The introductory chapter of historian Gray Brechin’s must-read Imperial San Francisco
Boats, yachts, and ships have been carried away by not guarding against it before they were within its reach. It likewise happens frequently, that whales come too near the stream, and are overpowered by its violence; and then it is impossible to describe their howlings and bellowings in their fruitless struggles to disengage themselves. A bear once, attempting to swim from Lofoden to Moskoe, was caught by the stream and borne down, while he roared terribly, so as to be heard on shore. Large stocks of firs and pine trees, after being absorbed by the current, rise again broken and torn to such a degree as if bristles grew upon them.
That’s almost too good a metaphor for Brechin’s history of San Francisco, whose “imperial” reach extended from the deep-sea whales of the Pacific, caught and rendered in plants around the Bay shore, to the ancient redwoods up and down the coast splintered into house-kindling for the 1906 fire, to the extermination of the inconvenient California Grizzly, a threat to the cattle and vaqueros that fed the burgeoning city. San Francisco’s gravitational pull brought the mountain slopes downstream as hydraulic miners washed away whole watersheds. The gold of the Mother Lode, then Nevada’s silver, then the desert’s mineral riches from borax to mercury to rare earths flowed up and over mountain ranges, then into the bank accounts of San Franciscan magnates like Hearst, Crocker, Stanford.
San Francisco’s not the only city that consumes the earth around it in this fashion, of course. It’s not even the most egregious example. I sit here in Los Angeles ten feet away from a faucet that, when turned on, draws water from a mountainside 250 miles away, in a valley that was literally colonized by the designers of the water utility.
It becomes nearly inevitable when cities grow past a certain size. The gardens within the city walls are insufficient to feed and clothe the people within the city walls, then the fields just outside the city are insufficient, and food and textiles must be imported from a distance. The city’s demand for metal depletes the local supply and metal begins to flow into the city from distant mines. There are not enough people within the city walls to perform the available tasks, so people from away migrate into the cities, accentuating the need for imported food and textiles. Wealth flows from the countryside into the city and the city raises an army to defend that wealth, or the city depletes the country accessible to it and raises an army to conquer more, and the need for metal and for food rises apace. Each large city an empire, each grand empire a conglomeration of powerful cities, some demanding explicit tribute from their vassal territories and others — the cleverer and more sophisticated — remaking the tribute into “trade.”
During the time of the Italian city-states, Brechin reminds us, there was a name for the countryside that fed a particular city. The word “contado,” cognate with our “county,” once implied a reciprocal relationship between a city and its surround. Farmers sold grain to the city’s bakers, and bought tools from the city’s artisans. On a small scale, the relationship can be a benign one, a mere horizontal distribution of labor and reasonably fair exchange, not too far removed from the rural towns from which farmers commute to their own fields each day. The contado nurtured and supported the city as a mother does a child in utero. But at some point, at a certain scale, probably somewhere in the five-figure population range, a city becomes too large for its relationship with its contado to be anything but parasitic.
The city becomes colonialist, a vortex into which wealth is drawn, depleting the contado of its lifeblood, an engorged tick on a vein. People take its demands as immutable, the natural order of things. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming are obliged to provide Los Angeles with 4.40 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year, even if they must pump other rivers over mountain divides to water the crops they hope to sell to Angelenos. This colonialism is the water in which we swim, and we do not see it. Ranching, logging, and mining to sate the cities’ appetite for beef, timber and gold despoil more of the American west each year, and what do environmentalists suggest as an alternative? “Ecotourism,” so that the sons and daughters of the ranchers and loggers can turn down bedsheets to vacationing urbanites, and serve them cappuccinos come morning.
There have been gigabytes of essays written about the pragmatic problems with the urban-colonial mindset, about the carbon burden inhering in tomatoes shipped cross-country or the concentration of capital in a few transnational merchandisers’ metaphorical pockets, the economic dislocations and inefficiencies that result from an overly top-down economics.
Fewer people comment on the inherent moral and ethical deficiencies of this form of colonialism. Almost no one asks what right cities have to rake the surrounding lands for wealth. Almost no one wonders whether the local economies, the communities, the ecosystems and other species in the contado might not have a right to the fruits of their own biological labors, and that depriving them of that right ought not be done at all even in the direst circumstances if an alternative exists.
After all, as the citizens of an imperial city are to their subjects in the contado, so is human society, urban and rural both, to non-human society. The natural world is our contado, and the human empire has exploited it to the breaking point. But who thinks of the rights that contado may have?
Who thinks about the rights of desert tortoises, for instance? We argue over the letter of the law, about possible impacts and probable outcomes of mitigation procedures, about acceptable losses of translocated tortoises to coyote predation, about the existence of viable populations elsewhere. We do not talk about whether, when cities decide to exploit the sunshine of the contado for electrical power, the tortoises to be displaced for concentrating solar construction might not have rights to be left undisturbed that outweigh our reluctance to use electricity less profligately.
What we hear instead, from serious environmentalists engaging in high-level negotiations with policymakers and industry representatives, is that we face a climate crisis dire enough that some tortoise habitat will very likely need to be converted to industrial solar facilities. The tortoise will have to “take one for the team,” so to speak. As will the bighorn whose habitat will be bisected by the transmission lines bringing power from the former tortoise habitat to the cities. As will the pupfish in the springs that will go dry sooner when groundwater is sprayed into the air to wash the solar plant’s mirrors.
If we did consider the rights of the contado’s human and non-human inhabitants when discussing our inevitable conversion to non-carbon-generating energy supplies, our list of solar-electric policy options would very likely look like this, with options listed in declining order of preferability:
- Enact widespread sensible conservation measures
- Install as much decentralized photovoltaic generating capacity as possible, on existing and new structures
- Develop and install concentrating solar technology on unused urban land
- Claim land currently occupied for human industrial use and convert to concentrating solar
- Claim land currently occupied for human residential use and convert to concentrating solar
- Ration electrical power if demand exceeds power supplied by the above measures
Instead, depriving our contado-dwellers of their rights to home, to privacy, to life becomes option number one, and thus the Imperial City’s vortex begins to consume the very light shining on the contado. A singularity: the city as black hole.
The climate change emergency is a frightening one, profound enough that environmentalists are advocating turning public lands over to industrial development, and accusing those who object of short-sightedness. And the climate change to which we have already committed ourselves ensures a bleak future, with grotesque human suffering an almost-certain consequence. But again, here we see evidence of a reluctance even to consider that the non-human inhabitants of our contado possess rights. The emergency is of our own creation. The livelihood of non-human creatures is mainly mentioned as a rationale for destroying their habitat, as if to say that if we don’t destroy the desert now, there won’t be any desert left to destroy later.
An analysis based on the assumption that the contado has rights, however, would point out that climate change poses a much greater threat to species other than humans — we are not faced with extinction, while many hundreds of our fellow species are, at the very least — the obvious ethical conclusion being that they have already taken enough for a “team” they never intended to join, and that if sacrifices are to be made to fix a crisis we humans caused, it is we humans who bear the ultimate moral obligation to make those sacrifices.
Which I think casts those who insist sacrifices must be made, but who quail at the thought of spending two hours a day without electricity, in a light harsher than any you’ll find in the desert.
I find the language of “rights” completely obscure, in all cases—I never have the slightest idea what non-theists are talking about (who grants these “rights,” by what derivation of authority?) and theists, while more logically consistent in this way, perplex me even more, for other reasons.
Having got that off my chest—I do enjoy the perspective of looking at it this way, and think it’s a fruitful thought-exercise. It’s a longstanding American tradition, of course, to think of city dwellers as automatically wicked and country dwellers as automatically virtuous. (I’ve never seen any evidence of it, but who needs evidence?) But anyway, extending the riff to include non-humans is a natural and satisfying progression. Anything to open up a little room for other perspectives is fine by me!
It will be interesting to see how the new Constitution of Ecuador with it’s equal rights for Pachamama and all living things, including ecosystems, plays out . . .
It’s not an answer I’d stake my rhetorical reputation on, Dale, but I generally think of rights as an emergent property of empathetic sentience. No one grants them, except in that the very concept of rights was granted to the universe as an unanticipated result of the evolution of sentience among feeling creatures. Once the concept of rights existed, rights themselves existed. Our task now is to understand their ramifications.
Also: This is about structures and mindsets, not whether city-dwellers are wicked and country dwellers virtuous. It’s too easy to rebut such an idea with anecdata.
Lovely essay Chris, thanks for writing it. These are very interesting ideas you raise, certainly a perspective worth considering and a framework that I think facilitates doing so (I especially like the metaphor of fetus/mother).
Your argument for protecting and valuing the rights of the non-human contado dwellers will find no opposition from me; I agree that “they have already taken enough for a “team” they never intended to join”. It’s that element of choice and intent that makes your argument so compelling—there’s no doubt we humans have imposed our structures on their very lives and livelihoods.
But help me understand how the HUMAN inhabitants of these “surrounding lands” are or have been similarly exploited in a non-consensual way. It seems like the farmers and ranchers and miners and loggers who supply the cities do so because of the economics of it; there’s a demand to fill, and they choose to use the resources available to them to do so, and thus earn money to better their lives. Would your argument be that granting them the rights to those resources is a fallacy?
I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
As interesting as your solar colonialism essay is, I don’t think that city residents give a good gosh darn about the “rights” of the people of the “Contado”, much less the “rights” that any non humans might have anywhere at all. As a desert resident I am interested in approaches that might have a chance of stopping big solar abortions . I like very much your list of solar electric policy options but I would point out that if climate change is really important the fastest way to reduce CO2 emissions is to adopt your policies. Siting big solar in the desert takes years of environmental reports and litigation whereas your policies are mostly ready to go today. We should all be pushing for them as hard as we can.
As an aside I have solar panels on my roof and enough batteries in my shed to keep me going for days without commercial power. Two hours a day with no commercial power would be no inconvenience at all. And a lot of people have the rooftop to do the same thing.
Great essay, Chris. I’ve been wondering where all the deep ecologists have gone. (Old Pete Seeger song.)
As you point out, there are many alternatives to big solar projects on public land. The last few in your list, are of course never considered. The environmentally-oriented big solar advocate will contend that we have to do ALL of the first three, plus remote solar, to have a chance of reducing climate change.
Then they assert that this possible reduction in global warming will actually benefit desert species more than the harm of scraping X thousands of acres. I think that’s an unprovable assertion, but many people of apparently good will have decided on nothing more than gut instinct that it must be true.
And of course, we aren’t even doing all of your first three solutions to the fullest extent possible. We’re instead relying on the old model of big centralized companies (utilities) and big government to save us from global warming while we watch the show on our large-screen plasma TVs.
Chris,
Excellent essay. It pretty much captures my feelings on these issues.
As wonderful as the idea of solar panels on sunny rooftops seems, there is the little issue of the materials used to make them. Silicon is abundant on this planet, but indium, currently used in solar panels, is not. This rare element is used not only in solar panels but also in flat screen technology. Some estimates give us a 10-year supply left.
http://en.kioskea.net/actualites/industries-countries-scrap-over-high-tech-metals-12478-actualite.php3
Of course, there are bound to be breakthroughs in developing solar cells with other materials, but whether they can be mass-produced soon enough to make a difference is a good question.
Basically, it comes down to too many humans using too much energy. It’s really hard to see how we are going to get out of this mess. And the biggest victims, as usual, are the other species with which we share the planet.
Jim,
Your point about too many humans using too much energy is spot on. It’s not just too much population, but too much consumption by the fraction of the population that lives here in the United States (and to a lesser extent Europe). So conservation and efficiency have to come before putting in renewable energy. This is the same way you go about solarizing a house—you plug all the energy leaks before deciding how many solar panels you’ll need.
As for the supply of solar panels, I’m not sure whether the indium you mentioned is a component of another type of solar panel, cadmium-telluride thin film panels. However, engineer Bill Powers says that for the foreseeable future, we’ll be awash in this type of solar panel and supplying them is just not a problem. I’ve also heard that the main sources of cadmium and telluride are old mine tailings, so in a sense it comes from a recycled material. The panels themselves can also be recycled in 30 years and the metals re-used.
-Larry
Great piece, Chris, and highly relevant as well to those of us fighting industrial wind plants in the Appalachians and elsewhere.