According to the American writer Rebecca Solnit, it was no coincidence that the Christchurch mosque massacre took place on the same day and in close vicinity to a climate protest by youngsters with hope and idealism in their hearts: "It was a shocking pairing and also a perfectly coherent one".
Was it? Surely such perfect coherence - or synchronicity - is in the mind of the beholder ...
But then Solnit is an idealist who specialises in discerning causal relations and meaningful connections between events; a woman who believes in harmonious global unity, which she describes as "the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems [...] on which that life depends".
Other than the murderous racism, the thing she really dislikes about white supremacists is that they refuse to care about climate change and thus threaten to destroy or disrupt the above systems, making the world not just warmer, but more chaotic, "in ways that break these elegant patterns and relationships".
But then Solnit is an idealist who specialises in discerning causal relations and meaningful connections between events; a woman who believes in harmonious global unity, which she describes as "the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems [...] on which that life depends".
Other than the murderous racism, the thing she really dislikes about white supremacists is that they refuse to care about climate change and thus threaten to destroy or disrupt the above systems, making the world not just warmer, but more chaotic, "in ways that break these elegant patterns and relationships".
This chaos, according to Solnit, is essentially an extension of terrorist violence; the violence not of guns and bombs, but of "hurricanes, wildfires, new temperature extremes, broken weather patterns, droughts, extinctions, famines" that the poor Earth is coerced or triggered into unleashing.
And this is why climate action, she says, has always been and must remain non-violent, in stark contrast to the actions carried out by men like Brenton Tarrant. For environmentalism is a movement to protect life and restore peace and harmony; protesting against global warming is "the equivalent of fighting against hatred" and disorder. In other words, it's a form of counter-terrorism.
And this is why climate action, she says, has always been and must remain non-violent, in stark contrast to the actions carried out by men like Brenton Tarrant. For environmentalism is a movement to protect life and restore peace and harmony; protesting against global warming is "the equivalent of fighting against hatred" and disorder. In other words, it's a form of counter-terrorism.
Personally, I think such claims are highly contentious, to say the least. But who knows, perhaps Ms. Solnit is right. After all, not only does she know a lot of climate activists, but she also knows what motivates them ... Love! Love for the planet, love for people (particularly the poor and vulnerable), and love for the promise of a sustainable future.
How many people at the opposite end of the political spectrum from herself and her friends she also knows isn't clear. Presumably not many. But that doesn't stop her from dismissing them all as irresponsible climate change deniers, unwilling to acknowledge that "actions have consequences", and full of the kind of libertarian machismo and entitlement that ultimately ends in violence.
What Solnit doesn't seem to consider is that the Earth is a monster of chaos and indifference; that it's not a living system or self-regulating organism and is neither sentient nor morally concerned with the preservation of life.
I think it's mistaken to think of the planet as some kind of home, sweet home and to ascribe the world with some sort of will. But, if we must play this game, then it's probably best to take a neo-Gnostic line and accept that all matter and events are imbued with the spirit of evil.
Indeed, push comes to shove, I'm inclined to think that human agency and geological catastrophe conspire not because innocent Nature has been groomed by terrorists or provoked into taking her revenge due to man-made climate change (as some followers of Lovelock like to imagine), but because they are both expressions of what is a fundamentally immoral existence.
Finally, Solnit might like to recall this from Sade writing in Justine: "Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power."
See:
Rebecca Solnit, 'Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy', The Guardian (19 March 2019): click here to read online.
Marquis de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Phillips, (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Rebecca Solnit, 'Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy', The Guardian (19 March 2019): click here to read online.
Marquis de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Phillips, (Oxford University Press, 2012).
See also the excellent essay by David McCallam entitled 'The Terrorist Earth? Some Thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard', in French Cultural Studies 23 (3), (SAGE Publications, 2012), 215-224. Click here to access as an online pdf via Academia.edu.
Amongst other things, McCallam indicates how eighteenth-century discourses on revolutionary politics and the aesthetics of the sublime provide the conceptual framework for the contemporary idea of the Earth as terrorist; an idea, developed by Jean Bauadrillard, that allows us to think terror attacks and natural disasters interchangeably.
