A few years ago, I joined a faculty dinner for a visiting scholar. I remember looking forward to a good steak, but like a budget airline menu, the choice was chicken or fish. It was only the first disappointment. As we took our seats at the restaurant, I promptly confessed that I hadn’t been able to attend the scholar’s lecture myself, as I’d been involved in a protest that afternoon. Climate activist Greta Thunberg was in town to headline a rally and march downtown, an event that capped a month of well-publicized protests, including the youth-led global Climate Strike that saw as many as 100,000 people take to the streets in Vancouver in September. It was now late October 2019, and pandemic restrictions on public assembly were soon to bring such gatherings to a halt. My memories of the faculty dinner are colored by that impending end to an era of mass action for the climate. But if unforeseen circumstances cast a pall over the climate movement in the years to come, political obstacles were already fully evident at the dinner itself.
Weather feeds small talk, but climate can fuel idiocy. Energized by the subject I had raised, a colleague was quick to repeat some of the malicious talking points of right-wing denialists circulating in the media at the time, including the slur that Thunberg’s father was supposedly writing her speeches – the implication being that larger forces were using the girl for their own dark purposes. Meanwhile, and no doubt leaning on the authority of social-media memes, he cited Thunberg’s intemperate speech to the UN as an indicator of mental illness. Another colleague scoffed openly at divesting from fossil fuels and asserted that she was counting on the performance of her pension and investments “for her daughter.” The Canadian tar sands were invoked, and the impossibility of closing them. Finally, as the conversation tapered off, a colleague from my own department leaned in to my ear to share the observation that climate has been known to change many times in Earth’s history – a statement perfectly true, but hopelessly irrelevant to the crisis we’re facing. Maybe he thought that the glaciers would start growing again next year? It was a virtual hurricane of academic disinformation.
The scene was unusual, perhaps, only in the unguarded frankness with which people voiced their attachment to business as usual. On the whole, the vested interests of corporate universities make them incompatible with the kind of radical mitigation programs the climate crisis requires. And yet, because years of market liberalization have undermined the labor conditions of the professoriat, there is reason to hope that a critical mass of knowledge-workers can help sever the ties between the production of knowledge and market ‘outcomes’ tied to the priorities of fossil capital. Precarity of employment can provide a strong basis for dis-identification with the exploitative structures of higher education, and this positionality within the institution informs my own teaching practice. Climate change, as I understand it, is the general context for humanistic study in the academy. As the overarching signifier of modernity’s ‘negative externalities,’ climate imposes a critical optic on research, as its unevenly-shared damage always illuminates the intersections of race, power, capital, and coloniality with natural ecosystems. I have been publishing in critical ecology for a decade, and every class I have taught in the past seven years has included readings in environmentalism and climate justice.
I can’t claim, though, to have gained a good grasp of the subject of climate change by research, reading, personal initiative or political enlightenment. I owe my awareness of the climate crisis to the experience of a mass mortality event, one of the first of its kind in the Global North. If that experience left me with an enduring sense of its gravity, it’s been an ironic lesson. For one, it’s a paltry thing to credit first-hand knowledge when scientific findings have long been readily available. More importantly, the palpable evidence of climate change is a sobering indicator that the process is well underway, that increments of data now bear down on us with unstoppable momentum. Most ominous among those slow-moving forces is the warming and expanding oceans, whose massive heat stores promise an ongoing “delayed response” to cumulative heat.[i] In this context, the much-vaunted authority of first-hand experience is self-negating, and even modest claims of testimony become dubious. To feel the change is to know that it has already occurred, and on a scale that can’t be reversed. This is the general irony of our present situation, in which millions indoctrinated by denialism are now personally experiencing genuine hazards unknown in their lifetimes. As I write these lines, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that July 3, 2023 was the hottest day recorded on the planet, while weather news so far this summer has been full of striking anomalies.[ii] Major U.S. cities from Chicago to Washington, DC have been repeatedly blanketed by smoke from over 500 Canadian wildfires currently burning and largely out of control – the worst fire season yet in that country’s history.
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Today’s climate crises have been foreseeable for decades. One milestone in this unfolding calamity is the European heat wave of 2003, which marks its 20th anniversary this summer. A persistent high-pressure system settled on much of the continent in August that year, bringing record temperatures that claimed upwards of 70,000 lives. Paris, where I was spending a summer research leave, was especially hard hit. Of the 15,000 deaths in France, most were in the capital and vicinity; among the dead, the majority were seniors aged 75 and over. Even by August standards, when many residents typically leave for the country, the French capital was strangely quiet. Even birds had abandoned the city. No sparrows echoing in the courtyard, no swifts shrieking in the playground sky. People emerged after dark hoping for a breath of fresh air, lounging by parks, the river and the canal, though the air was static and temperatures stayed elevated well into the night. Mars, in an exceptionally close orbit to the Earth that summer, hung in the implacably clear night sky, a red, swollen beacon. Day after day, the sun also rose, unwelcome; early mornings were soon sweltering. The city morgues filled to capacity; in a gruesome turn of events, the wholesale food market on the outskirts of Paris was commandeered for the storage of bodies, many of which remained unclaimed after the crisis.
Such at least was the news in the aftermath. As is often the case in disasters, those caught in the event had only scraps of news to exchange: They say it’s hotter here than Cairo; It topped one hundred again today. Scenes on the street were full of meanings we could only read as comic or absurd: a delivery van on the street, its stock of cheap electric fans raided by an anxious crowd. Others came back as significant only after the fact: sudden random outbursts of anger in public; immigrant children tossing pétards at people’s feet during the July 14 fireworks. To paraphrase Céline on the confusion of war, the canicule was a rout of comprehension. We had been at the center of an epic event, in the eye of the storm, unaware that neighbors were choking in their garrets. For weeks and even months afterwards, we tried to piece together the blank sequence of days we had lived in a stupor, splayed on the floor for hours on end, lights out, the TV and laptops left dark for fear of their radiant heat. No attention span for the internet or even the radio. Strangely fitting, then, that after that warp in time the first hard news we got came as a handbill on a newspaper box, it might as well have been a sandwichman in top hat ambling by, declaring the month’s shocking toll.
How could this have happened in a rich modern metropolis? Why did things go so badly wrong? One reason was a general lack of air conditioning: Paris was unprepared, never expecting such temperatures. Or rather, the governing classes opted to put the public in harm’s way, neither preparing for danger nor taking action to prevent its cause. An infernal day early in the crisis, dreaming of peace, quiet, and modern amenities, I braved the subway and a walk across a concrete cityscape to the unlovely new Bibliothèque Nationale, but after the sweaty trek the tepid air inside gave no relief. This was ironic, given that unlike its venerable predecessor, the building’s four glass towers commit the library in perpetuity to an unholy expense of energy to maintain a stable temperature. I abandoned study and in the days that followed my work ground to a complete halt. I had come to Paris to develop a research project: a study of the long-disappeared and mostly forgotten Gibet de Montfaucon, an enormous gallows that once served as a potent symbol of the King’s justice. Countless people had been executed there over centuries, strung up and left exposed to the elements on an imposing prominence by a main road into the city. The sheer ghastliness of it gripped your mind: the bodies of the executed were hung on chains, often several at a time, and after the crows had done with them the remains would eventually fall into a pit below, scrambled unremembered in unconsecrated ground, unless their family was bold or influential enough to rescue them from that ultimate defilement. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish opens by evoking a similarly cruel punishment, the execution of a would-be regicide, in order to bring home the historical gap between then and now. His more important point is that bodily discipline in our time, while not as spectacular, is all-pervading and the more insidious for being so apparently benign. My own project sought to explore the gibet’s influence on spatial politics – the resonance of obliterated memory in the surrounding cityscape.I would recognize the irony only some time later: preoccupied with what Foucault called the éclat of torture, I was unaware of the unspectacular casualties surrounding me, victims of impersonal forces and fatal neglect.
In the canicule’s aftermath, debate erupted over political accountability. President Chirac’s first statement on the disaster laid blame for the deaths on a lack of neighborliness, family responsibility and poor social “solidarity.”[iii] As he pointed out, many of the victims of the heat wave died alone in their homes. A scapegoat emerged in the media: that of the well-to-do summer vacationer enjoying the sea breeze while their elderly parent suffocated in the city. Ironically, Chirac himself was on vacation during the crisis, but on his return he played the populist by attending the burial of some of the unclaimed bodies.
“Solidarity” has a different ring on the left, and Chirac’s use of the term seemed designed to preempt socialist values and to disavow the right wing’s role in promoting business and developer-friendly policies that for decades had frayed the French social fabric. Unsurprisingly, Chirac’s public statement was countered by articles and editorials that emphasized instead the failures of social and medical care during the heat wave – symptoms of a larger neoliberal attack on social services. This rightward lurch is the subject of Louis Chevalier’s bracing study The Assassination of Paris, which targets the 1970’s demolition of the marvelous central marketplace, Les Halles, as the definitive assault on Paris’ social and cultural character. Notably, the market was moved far outside the city to suburban Rungis, and it was here the heatwave’s victims were stored. As mayor of Paris, Chirac played no small role in this strange turn of events, as his signature act of urban vandalism was to oversee the late stages of construction on the site of Les Halles and to personally choose the risible design of the mediocre new Forum – a glossy palace of consumerism to replace Zola’s vibrant “belly of Paris.”
In retrospect, then, the grotesque use of the Rungis market seems like an uncanny belated symptom of the violence inflicted on the city decades earlier. Indeed, the canicule of August 2003 might itself be seen less as a natural force than as a particularly cruel agent of eviction, a delegated power of highly diffuse disciplinary order. In his introduction to Chevalier’s book, John Merriman relates a scene he witnessed in the late 1970s when two elderly sisters, obstacles to a developer’s gentrifying ambitions, were evicted from their apartment in the prized central area of the city during what he calls “that very sneaky month” of August.[iv] Merriman’s anecdote strongly implies that solidarity is difficult or even impossible when most of the populace is away. And if August vacation has always exposed class division in Paris, climate change seems primed to put the poor and vulnerable no longer simply at risk of summer’s ennui, loneliness, and even dislocation, but instead of permanent eviction. Before ‘Paris’ became the keyword for toothless climate ‘aspirations’, the city staged a moral drama of vicious governance and social divisions that portends a general future of heatwaves and forced displacement.
I was left with notebooks full of scrawlings, copies of ancient maps of the city, photos I had taken in and around the site of the gibet. On one of those rolls of film I had snapped photos of a homeless man living in a tidy box on wheels in the city center, just two blocks from the site of Les Halles. Monsieur Gérard survived the calamity because he lived at street level, rather than an airless attic, and because he was visited regularly by neighbors and even a café waitress, who brought him a daily coffee. He was articulate and cheerful, but as he frankly informed me the first time we spoke, his memory was failing; he wouldn’t remember me, he said, if he saw me again.
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When the heat wave broke, I went south to visit friends in Switzerland. We took a car trip up into the Valais, following a road that led to a high village in a deep valley cleft. It was a fairly leisurely hike to the balmy but pleasant alpine meadows above the treeline. We stopped for a snack at a rocky outcrop and my friends’ kid amused himself by pulling the legs off some luckless bug. The husband noticed my disapproval of the boy’s environmental education and he said, by way of explanation, “you have to pick your battles.”
Half the group stayed behind as the husband and I walked the knife-edge moraine up to the glacier. As we got closer I realized that we had actually stopped and snacked in full view of the glacier’s head, but didn’t know it, so gray and diminished it was. When the full length of the thing came into view, it seemed to lie shrunken at the bottom of an enormous dirty bath tub. I took a photo of my friend with the glacier spread in a diagonal slash behind him. He pointed the camera at my head and captured mostly sky. I suggested that the glacier’s sorry state must be caused by the changing climate. To which comment my academic friend – a professor of economics at a pricey liberal-arts college – thought it reasonable to suggest (since glaciers have, as everyone knows, grown and shrunk over time) that the one dying at our feet was likely to grow back again for his son to enjoy in the future.
[i] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ocean-temperatures-1.4970696
[ii] Gloria Dickie, “World registers hottest day ever recorded on July 3,” Reuters, July 4, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/world-registers-hottest-day-ever-recorded-july-3-2023-07-04/
[iii] In Chirac’s relatively short statement, where he congratulates social services for their work, while promising an investigation into their failings, the president places strong emphasis on the notion of “solidarity” – a word repeated six times. Combined with his speculation that a lack of family and neighborly support contributed to the deaths of many, the appeal to “solidarity” seemed to many commentators to amount to an exculpation of the government and its agencies. “Déclaration de M. Jacques Chirac, Président de la République, sur la révision du système de prévention, de vigilance et d’alerte sanitaire à la suite des conséquences de la canicule et sur la solidarité et le respect à l’égard des personnes agées ou handicapées, Paris le 21 août 2003.” http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/037000283.html
[iv] John Merriman, “Foreword,” in Louis Chevalier, The Assassination of Paris, David P. Jordan, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),xix.
The Purgatory Press 