I don’t know where to begin. Each day it seems like a new nightmare presents itself. But these nightmares did not emerge from nothing or out of nowhere. They are the culmination of the two centuries of violence, oppression, and disorder this nation was built upon. They have been growing underneath the thin skin of the veil the US masquerades itself with. The calamities we will wade through in the coming years have been itching to show themselves, to make apparent all the sins of the nation that once cast everyone else as sinners.
All empires come to an end and all tyrants last only for a moment.
This monster will eat itself from within. It was a monster born to devour, born of consumption. Its appetite is so insatiable that it is now eating its own leg.
As we stand at the edge of the world we once knew, as we witness and live through these everyday catastrophes and the many apocalypses that arise, we must ask ourselves this:
How many times have we come to the end of the world, and surpassed it?
We must remember the billion particles of life each of our lives stand on.
The Trump Administration’s Energy Emergency Proves that No Life Is Sacred to the Radical Right
My children remind me life moves in cycles. Each passing phase is but a blip in the unceasing continuum of being and living and matter. The nine months it takes to incubate a child vanishes in the hours it takes to give birth once more vanishing to each different stage of development. Each day, there is a newness to be revealed, to revel in. One day my arms hang heavy with the weight of a child until one day that child takes their first step until one day that child walks out the door on their own.
We humans live for a short period. Even animals known to live forever exist for but a moment. A giant tortoise, a bowhead whale, a Greenland shark, an ocean quahog, a glass sponge, a couple hundred or a few thousand years in the grand scheme of time is nothing.
Great empires are no different. The thousand years it took to build and ruin Rome was a blip. The United States, only 249 years old, is still nascent, but a wee toddler in the eyes of the all knowing that is being. In the massive, unceasing landscape of existence, tyrants and oligarchs only last a moment.
“Drill baby drill,” was what the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States said when one of his supporters asked about his children.
At a campaign stop in South Dakota, a voter expressing concern over his children’s financial well-being asked Trump, “How are you going to make the economy — not just the food and electricity — but bring down the rent prices, the housing prices, so that these kids can survive without their parents’ help?” The then-candidate’s response was one of his typical meandering word salads, punctuated by “drill baby drill.” Trump’s answer to people struggling to hold on to security was extreme extraction completely divorced from those people’s concerns and everyday realities. It’s ridiculous to debate how increasing oil production would bring down the price of rent in areas that could be miles away from an oil site. A 2014 study found that a majority of people surveyed would decline to buy property near a fracking site. If we follow this logic, we see that fracking likely creates higher rents and more housing scarcity as people flee to areas farther from the risks associated with oil fields, as water sources are endangered, and the long-term effects of rising global temperatures and natural disasters compound over time. Another report looking at rent prices in rural North Dakota, which at the time accounted for nearly 11 percent of US crude oil production, found that fracking booms increased rental prices and housing instability in nearby boomtowns.
On the first day of his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders declaring a “national energy emergency,” withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, and opening the door to more drilling than ever before. These measures also attack and restrict wind and solar power alternatives. The administration lauded this immediate declaration as one of many examples of campaign promises made and kept.
But it was more than a double entendre. These people really get off on destruction.
I’ve been alive long enough to know the dangers of unregulated and unchecked fracking. Fracking has polluted drinking water resources and contributes to a number of serious health issues, especially for particularly vulnerable populations like children and elderly people. Living in proximity to fossil fuel extraction has correlated with a variety of cancers, respiratory illnesses, and endocrine system issues. Fossil fuel extraction increases air pollution, can trigger earthquakes, and contributes to the overproduction of greenhouse gases. Rising global temperatures lead to rising sea levels, increased risk of floods, extreme weather events like hurricanes. Fracking disrupts ecosystems and creates difficult conditions for farming and food production. According to a recent study at Yale, “More than 17.6 million people in the U.S. now live within a mile of a fracked oil or gas well.” This number could exponentially increase following the Trump administration’s energy directives.
It’s so odd how a regime that is so culturally bound by the pulpit of a vapid nationalistic brand of religion can be so morally destitute, spiritually bankrupt, and disconnected from the ways any way God has shown up has been a force of nature and in the blessings and cycles of this natural world. How can a movement that has so strategically co-opted the word “life” have no regard for what it takes to sustain life and no reverence for what life stands upon?
There is no reverence for the world, for the lives these lives stand on, for the energy it takes to create one molecule of fuel. Every drop that spills from the gas pump is the result of hundreds of millions of years of life, billions of particles of algae and plants sinking to the bottom of ancient seas. Every ounce of crude oil is the end point of millions of years of pressure and temperature. Each reservoir is the vestige of an ancient body of water, an archive of life as it once was. I learned this from the wisdom of Indigenous water protectors, who are facing even more fierce struggles against an even more unrelenting big-bad boss in their quest for justice and ecological well-being.
The Dikenga, the cosmogram of the Bantu-Kongo people, teaches one to honor the cycle of life and their place in it, to see themselves as connected to the life which passed on to create and sustain the life that exists today. If we conceptualize fossil fuels in this way we are called to be more responsible with our consumption and production of them. Another thing these Indigenous cosmologies and knowledge systems teach us is that the earth will not stop spinning. These actions endanger human and other life forms but this planet, which has endured five mass extinctions, will go on.
If we are perhaps somewhere in the middle of a sixth mass extinction, as scientists believe, then we can no longer ignore or feign ignorance about the emergency that is being presented to us because of us. Scientists have cited humans as the main cause of the current mass extinction.
I, however, would place the emphasis not on the mere existence of humans but on the systems, institutions, and ideological frameworks created and maintained by small numbers of humans to serve the excessive wealth of a few humans and control the masses. These systems and ideologies destroy environments and disrupt ecosystems because capitalism has no regard for the concepts of balance, responsibility, ethics, reciprocity, or life. Even the alternatives to fossil fuels we have been handed, like electric vehicles, fall short and prove shallow. Billionaire CEOs like Musk take dozens of private jet trips each year. At the same time that Musk, who has become a prominent figure in the Trump administration, profits from the necessity for alternatives, he rubs elbows with those destroying the planet to make more money than they can ever spend in two lifetimes. The production of electric vehicles has an enormous environmental and human rights cost. The metal mining processes use large amounts of water, can contaminate nearby water supplies and pollute local ecosystems while fueling modern slavery and the ongoing genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And in recent years, EV companies have endorsed ocean floor drilling for minerals to build new models of car batteries, but critics say deep-sea mining could create irreversible harm to fragile ocean ecosystems and release enormous amounts of carbon which would exacerbate climate change.
Driving downriver out of Detroit, I see the Marathon gas refinery overlooking the interstate, a cluster of lights and towers in a spiraling campus, spewing foul-smelling smoke into the air like a Gotham City villain’s lair. Workers at the refinery in southwest Detroit just concluded a three-month strike due to safety concerns and wage disputes. During the strike, Marathon reportedly used undertrained, non-certified workers from other sites to keep the plant operational, endangering the community where I live with my children. The people who mine the fossil fuels are harmed and exploited. The people who refine the fossil fuels are harmed and exploited. The people who mine the minerals for electric alternatives are harmed and exploited. The people who buy and use the energy are harmed and exploited. The obnoxious slogan, “drill, baby, drill,” reflects the hard on these systems and the people who profit from them get from abusing the rest of us and the very earth that we depend on.
The only people who aren’t exploited in the process are the bosses. The Trump administration’s latest executive order declaring an energy emergency will pave the way for oil company bosses to potentially rake in some of the largest profits in history. The real crisis here is capitalism, a version of hyper-extractive capitalism that has been allowed to run rogue for decades in this country and threaten all forms of life. Frameworks of extraction, greed, gluttony, and excess bred from capitalism will reach a tipping point with the forthcoming fracking boom that will have endless effects on human life. Capitalism as we’ve always known it is a framework that places profit above the sacred cycles of the natural world and seeks to separate humans from the cycles we exist within. There is no regard for the life and time and energy it took to create fossil fuels. The same movement that proclaimed itself as pro-life is only concerned with life so far as it can be used to control the bodies of others and to exploit and extract resources for wealth.. There are no protections for life in this world. Children will be born into a future of climate chaos because of the actions of this administration and the greed of billionaires.
I am in awe thinking about how something which took 300 million of years of life to create is reduced to five minutes at the fuel pump, reduced to billions of dollars of exorbitant wealth which is hoarded by a few, yet determines and threatens the life of billions of people and trillions of other living beings. Something that took hundreds of millions of years to be consumed in only a couple hundreds of years. We should marvel at the splendor of this process, the way that water, earth and fire all had to collide and collaborate for millennia to make this happen, the way so much life was essential to creating energy. If we see ourselves, and by extension the energy we consume and the effort it took to create this energy, in a framework of life that is interconnected and sacred then we necessarily become more responsible with it. This system mocks of the life that went into creating energy, and no life is sacred to the radical right.
