The violence of climate change
Rebecca Solnit:
Climate change is caused by many human actions, and the solutions are likewise manifold: change how we design our residences, towns and cities, transit systems, agriculture, land management, and overall consumption habits, including food. But the single biggest one is: get over our reliance on fossil fuels. Climate change is itself violence as fires, floods, extreme heat, drought, famine, sea level rise and other catastrophes that both take human life and devastate the natural world. (Environmental historian Rob Nixon published a book in 2011, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, about the way we need to see these undramatic forces that poison, contaminate, undermine, force relocation as violence.) It is violence caused by the powerful minority that has delayed and derailed the decades of efforts to do what the climate requires of us. People die of stuff like the current heat wave (and heat-wave deaths are one of the most undercounted ways we die of climate chaos).
If Fossil Fuels Are War, Renewables Can Bring Peace
