not a public safety issue
On the evening of April 22, 2022, not coincidentally Earth Day, a person lit themselves on fire in front of the United States Supreme Court Building.
The official Twitter account of the U.S. Capitol Police was posting at the time. As it was earlier in the week, the account’s oeuvre of powerfully uncut, subtly terrifying public relations schmaltz is sometimes punctuated by minimalist bulletins. The most recent of these had announced cryptically that the Capitol had been evacuated “out of an abundance of caution.” In that previous case the cause of the perceived danger would later be identified as a circling airplane carrying the Army’s Golden Knights Parachute Team, whose own planned show of patriotic propaganda at that night’s Washington Nationals game had not been communicated through the proper channels.
That Friday, though, the USCP account tweeted out this dispatch and adjudication:
“A medical helicopter just landed near the Capitol for a medical emergency.
This is not a public safety issue.”
It followed-up later when the helicopter departed and when the adjacent roads had been reopened and everyone could go back to driving their vehicles unobstructed. Beyond that, it offered no further information.
Other channels filled in the basic, disturbing outline of the horror that had caused the medical emergency. By Saturday, it was reported that the person who had self-immolated had a name, Wynn Bruce, a place he had resided, Boulder, Colorado, and that he had lived on the planet for fifty years before his body succumbed to the flames and he died of his injuries. While this left out much of the story, it was the extent of what a long list of outlets were saying, at least for the moment. In fairness, it was the start of a weekend and Bruce’s motives were not immediately obvious. Sometimes these topics get fleshed out after further investigation and sometimes not. Sometimes amidst the backdrop of incessant violence they fade from institutional memory almost immediately. And after all, this had been deemed not a public safety issue, unlike the unconnected mass shooting which also occurred in Washington D.C. the same day, and which the CBS News website mentioned in their brief writeup.
There were other details circulating, though. By Sunday, The New York Times, who are selectively meticulous about these things — sometimes less so when cheerleading wars or running reactionary op-eds — was comfortable expounding on the record. By all appearances, Wynn Bruce had burned himself to death on Earth Day in protest of man-made climate destruction.
Any conception of public safety implies some prerequisite components. The existence of a collective public — an idea that for my entire lifetime has been hunted toward eradication. An understanding of who deserves to be safe, which in a system foundationally built on inequities looks every bit as unjust as you might expect. An accounting of which threats are treated as acceptable, which as inevitable, and which are barely recognized at all.
If you are looking for it, you can watch the quiet manipulation and negotiation of these constituent parts all over society. In a recent interview with Truthout’s Kelly Hayes, Patrick Blanchfield, who studies American gun violence, explained how these demarcations influence the perception of shootings. There is the selectivity with which the term “mass shooting” is employed, the unstated determination of which people and places are expected to incur both bullets and terror, and the spotlight focus on which scenes are meant to inspire outrage or fear, and which the audience is encouraged to ignore.
In a culture like this one, these necropolitics are glaring and everywhere. The aforementioned gun violence is continuous; news of shoppers in Buffalo and worshipers in Laguna Woods cut down in racist attacks, of school children murdered in Uvalde poured in again and again while writing this story. And those are just the casualty events deemed appropriate and morbidly spectacular enough to register in the national discourse. There are countless others that never do.
Similar calculus has been on display in the catastrophic public policy response to more than two years of a worldwide coronavirus pandemic. It suffuses conversations about policing. About trans people just trying to live their lives without being assaulted, arrested, or killed. About pedestrians and bikers attempting to navigate their cities without being mowed down by SUVs. It’s at the heart of the leaked draft decision by the Supreme Court that would further obliterate the bodily autonomy of half the population. As Christopher Hooks put it, oversimplifying work by people like Achille Mbembe, Lauren Berlant, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “That’s what politics is — the way we distribute pain.”
Coherent politics require context, which is as straightforward an explanation as any for why that context is so often lacking when these stories of pain are relayed. To the credit of author Chris Cameron, that NYT article on Wynn Bruce provides some meaningful additional background. It recounts the same Supreme Court’s conservative majority skepticism of even the idea of carbon emission regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. It explains that Bruce was a practicing Buddhist, who was almost certainly aware of the history of previous, similar protests. It quotes writer and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. explaining these acts, then undertaken against the violence and imperialism of the Vietnam War, but later in Tibet and elsewhere. “To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. “There is nothing more painful than burning oneself.” And, it references David Buckel, an environmental advocate who, in 2018 in Prospect Park, also burned himself to death to protest climate change.
This is all welcome information, but there are practical limits to what a single article like this can cover comprehensively. For instance, it does not mention that earlier in the month, around 1200 climate scientists in 26 countries took less extreme but still drastic action in an attempt to spur responses to a problem caused by calculated human behavior. One of them, Peter Kalmus, was arrested for locking himself to a JP Morgan Chase building entrance — the investment bank is one of the world’s great funders of new fossil fuel projects — and then wrote about the efforts and the grim state of action for The Guardian. This was in the wake of yet another IPCC report, that even in its infuriatingly reserved language projects a devastating future if the current trends continue. (See climate writer Emily Atkin’s excellent explanation of how this language is arrived at.) The article doesn’t bring up indigenous land defenders, who at any given moment are being trampled, imprisoned, and murdered by imperial powers worldwide. It doesn’t cover climate activist Miranda Whelehan’s recent appearance on Good Morning Britain, which somehow managed to make the broad, hammy television pundit satire of Don’t Look Up seem understated. Whelehan’s very real and well-past pressing concerns were mocked as “quite childish.”
The bigger omission is not just a failing of one article, but of the entire media apparatus, the whole of our governing bodies, and to a lesser degree, downstream from that, even our interpersonal accounting. What’s missing is a real, material reckoning with the emergency that Bruce and so many others have been so desperate to call to attention. This does not mean a vague acknowledgement that “We really need to take better care of the environment,” or an ad for a multinational oil conglomerate filled with shots of lush green fields and solar panels, with a voiceover pledging to innovate a better future. It will not be satisfied by calls for bipartisan draft legislation to mandate the capture 3% of carbon from luxury jet boat manufacturers by 2075. This failure is so great that even when people are literally lighting themselves on fire, the actual realities will rarely even be articulated by anyone with a substantial platform. Pain this pervasive and overwhelming can scarcely be named.
What is happening is that over the past two and a half centuries, give or take, the exponentially accelerating quest for profit has grotesquely warped the planet itself. Since the mid-1900s, things have gotten much, much worse — this is how exponential trends work, unfortunately — to the point that you will now hear terms like “The Great Acceleration” or “The Anthropocene” applied to this most recent epoch of human destruction.
At this point, I would apologize for being didactic but the refusal to clearly identify the situation is part of the problem. When this is talked about at all, one common approach is an indistinct admission that “human activity” is altering the climate and at some date in the future it sounds like that might be bad. Plenty of people still deny even this — Maybe there are no changes? Maybe those changes are the result of natural cycles? Have you considered that the changes might be good and allow my company to make more money? — but were they to accept this version it still would not come close to illuminating the situation.
This did not occur inevitably. It is not some unavoidable side effect of “progress,” or dictated by the preordained Malthusian effects of population growth. A globally hegemonic society built on consumption and infinite growth is very good for the upper class who are orchestrating it! Fossil fuels make the people who control them a lot of money, which puts them in charge of the decisions about whether or not we should keep organizing society around fossil fuels! The “human activity” responsible is not some intrinsic behavior but capitalism, empire, the conversion of the Earth itself into a commodity. All of this is the result of an extractionist system designed to make a small number of people very wealthy, and to placate enough of the rest of us to allow them to stay that way, at the expense of absolutely everything else. The obvious consequences are upon us.
Unlike, say, colonial military activity leaking fuel into the water supply in Hawai’i, air pollution in neighborhoods that have been abandoned as “sacrifice zones,” or microplastics now being found everywhere, the complexity of any given climate event can make it difficult to assign direct causality. That said, here are some things that are currently happening around a globe whose atmosphere now contains carbon levels never experienced in human history. Parts of India and Pakistan are being ravaged by an ongoing months-long heat wave, in some places the hottest April in 122 years. According to CBS News as of a few days before writing this, 90 deaths have been reported between the two countries, but “the true numbers are expected to be higher.” The IPCC’s Chandni Singh told CNN, “You can only adapt so much. This heatwave is testing the limits of human survivability.” In March, temperatures in eastern Antarctica spiked to levels never before observed, setting records and hovering 70 Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) degrees above normal for several days. The 60,000 residents of the Marshall Islands, who you may be familiar with as a victims of horrific U.S. nuclear testing, the remnants of which are still a problem and at risk of being unleashed once again, are already pleading to not be flooded off the map.
The United States is, simultaneously, experiencing a marked increase in wildfires, particularly in the West, and heavy downpours of rain. In coastal areas, ‘100-year’ floods could now happen once a decade or even once a year. Projections are that in as soon as a few decades, the country will be radically reshaped in ways that, in ProPublica’s words, will incur “compounding calamities,” “force a new American migration,” and “profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm.”
This is a tiny sampling. It would be impossible to list all the extreme weather events, species threatened, and biomes at risk in this format. But they are also difficult to enumerate both because the reality of what is happening is almost unfathomable, and because the culture that goes hand in hand with all this damage is fundamentally opposed to grappling with what it has wrought. It is all underway and the deadlines to act on it were breached before many of us were born.
This is not a problem that market-based solutions and modest, incremental liberal reforms are capable of solving, and so it can not be specified. If the latter might at least marginally restrain it, we are largely barred from even those salves. The only conceivable way to avoid the worst of the consequences, which have already arrived and will only spiral with each passing day, is to dramatically alter our entire way of life. If we do not, it will be brutally altered for many, or most, or eventually all of us, regardless. To describe such a task as daunting is a monumental understatement, but recognition is a bare minimum requirement for bringing it into the realm of possibility. As always, the misery involved will be heavily distributed away from the people at the wheel, driving these events, who’d prefer not having these actualities even uttered aloud. They will ask us all to turn away even when people are taking shocking steps to make us look. They wouldn’t want to see all this escalated unnecessarily into something dangerous.
