Early Victims
Paul Kingsnorth and Georges Monbiot recently conducted a public discussion which is published in various web sites:
Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?
The collapse of civilisation will bring us a saner world, says Paul Kingsnorth. No, counters George Monbiot - we can't let billions perish.
but farmer/blogger Sharon Astyk struck me in her analysis:
Kingsnorth seems to have taken wholeheartedly to Greer's vision of a gradual decline, and there's almost certainly a good bit of truth about this vision. Monbiot, on the other hand, keeps emphasizing the billions dead - and there's a good bit of truth in that one too. The problem is the lens through which they are looking. Because of course, the Greerian story where a young woman born in 1960 begins the journey of collapse while her great-granddaughter finally leaves the broken cities for the countryside is a compelling, and probably accurate one for a certain subset of the population. But it isn't all the story - every story has its early victims. How would we view Greer's narrative if the story began ... with a young woman, born in 1960, who begins to see the energy and ecological crisis from her vantage point, and who happens to be living in south Florida when the nearly-inevitable massive hurricane, causing massive loss of life, snuffs out hers and her son's, thus ending all future discussion of what her grandchildren will see?
For every person who in a multi-generational novel-style narrative got to see the full decline and fall of any collapse, there was at least one who saw collapse occur completely and totally ... I do think it is important to realize that even if the great sweep of history goes the way Greer describes, sweeping history famously fails to fully articulate the general experience of the people who get to be the early victims. They are generally categorized as the poor, the unfortunate, etc.... and unless there's some reason to lionize them, their deaths are recorded, 500 years later, with a complete lack of interest except as factual observation.
Thus, the fact that a million people a year (approximately) are now dying from climate change already gets subsumed into discussions - millions of people die every year from all sorts of things, as noted above, the poor are always with us. Thus, when a few (or a few tens of thousands or even a million or so) extra of them die, seen through the proper lens ..., it is easy to subsume that into the sweep of history, easy to say "wait, that isn't collapse, we have a long time before that happens, because, after all, the guy in Cleveland is still arguing about whether climate change exists."
How do we view history? How do we view those people, mostly poor, mostly ordinary, many of whom didn't have a very bright future anyway, because they were poor, who are the early victims? And how many early victims do we permit before we admit that something substantial is going on? We can say, for example, that Haiti was always, at least in our modern memory, a terrible and corrupt and impoverished place, so that it does not much matter that climate change seems to be upping the infant mortality rates. A comparatively small number of deaths in New Orleans get our attention, but it is easy to sweep the ordinary people of Bangladesh, losing more and more lives to annual flooding, into the sweep of historic scope. How many dead before we can say it is a collapse? Or does it only count when it comes here?
I would ask if many of the people currently out of work, and their families, count as early victims. Do the people losing their mortgages count? Do the people without health care count?
