âIf youâre poor, the only way youâre likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it â by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if youâre tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If youâre the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers â the US and Russia â still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth. So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above. [âŠ] People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education â these things are also governed by economic means and government policy.[âŠ] Thatâs a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field â and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that canât form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.â
