Such an excellent and incredibly important article! — Molly
Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains why "green growth" isn't enough to save the planet.
The most common introductory
example we use when we teach kids about interdependent ecosystems is insects They may seem
gross and small compared to the charismatic megafauna, we say, but insects play
all sorts of important roles: pollinating plants, breaking down organic matter,
feeding bigger animals. Without insects the whole web would collapse. I don't
think many of us who have given this lesson actually contemplated the mass death
of the world's insects as a possibility, imminent or otherwise. We should have.
A new study in the journal Biological Conservation takes a look
at the global status of entomofauna (insects), and the picture is not good. The
topline finding is that over 40 percent of insect species are threatened with
extinction. That's a situation hard to describe without sounding like a heavy
metal concert billing. (Megadeath, Ecocide, etc.) And the
lesson about the ecosystem wasn't wrong: Without insects, Earth's environment
as we've become familiar with it is toast. Even our apocalyptic thought
experiments are coming true.
The trouble with combating climate change, we're
often told, is that it's hard to imagine, hard to see. The philosopher Timothy
Morton calls climate change a "hyperobject": It's so widely
distributed and conceptually sticky that we can't really perceive it except in
partial local instances. "When you feel raindrops falling on your head,
you are experiencing climate, in some sense. In particular you are experiencing
the climate change known as global warming," Morton wrote in 2010.
"But you are never directly experiencing global warming as such."
Humans don't have the right sensory faculties.
Maybe it was possible to think that way in
2010, but, less than a decade later, I think many of us have developed the
ability to see global warming. We are no longer empiricists who route
information through our senses to our brain for analysis; we're conspiracy
theorists, every raindrop or sunbeam encountered as hyperobject. Now the
totality hits us first. At the beginning of this essay, I didn't say the
insects were being killed off by global warming—but didn't you assume it?
To people who don't feel the omnipresence of
global warming, people like me sound off.
Not necessarily because they refuse to believe the data, I think, but because
some of us are no longer bothering with the
scientific method. We're not analyzing evidence to develop a theory; we are
convinced of what's happening before we hear the particulars. Our question is
not whether today's forecast reflects climate change, but how. And we're not
wrong.
Since global warming is a fact and in one way
or another an imminent threat to the well-being of every living thing known to
mankind (including us), I think our increased ability to perceive it represents
progress. The positivist method is not the only way to produce knowledge, and
though "science" gets a lot of credit for sounding the alarm on
climate change, it has been comparatively slow on the uptake. If we
pay any attention at all, we can see and feel and hear that nature's cycles are
broken, and some peoples have understood for centuries that a society built on
extraction and accumulation would burn the whole planet alive. Western science
has a lot of nerve showing up just as we're on the precipice of a biospheric
death spiral to brandish some graphs and offer to block out the sun just a little.
"Indigenous peoples have witnessed
continual ecosystem and species collapse since the early days of colonial
occupation," says Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, an activist/scholar from
the Nishnaabeg nation and author most recently of the book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. "We
should be thinking of climate change as part of a much longer series of
ecological catastrophes caused by colonialism and accumulation-based
society."
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