical Philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. She teaches, performs, parents, and lives a creative-zero-waste life. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com or via her websites, Cara Judea and Zazu Dreams. See also this article: Social ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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