The introductory chapter of historian Gray Brechin's must-read Imperial San Francisco is entitled “The Urban Maelstrom.” The chapter begins with a reference to Edgar Allen Poe's A Descent Into The Maelstrom, a tale of the now-eponymous sea storm with a whirlpool at its center. It's an apt metaphor, an only slightly hyperbolic description of the voracious relationship large cities have with the land that surrounds them. As Poe describes the Maelstrom:
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 after 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. The maelstrom 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 the English word "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 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 Southern California 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 Californians. 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 bed sheets 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 whether 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 solar technology on unused urban land
Claim land currently occupied for human industrial use and convert to solar
Claim land currently occupied for human residential use and convert to 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.
Letters From the Desert is a project of the nonprofit Desert Advocacy Media Network. D.A.M.N. also produces the 90 Miles from Needles desert protection podcast, and the 90 Miles from Needles email newsletter.
Excellent post, Chris. Dovetails very well with my own from today. We must be on the same wavelength.
The most coherent elucidation on reality I've read, a clear connecting of dots.
I believe the panaceas will happen in small pockets and that the rest is "bleak" to say the least. Because at root is unconsciousness in about 99.9999% of humans on the planet, most particularly decision-makers.
Some years ago I gave myself permission to make this small personal bubble of sanity and beauty a priority; happy to find many of my desert-dwelling friends doing same.
Thank you, Chris.