The dead future
I can’t breathe. They say something like 100 bush and grass fires are raging across the state. The city I live in feels like a scene from Blade Runner 2049 come to life in 2019. There is no other way to see it: our dead future is here.
The mornings are smoky and grey. The afternoons distinctly eerie with the sun a shrunken disc that is by turns eggishly sick, bright pink, or burning orange in the seemingly permanent haze.
Seattle was like that for a couple of weeks in August 2018. We had, literally, the worst air in the world for a few days. It was forest fires rather than bush fires, but the result was much the same. It was nightmarish even without asthma.
My eyes water. My breathing is shallow. My throat trickles with foreign matter. On my back verandah, the washing machine and wooden shelves are covered in a gritty film of ash. I see what I am breathing in. Like tea leaves left in a cup predicting bad things.
Last week, I struggled so badly for air I had to leave work early and drive back home 10 minutes away. Yes, I am mildly asthmatic. Yes, I am vulnerable to air pollution. But this was different to anything I’ve experienced before.
Same here back then. It always gets grubby here in July and August, because there is little to no rain and often no wind, but smelling smoke outside for days on end was new.
This week temperatures are soaring again. Friends say the fires will burn for weeks, maybe months. It’s likely there will be no rain till the end of January. On social media, everybody keeps taking pictures of the sky and the sun. Someone writes a note: “How long before the birds start dropping from the sky?”
Pollution levels are rising to 22 times the accepted safety levels. Driving over the Bridge, the great cloud that occupies my city reminds me of past visits to Tehran and Beijing. I associate the pollution with something totalitarian I can’t put my finger on, a form of oppression manifest in nature.
Climate change is a very totalitarian thing.
Yeah, well, it was all because nobody went out, and you know, did that thing they do in other countries, like rake the forest floor, or something.
And anyway, we’ve had worse fires, you know, much worse fires, in fact, the worstest of fires were in the past, because that is where the people running the country live. In the past.
Tiny language note: “the bush” more or less means any wilderness area, and around Sydney that means lots of forests.
/pedantry
When did the future die? It is tempting to point to that pitch black day in november 2016 when the rotting corpse was displayed to the world in all its glory. But of course by then the foul stench of death and decay had already been noticeable for quite a while. If I were to venture a guess, I’d place the time of death sometime around the fall of the Soviet Union. That’s when the world pretty much collectively decided that the failure of Soviet-style communism not only discredited that particular system, but any alternative to neo-liberal, laissez faire capitalism what so ever, and that leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market and the unfettered pursuit of short-term profit wasn’t just one out of many possible ideological positions reflecting the interests and biases of one particular group of people, but “the only way it can be”.*
If you really want to know a person’s political or ideological bias, look at what they’re trying to pass of as the “unpolitical”, “non-ideological” position. On the case of laissez faire it has become so deeply ingrained that many no longer even recognize it as an ideological position and treat it more like a law of nature that must be obeyed no matter how disastrous the consequences. It speaks volumes that letting everything go to hell has come to be considered the “reasonable”, “moderate”, “responsible”, “non-extreme” position, while “saving the world” (always said in a mocking voice and accompanied by eyerolls etc. to make sure everyone understands what a stupid idea “saving the world” is) is considered “crazy”, “radical”, “irresponsible” and “extreme”.
* To be sure, there has been plenty of critics, and some of them have even managed to win the occasional election. But in a globalized economy even they have invariably ended up in the same race to the bottom while competing for the favor of corporations who otherwise threaten to go somewhere else and take all the jobs with them.