Catastrophic Myths

The floods in Rio Grande do Sul that have rendered parts of the state uninhabitable, are one of Brasil’s worst environmental disasters in recent times. Half a year’s precipitation in ten days, over a hundred and fifty dead and half a million homeless. It should encourage everyone regardless of their political allegiances to pause for thought. But in some sort of macabre death wish, the far right deny that anything unusual is happening and ignore empirical evidence, even when it’s lapping at their door. Since coming to power in 2019, the State Governor Leite has relaxed five hundred environmental laws. Poor maintenance of existing flood defence systems, the long-term consequences of deforestation and the destruction of wetlands that absorb excess rainfall, have all helped increase the vulnerability of a region that has suffered three major floods in the last year. Building over river systems and human engineered global warning have exacerbated an unstable meteorological ‘state of being’ that is now permanent. An article in today’s Folha de Sao Paulo shows a disturbing graph, a steadily increasing curve of flooding and related environmental disasters over the last thirty years. Many scientists argue that the much talked about tipping point has already happened. But rampant extrativist economic policies in mining, agriculture, and the exploitation of fossil fuels, continue apace, and disproportionally effect living conditions in the global south.  The sacrifice of the future for corporate profits is central to a specifically capitalist ideology that has three principal features; the commodification of nature; the idea that the human species exists somehow outside of the natural world; and a deterministic belief that it is somehow possible to conquer nature in a demonstration of human technological supremacy. I have already had a good life, but I am terrified of what the future holds for my children and grandchildren. There is a branch of science fiction  that I call catastrophe literature. These are novels, that depict the end game of the human species. Global war, laboratory experiments that release uncontrollable viruses into the atmosphere, droughts, chronic food shortages, the extinction of bees, there are plenty of narrative options that are not so much rooted in implausible futures but in what is happening now. If you want to indulge in a literary vision of what an apocalyptic future might look like, then there is none better than the incomparable JG Ballard who wrote a trilogy of novels about the ‘end-game.’ The most pertinent of these, in the context of what is happening in Brasil is probably Drowned Earth. The planet heats, sea levels rise and the last inhabitable zones in the polar regions become militarised fortresses that protect a global elite from seaborne armadas of refugees scavenging what they can from the debris of urban civilisation.