Inequality in the Anthropocene

This post was inspired by an article on the possibility of increasing suicides because of climate change. What occurred to me is that all the social and psychological problems seen with climate change are also seen with inequality (as shown in decades of research), and to a lesser extent as seen with extreme poverty — although high poverty with low inequality isn’t necessarily problematic at all (e.g., the physically and psychologically healthy hunter-gatherers who are poor in terms of material wealth and private property).

Related to this, I noticed in one article that a study was mentioned about the chances of war increasing when detrimental weather events are combined with ethnic diversity. And that reminded me of the research that showed diversity only leads to lowered trust when combined with segregation. A major problem with climate-related refugee crises is that it increases segregation, such as refugee camps and immigrant ghettoization. That segregation will lead to further conflict and destruction of the social fabric, which in turn will promote further segregation — a vicious cycle that will be hard to pull out before the crash, especially as the environmental conditions lead to droughts, famines, and plagues.


The only defense against this will be a strong, courageous left-wing response. That would require eliminating not only the derangement of the GOP but also the corruption of the DNC by replacing both with a genuinely democratic and socialist movement. Otherwise, our society will descend into collective madness and our entire civilization will be under existential threat. There is no other option.

* * *

The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence: Vulnerability in the Anthropocene
by Rob Nixon

Most Anthropocene scholars date the new epoch to the late-eighteenth-century beginnings of industrialization. But there is a second phase to the Anthropocene, the so-called great acceleration, beginning circa 1950: an exponential increase in human-induced changes to the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle and in ocean acidification, global trade, and consumerism, as well as the rise of international forms of governance like the World Bank and the IMF.

However, most accounts of the great acceleration fail to position it in relation to neoliberalism’s recent ascent, although most of the great acceleration has occurred during the neoliberal era. One marker of neoliberalism has been a widening chasm of inequality between the superrich and the ultrapoor: since the late 1970s, we have been living through what Timothy Noah calls “the great divergence.” Noah’s subject is the economic fracturing of America, the new American gilded age, but the great divergence has scarred most societies, from China and India to Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Australia, and Bangladesh.

My central problem with the dominant mode of Anthropocene storytelling is its failure to articulate the great acceleration to the great divergence. We need to acknowledge that the grand species narrative of the Anthropocene—this geomorphic “age of the human”—is gaining credence at a time when, in society after society, the idea of the human is breaking apart economically, as the distance between affluence and abandonment is increasing. It is time to remold the Anthropocene as a shared story about unshared resources. When we examine the geology of the human, let us also pay attention to the geopolitics of the new stratigraphy’s layered assumptions.

Neoliberalism loves watery metaphors: the trickle-down effect, global flows, how a rising tide lifts all boats. But talk of a rising tide raises other specters: the coastal poor, who will never get storm-surge barriers; Pacific Islanders in the front lines of inundation; Arctic peoples, whose livelihoods are melting away—all of them exposed to the fallout from Anthropocene histories of carbon extraction and consumption in which they played virtually no part.

We are not all in this together
by Ian Angus

So the 21st century is being defined by a combination of record-breaking inequality with record-breaking climate change. That combination is already having disastrous impacts on the majority of the world’s people. The line is not only between rich and poor, or comfort and poverty: it is a line between survival and death.

Climate change and extreme weather events are not devastating a random selection of human beings from all walks of life. There are no billionaires among the dead, no corporate executives living in shelters, no stockbrokers watching their children die of malnutrition. Overwhelmingly, the victims are poor and disadvantaged. Globally, 99 percent of weather disaster casualties are in developing countries, and 75 percent of them are women.

The pattern repeats at every scale. Globally, the South suffers far more than the North. Within the South, the very poorest countries, mostly in Africa south of the Sahara, are hit hardest. Within each country, the poorest people—women, children, and the elderly—are most likely to lose their homes and livelihoods from climate change, and most likely to die.

The same pattern occurs in the North. Despite the rich countries’ overall wealth, when hurricanes and heatwaves hit, the poorest neighborhoods are hit hardest, and within those neighborhoods the primary victims are the poorest people.

Chronic hunger, already a severe problem in much of the world, will be made worse by climate change. As Oxfam reports: “The world’s most food-insecure regions will be hit hardest of all.”

Unchecked climate change will lock the world’s poorest people in a downward spiral, leaving hundreds of millions facing malnutrition, water scarcity, ecological threats, and loss of livelihood. Children will be among the primary victims, and the effects will last for lifetimes: studies in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Niger show that being born in a drought year increases a child’s chances of being irreversibly stunted by 41 to 72 percent.

Environmental racism has left black Americans three times more likely to die from pollution
By Bartees Cox

Without a touch of irony, the EPA celebrated Black History Month by publishing a report that finds black communities face dangerously high levels of pollution. African Americans are more likely to live near landfills and industrial plants that pollute water and air and erode quality of life. Because of this, more than half of the 9 million people living near hazardous waste sites are people of color, and black Americans are three times more likely to die from exposure to air pollutants than their white counterparts.

The statistics provide evidence for what advocates call “environmental racism.” Communities of color aren’t suffering by chance, they say. Rather, these conditions are the result of decades of indifference from people in power.

Environmental racism is dangerous. Trump’s EPA doesn’t seem to care.
by P.R. Lockhart

Studies have shown that black and Hispanic children are more likely to develop asthma than their white peers, as are poor children, with research suggesting that higher levels of smog and air pollution in communities of color being a factor. A 2014 study found that people of color live in communities that have more nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that exacerbates asthma.

The EPA’s own research further supported this. Earlier this year, a paper from the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment found that when it comes to air pollutants that contribute to issues like heart and lung disease, black people are exposed to 1.5 times more of the pollutant than white people, while Hispanic people were exposed to about 1.2 times the amount of non-Hispanic whites. People in poverty had 1.3 times the exposure of those not in poverty.

Trump’s EPA Concludes Environmental Racism Is Real
by Vann R. Newkirk II

Late last week, even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Trump administration continued a plan to dismantle many of the institutions built to address those disproportionate risks, researchers embedded in the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment released a study indicating that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air. Specifically, the study finds that people in poverty are exposed to more fine particulate matter than people living above poverty. According to the study’s authors, “results at national, state, and county scales all indicate that non-Whites tend to be burdened disproportionately to Whites.”

The study focuses on particulate matter, a group of both natural and manmade microscopic suspensions of solids and liquids in the air that serve as air pollutants. Anthropogenic particulates include automobile fumes, smog, soot, oil smoke, ash, and construction dust, all of which have been linked to serious health problems. Particulate matter was named a known definite carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and it’s been named by the EPA as a contributor to several lung conditions, heart attacks, and possible premature deaths. The pollutant has been implicated in both asthma prevalence and severitylow birth weights, and high blood pressure.

As the study details, previous works have also linked disproportionate exposure to particulate matter and America’s racial geography. A 2016 study in Environment International found that long-term exposure to the pollutant is associated with racial segregation, with more highly segregated areas suffering higher levels of exposure. A 2012 article in Environmental Health Perspectives found that overall levels of particulate matter exposure for people of color were higher than those for white people. That article also provided a breakdown of just what kinds of particulate matter counts in the exposures. It found that while differences in overall particulate matter by race were significant, differences for some key particles were immense. For example, Hispanics faced rates of chlorine exposure that are more than double those of whites. Chronic chlorine inhalation is known for degrading cardiac function.

The conclusions from scientists at the National Center for Environmental Assessment not only confirm that body of research, but advance it in a top-rate public-health journal. They find that black people are exposed to about 1.5 times more particulate matter than white people, and that Hispanics had about 1.2 times the exposure of non-Hispanic whites. The study found that people in poverty had about 1.3 times more exposure than people above poverty. Interestingly, it also finds that for black people, the proportion of exposure is only partly explained by the disproportionate geographic burden of polluting facilities, meaning the magnitude of emissions from individual factories appears to be higher in minority neighborhoods.

These findings join an ever-growing body of literature that has found that both polluters and pollution are often disproportionately located in communities of color. In some places, hydraulic-fracturing oil wells are more likely to be sited in those neighborhoods. Researchers have found the presence of benzene and other dangerous aromatic chemicals to be linked to race. Strong racial disparities are suspected in the prevalence of lead poisoning.

It seems that almost anywhere researchers look, there is more evidence of deep racial disparities in exposure to environmental hazards. In fact, the idea of environmental justice—or the degree to which people are treated equally and meaningfully involved in the creation of the human environment—was crystallized in the 1980s with the aid of a landmark study illustrating wide disparities in the siting of facilities for the disposal of hazardous waste. Leaders in the environmental-justice movement have posited—in places as prestigious and rigorous as United Nations publications and numerous peer-reviewed journals—that environmental racism exists as the inverse of environmental justice, when environmental risks are allocated disproportionately along the lines of race, often without the input of the affected communities of color.

The idea of environmental racism is, like all mentions of racism in America, controversial. Even in the age of climate change, many people still view the environment mostly as a set of forces of nature, one that cannot favor or disfavor one group or another. And even those who recognize that the human sphere of influence shapes almost every molecule of the places in which humans live, from the climate to the weather to the air they breathe, are often loathe to concede that racism is a factor. To many people, racism often connotes purposeful decisions by a master hand, and many see existing segregation as a self-sorting or poverty problem. Couldn’t the presence of landfills and factories in disproportionately black neighborhoods have more to do with the fact that black people tend to be disproportionately poor and thus live in less desirable neighborhoods?

But last week’s study throws more water on that increasingly tenuous line of thinking. While it lacks the kind of complex multivariate design that can really disentangle the exact effects of poverty and race, the finding that race has a stronger effect on exposure to pollutants than poverty indicates that something beyond just the concentration of poverty among black people and Latinos is at play. As the study’s authors write: “A focus on poverty to the exclusion of race may be insufficient to meet the needs of all burdened populations.” Their finding that the magnitude of pollution seems to be higher in communities of color than the number of polluters suggests, indicates that regulations and business decisions are strongly dependent on whether people of color are around. In other words, they might be discriminatory.

This is a remarkable finding, and not only because it could provide one more policy linkage to any number of health disparities, from heart disease to asthma rates in black children that are double those of white children. But the study also stands as an implicit rebuke to the very administration that allowed its release.

Violence: Categories & Data, Causes & Demographics

Most violent crime correlates to social problems in general. Most social problems in general correlate to economic factors such as poverty but even moreso inequality. And in a country like the US, most economic factors correlate to social disadvantage and racial oppression, from economic segregation (redlining, sundown towns, etc) to environmental racism (ghettos located in polluted urban areas, high toxicity rates among minorities, etc) — consider how areas of historically high rates of slavery at present have higher levels of poverty and inequality, impacting not just blacks but also whites living in those communities.

Socialized Medicine & Externalized Costs


Percentages of Suffering and Death

Even accepting the data that Pinker uses, it must be noted that he isn’t including all violent deaths. Consider economic sanctions and neoliberal exploitation, vast poverty and inequality forcing people to work long hours in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, covert operations to overthrow governments and destabilize regions, anthropogenic climate change with its disasters, environmental destruction and ecosystem collapse, loss of arable land and food sources, pollution and toxic dumps, etc. All of this would involve food scarcity, malnutrition, starvation, droughts, rampant disease, refugee crises, diseases related to toxicity and stress, etc; along with all kinds of other consequences to people living in desperation and squalor.

This has all been intentionally caused through governments, corporations, and other organizations seeking power and profit while externalizing costs and harm. In my lifetime, the fatalities to this large scale often slow violence and intergenerational trauma could add up to hundreds of millions or maybe billions of lives cut short. Plus, as neoliberal globalization worsens inequality, there is a direct link to higher rates of homicides, suicides, and stress-related diseases for the most impacted populations. Yet none of these deaths would be counted as violent, no matter how horrific it was for the victims. And those like Pinker adding up the numbers would never have to acknowledge this overwhelming reality of suffering. It can’t be seen in the official data on violence, as the causes are disconnected from the effects. But why should only a small part of the harm and suffering get counted as violence?

by Roy Scranton
Kindle Locations 860-888 (see here)




Donald Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene
by Robinson Meyer

First, climate change could easily worsen the inequality that has already hollowed out the Western middle class. A recent analysis in Nature projected that the effects of climate change will reduce the average person’s income by 23 percent by the end of the century. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicts that unmitigated global warming could cost the American economy $200 billion this century. (Some climate researchers think the EPA undercounts these estimates.)

Future consumers will not register these costs so cleanly, though—there will not be a single climate-change debit exacted on everyone’s budgets at year’s end. Instead, the costs will seep in through many sources: storm damage, higher power rates, real-estate depreciation, unreliable and expensive food. Climate change could get laundered, in other words, becoming just one more symptom of a stagnant and unequal economy. As quality of life declines, and insurance premiums rise, people could feel that they’re being robbed by an aloof elite.

They won’t even be wrong. It’s just that due to the chemistry of climate change, many members of that elite will have died 30 or 50 years prior. […]

Malin Mobjörk, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, recently described a “growing consensus” in the literature that climate change can raise the risk of violence. And the U.S. Department of Defense already considers global warming a “threat multiplier” for national security. It expects hotter temperatures and acidified oceans to destabilize governments and worsen infectious pandemics.

Indeed, climate change may already be driving mass migrations. Last year, the Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley was mocked for suggesting that a climate-change-intensified drought in the Levant—the worst drought in 900 years—helped incite the Syrian Civil War, thus kickstarting the Islamic State. The evidence tentatively supports him. Since the outbreak of the conflict, some scholars have recognized that this drought pushed once-prosperous farmers into Syria’s cities. Many became unemployed and destitute, aggravating internal divisions in the run-up to the war. […]

They were not disappointed. Heatwaves, droughts, and other climate-related exogenous shocks do correlate to conflict outbreak—but only in countries primed for conflict by ethnic division. In the 30-year period, nearly a quarter of all ethnic-fueled armed conflict coincided with a climate-related calamity. By contrast, in the set of all countries, war only correlated to climatic disaster about 9 percent of the time.

“We cannot find any evidence for a generalizable trigger relationship, but we do find evidence for some risk enhancement,” Schleussner told me. In other words,  climate disaster will not cause a war, but it can influence whether one begins.

Why climate change is very bad for your health
by Geordan Dickinson Shannon


We don’t live in isolation from other ecosystems. From large-scale weather events, through to the food we eat daily, right down to the minute organisms colonising our skin and digestive systems, we live and breath in co-dependency with our environment.

A change in the delicate balance of micro-organisms has the potential to lead to disastrous effects. For example, microbial proliferation – which is predicted in warmer temperatures driven by climate change – may lead to more enteric infections (caused by viruses and bacteria that enter the body through the gastrointestinal tract), such as salmonella food poisoning and increased cholera outbreaks related to flooding and warmer coastal and estuarine water.

Changes in temperature, humidity, rainfall, soil moisture and sea-level rise, caused by climate change is also affecting the transmission of dangerous insect-borne infectious diseases. These include malaria, dengue, Japanese encephalitis, chikungunya and West Nile viruslymphatic filariasis, plague, tick-borne encephalitis, Lyme diseaserickettsioses, and schistosomiasis.

Through climate change, the pattern of human interaction will likely change and so will our interactions with disease-spreading insects, especially mosquitoes. The World Health Organisation has also stressed the impact of climate change on the reproductive, survival and bite rates of insects, as well as their geographic spread.

Climate refugees

Perhaps the most disastrous effect of climate change on human health is the emergence of large-scale forced migration from the loss of local livelihoods and weather events – something that is recognised by the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights. Sea-level rise, decreased crop yield, and extreme weather events will force many people from their lands and livelihoods, while refugees in vulnerable areas also face amplified conditions such as fewer food supplies and more insect-borne diseases. And those who are displaced put a significant health and economic burden on surrounding communities.

The International Red Cross estimates that there are more environmental refugees than political. Around 36m people were displaced by natural disasters in 2009; a figure that is predicted to rise to more than 50m by 2050. In one worst-case scenario, as many as 200m people could become environmental refugees.

Not a level playing field

Climate change has emerged as a major driver of global health inequalities. As J. Timmons Roberts, professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at Brown University, put it:

Global warming is all about inequality, both in who will suffer most its effects and in who created the problem in the first place.

Global climate change further polarises the haves and the have-nots. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that climate change will hit poor countries hardest. For example, the loss of healthy life years in low-income African countries is predicted to be 500 times that in Europe. The number of people in the poorest countries most vulnerable to hunger is predicted by Oxfam International to increase by 20% in 2050. And many of the major killers affecting developing countries, such as malaria, diarrhoeal illnesses, malnutrition and dengue, are highly sensitive to climate change, which would place a further disproportionate burden on poorer nations.

Most disturbingly, countries with weaker health infrastructure – generally situated in the developing world – will be the least able to copewith the effects of climate change. The world’s poorest regions don’t yet have the technical, economic, or scientific capacity to prepare or adapt.

Predictably, those most vulnerable to climate change are not those who contribute most to it. China, the US, and the European Union combined have contributed more than half the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions in the last few centuries. By contrast, and unfairly, countries that contributed the least carbon emissions (measured in per capita emissions of carbon dioxide) include many African nations and small Pacific islands – exactly those countries which will be least prepared and most affected by climate change.

Here’s Why Climate Change Will Increase Deaths by Suicide
by Francis Vergunst, Helen Louise Berry & Massimiliano Orri




Spikes during heat waves

It has been known for a long time that suicide rates spike during heat waves. Hotter weather has been linked with higher rates of hospital admissions for self-harmsuicide and violent suicides, as well as increases in population-level psychological distress, particularly in combination with high humidity.



“While speculative, perhaps the most promising mechanism to link suicide with high temperatures is a psychological one. High temperatures have been found to lead individuals to behave in a more disinhibited, aggressive and violent manner, which might in turn result in an increased propensity for suicidal acts.”


Disease, water shortages, conflict and war






The Broken Ladder
by Keith Payne
pp. 3-4 (see here)

[W]hen the level of inequality becomes too large to ignore, everyone starts acting strange.



PP. 119-120 (see here)

But how can something as abstract as inequality or social comparisons cause something as physical as health? Our emergency rooms are not filled with people dropping dead from acute cases of inequality. No, the pathways linking inequality to health can be traced through specific maladies, especially heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and health problems stemming from obesity. Abstract ideas that start as macroeconomic policies and social relationships somehow get expressed in the functioning of our cells.

To understand how that expression happens, we have to first realize that people from different walks of life die different kinds of deaths, in part because they live different kinds of lives. We saw in Chapter 2 that people in more unequal states and countries have poor outcomes on many health measures, including violence, infant mortality, obesity and diabetes, mental illness, and more. In Chapter 3 we learned that inequality leads people to take greater risks, and uncertain futures lead people to take an impulsive, live fast, die young approach to life. There are clear connections between the temptation to enjoy immediate pleasures versus denying oneself for the benefit of long-term health. We saw, for example, that inequality was linked to risky behaviors. In places with extreme inequality, people are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, more likely to have unsafe sex, and so on. Other research suggests that living in a high-inequality state increases people’s likelihood of smoking, eating too much, and exercising too little.

10 thoughts on “Inequality in the Anthropocene

  1. If I were a doctor looking for what all of these “patients” have in common so I could treat this “plague” I would consider two sources: Capitalism and human consciousness. The first could possibly be transformed though if the second cause is in fact a cause and is in fact flawed, it may be impossible to change the first sufficiently to save the patient.
    But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.

  2. “Abstract ideas that start as macroeconomic policies and social relationships somehow get expressed in the functioning of our cells.”

    Is this a reason why you emphasize metonymy and the way rhetoric often outlives its expedient uses? I guess that’s a mostly unrecognized field of study; even Chomsky barely grazes the surface and I think his propaganda model would be a lot stronger if he allowed more cross talk between his linguistic and political brains. But being a cranky essentialist who writes about politics can easily be a bad trip ( witness Camille Paglia’s recent career ).

    • I’m glad you pulled out that quote. That is Lewis Hyde’s point in talking about metonymy, in how patterns of mind are embodied. A related point is made by Julian Jaynes which touches upon metaphor and rhetoric.

      It’s within the body-mind that the social order becomes entrenched within the moral imagination. Of course, none of this is a rational process. And so it the survival of memes is irrelevant its expedient uses.

      I’m not sure the exact reason Chomsky has separated those aspects, other than it’s yet another expression of how divided is our entire society. And I argue that goes down to the rigid boundaries of egoic consciousness itself. To not be an essentialist has been difficult because the status quo requires essentialism.

      That puts Chomsky in a perplexing position where simultaneously, having been personally funded by the Pentagon at MIT, he spent his life working within the heart of the establishment and, in a separate part of his life, tried to challenge that establishment. He could only accomplish this contortion by become mild version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

      What has happened to Camille Paglia’s recent career?

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