The Article below was published in Vol. 135, Issue 4 of the Lake Forest College Stentor on December 6, 2019
By Josh Hager ’22
Staff Writer
The effects of climate change result in California constantly being on fire. The massive and widespread California wildfires are the culmination of an environmental catastrophe that has dried out the state and made it fertile for wildfires to sweep through towns. I know this first hand.
On December 4, 2017, I awoke from a chaotically windy night of power outages to a sky filled with smoke. My town of Ventura, California was on fire. In what came to be known as the Thomas Fire, thousands evacuated, and the homes of many people I know went up in smoke. Thousands of firefighters from across the country helped in putting out the fire, and when it threatened to engulf the nearby town of Ojai, California, their efforts saved the town from being surrounded by flames.
Some of these firefighters who help save my town were not free people, but inmate firefighters. According to the Los Angeles Times, the inmate firefighters earn pitifully low wages ranging between $2.00 and $5.00 per day and work in extremely dangerous conditions. Not all of them lived. Even if the inmate firefighters lived and are eventually released from prison, because of their felony status, the chances of an inmate firefighter becoming a fully paid and fully respected firefighter are slim.
What then is justice in the age of climate change? The environmental degradation of California, or the world for that matter, originated in inherent flaws of capitalist society. So why is California on fire to begin with? Drought, neglect of ecological balance, and overdevelopment all connected to capitalist incentives and of class society. The hills beyond Ventura are of the unique Chaparral ecosystem, which needs to burn regularly to not become laden with too much “fuel.” When the wealthy decided to develop into the hills, the policy became fire suppression, thus cutting off this natural cycle to not risk these homes burning.
Additionally, drought has been the reality for Southern California for as long as I can remember. Without the meat industry, the water usage of the state would decline substantially, and the water resources would not be so overexerted. Additionally, the cause of many deaths in Paradise, California was due to the refusal of companies such as PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) to upgrade their fragile infrastructure. The message is, capitalists profit from the plunder of the earth, and those who have been victimized are left to suffer and clean up the disasters.
The response to climate change today dictates the world we live in tomorrow. I do not want to live in a green world with oppression, military invasions by the United States, and the same class structures as the world we currently live in. It is no secret that the United States’ expansive prison complex entraps people in poverty, and perpetuates racism in the most brutal form. It is then the policy of the United States for the most vulnerable social groups to clean up the mess of the rich and their economic order, using inmates as firemen at risk to their safety. To solve climate change, we cannot maintain the same institutions that caused climate change.
Author and activist Naomi Klein pointed out in an interview with the podcast Chapo Trap House that an approach to climate change without justice and a revolution in politics and the economy will amplify the injustice and inequalities that exist in neoliberal capitalism. This is what happened in France, where President Macron instituted taxes on people without there being change to capitalism itself, causing the masses to revolt during the Yellow Vest movement. Ecosocialism is the logical solution to this.
A revolution of the masses enacting a system that is not fundamentally antagonistic to the environment and planning for the needs of both the people and the environment will solve the crisis. Capitalism is not capable of doing this and has never planned for the needs of the environment or the people, but the capitalists who profit from the exploitation of both. To even say that this was planned is a stretch. Capitalism created the socially unequal context in which there are prison firefighters to begin with, and it is socialism that will undo this. The environment will be repaired by the masses, for the masses, but only in a just society.
Josh Hager can be reached at hagerjm@mx.lakeforest.edu
