A Place Called Providence

Providence Canyon, Georgia

Between Chattanooga and my hometown, I drive a long stretch of Highway 27 through the prosaic farmlands of southwest Georgia. In the early 1800s, plantation owners and other farmers clearcut the native forests of Stewart County to grow cotton mostly, also peanuts. Being the big-brained geniuses they were, they failed to consider rain runoff, which cut the soft soil like a hot knife in butter. By the 1850s, a vast network of ditches 3-5 feet deep ran throughout the county. By the end of the nineteenth century, those ditches became gullies, and the gullies became canyons that now descend as deep as 150 feet into the earth.

They call it Providence Canyon. It's a state park now; considered one of Georgia's "seven wonders" with hiking trails, scenic overlooks, and backcountry campsites. All of this, even though there is nothing naturally wonderful about the place. Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon" is the product of human activity: the forced removal of the Muscogee by European settlers, the destruction of native forests, and the short-sighted implementation of unsustainable farming practices. 

It took God, the Everlasting Song of the Universe, eons to carve the many canyons of the world. It took careless Georgians less than a century.

Without getting too deep in the theological weeds, certain reformed protestant traditions understand providence to mean that God governs the course of nature and history down to its minute details. I think this view of things is bogus but it is held by a great many people, both in its hardline Calvinist and slightly softer Augustinian formulations. 

According to this view, God orchestrated (Calvin) or oversaw (Augustine) the Creek Wars of 1812 and 1836, the clear-cutting of native pine forests, and the implementation of unsustainable farming practices fueled by the horrors and human misery of the Atlantic slave trade. And finally, God pushed the rainwaters through the fields in such a way that a canyon worthy of a spaghetti western formed in the coastal plain region of southwest Georgia.

If this view of things is correct, then it would also be true that God breached the human-made earthen work dam on Pennsylvania's south fork of the Little Conemaugh River that killed 2,200 people in 1889. The private owners of the dam even argued in court that the dam's failure was the product of divine providence rather than human negligence, despite overwhelming evidence of the latter. They won. Think about that. Their legal defense was "God did it" and they paid zero dollars in legal compensation for the losses. If folks want to fill up the Sunday morning pews to worship a god like that, I cannot stop them; but I will not. 

It seems much more likely, moral, and coherent that God's initial aim for the world is one of beauty and flourishing for both the human and non-human world. Humans inhabit a space of open possibilities and may accept this aim or reject it. Because God is love and love, by nature is noncontrolling, then God needs humans to actively participate in working towards that aim or expectation of wholeness, order, and flourishing -- what the Hebrew writers called shalom.

Pope Francis wrote in the 2015 encyclical Lautado Si that "The present world system is certainly unsustainable from a number of points of view, for we have stopped thinking about the goals of human activity." He continues, "If we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God’s expectations." We often reject the "initial aims" or "goals of human activities" for short-term gain, private interests, and profit margins.  

Hence Providence Canyon, hence the Johnstown Flood, hence a lot of things. 

The walls of Providence Canyon are diminutive compared to the canyons of the Four Corners region. The destruction is also small compared to the man-made disaster of the Johnstown Flood. But Providence Canyon does bear witness to the awful potential of human ignorance and avarice. That's not to say you shouldn't visit it. It is truly something to behold. So go. Hike. Picnic. And when you do, consider the irony of its name because Ignorance and Avarice Canyon State Park doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.

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Not My Words: How to Blow Up a Pipeline

possums rule and monkeywrenching is good

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is not an instruction manual. It is, instead, a philosophical reflection on the utility of violence (re: property destruction). It was a challenging read for this anabaptish, Quaker-lite, grad-school-ethics-class-psuedo-pacifist but I'm glad I did. A recent study of 20,000 people across 27 countries found that a fifth of all those under the age of 35 think it's too late to fix climate change. Here, Malm decries climate fatalism and urges imaginative action. 

"Climate fatalism is a performative contradiction. It does not passively reflect a certain distribution of probabilities but actively affirms it. Or, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: that which is repeatedly asserted to impossible can thereby become impossible. The more people who tell us that a radical reorientation is scarcely imaginable, the less imaginable it will be. 

Imagination is a pivotal faculty here. The climate crisis unfolds through a series of interlocked absurdities: not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is also easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight, to reconcile oneself to the end of everything one holds dear than to consider militant resistance. Climate fatalism does all in its power to confirm these paralyzing absurdities." -- Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021)

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Not My Words: Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption

BLM and open-range land near Cañon City, CO 

Every January, I walk my A.P. U.S. Government students through the concept of "iron triangles." It is the policy-making relationship between congress, bureaucratic agencies, and special interest groups. E.g., an interest group will give money to a congressional campaign in return for friendly legislation and so on and so forth. Iron triangles are generally considered detrimental to democracy because the common good is ignored for special interests. Christopher Ketcham's This Land is a deep dive into the destructive relationship between corporate cattle farming, Congress, and federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. As one chapter's epigraph reads: "The real history of the western livestock industry is a country mile from our idealistic cowboy fantasy..." 

"Everything I thought about cows as an Easterner-come-west is wrong. They are not symbols of a noble culture of mounted herdsmen. They are not cute. They are invasive species, Bos taurus, a water-loving European animal not fit for arid climates, and their cancer-like effects on the land have not ceased. The fatal error of the [The Establishment of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument] was that it continued to allow cattle grazing. This was for political expediency, to quiet the opposition of cattle interests. There is no way to square that decision with the science of botany. How can you preserve a wild and unspoiled landscape with a ruinous alien bovine on it? You can't. It's an impossibility, an absurdity." -- Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West (2019)

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United States of Apocalypse

Rising emissions, rising temperatures, rising sea levels; if more is a good thing, then you could say we’re killing it. USA #1! Maybe it’s more helpful to say corporations are killing it. Either way, something is dying and, oh, by the way, it’s the earth. The overwhelming majority of scientists who specialize in the earth’s climate (not politicians, political commentators, or stay-at-home moms on Facebook) unequivocally affirm that we’re in a human-created ecological crisis.

There's no more avoiding our climate-induced collapse. Irreversible ecological damage is here and our current political-economic system is incapable of dealing with it. Short of an international mass movement of monkeywrenchers dismantling fossil fuel extraction around the globe, we're going to have to adapt to our new nightmarish hellscape. Look around: California is forever on fire, Florida is annihilated by a hurricane six months a year, and increasing swaths of Louisiana are already underwater.

We are already citizens of a new place: the United States of Apocalypse. To help us prepare for our dystopia, I have divided our new country according to how each region will become a real-life post-apocalyptic film. 

East Coast + Rust Belt: Judge Dredd (1995)

Judge Dredd begins with James Earl Jones' ominous narration, "The Earth transformed into a poisonous, scorched desert, known as 'The Cursed Earth.' Millions of people crowded into a few Megacities... Law, as we know it, collapsed. From the decay rose a new order, a society ruled by a new, elite force." The Judges are fascistic law enforcers who rule the megacities with brute force and little to no due process. For much of the densely populated eastern seaboard and post-industrial "rust belt" this future already exists. Only now you will receive your extrajudicial killings and police brutality with an extra dose of heat and humidity. 

Appalachia: The Road (2009) with a  C.H.U.D. (1984) twist
The rural bits of the southeast, i.e., Lyndon B. Johnson's socio-economic "Appalachia," will be Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets the cult classic, C.H.U.D. The sun will be blotted out by ash, but instead of nuclear holocaust or whatever unnamed event from The Road, it will be caused by the raging forest fires. Roving bands of cannibals (leftover maga chuds) in jacked-up trucks will roam the ashen grey hills in search of fresh flesh, AKA baby meat. These cannibalistic humanoid Appalachian dwellers or "CHADs" won't feel bad about it either because, spoiler alert, they were never really "pro-life" to begin with. 

 

Gulf Coast: Water World (1995)

Rising sea levels will turn the entire states of Florida and Louisiana and much of southern Alabama, Mississippi, and East Texas into Kevin Costner's Water World. Inhabitants who have not already will be forced to pawn their belongings to buy wave runners and become pirates. Sounds nice, actually. Except, something tells me warmer waters will cause alligators to evolve back into full-fledged dinosaurs. I mean, they're already climbing trees. 

 

 

Midwest, Mountain West, and Southwest: Mad Max (1979, 1981, 1985, 2015)

The biggest geographical region deserves the biggest post-apocalyptic film franchise. The majority of the landlocked United States will resemble the Mad Max universe. The Great Plains will be choked dry by drought and industrial farming. Think Great Depression "Dust Bowl" meets marauding gangs of leather-clad, daddy-issues off-roadsters. Most will be forced to move to coastal megacities and the few that remain will scavenge or pillage for limited food and resources to survive. Of course, Americans' market-based health care system already resembles the Thunderdome, so now you will have to duel to the death in a gladiatorial arena for Oklahoma's last can of franks n' beans. 

 

West Coast: Soylent Green (1973)

Imagine a world where climate catastrophe causes severe shortages of food, water, and housing. Okay, you're imagining liberal enclaves, Los Angeles and Seattle. Now imagine a world where society is almost entirely dependent on a singular global corporation, which controls the supply of most of the earth's necessities and brutally exploits its workers. Okay, now you're imagining Amazon. Shortages and supply bottlenecks create daily riots policed by corporate-sponsored armed forces who, unsurprisingly, brutally remove protesters with no due process. Welcome to Portland, Oregon. 

Behold our future and the future is bleak. But lest I be accused of casual nihilism or climate fatalism, I am not without hope. A long time ago I heard someone say that realism without idealism leads to apathy and idealism without realism leads to cynicism. I, personally, tend toward the latter and this post is probably a bit of both. Yet I hope it is, at least, a humorous caricature of the absurd landscape climate fatalism will bring. The truth is we don't have to accept this cursed earth future. Things, drastic or difficult they may be, can still be done to reduce the harm and suffering that our climate crisis is causing and will continue to cause. 

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