Black Earth(137)

The Green Revolution, perhaps the one development that most distinguishes our world from Hitler’s, might be reaching its limits. This is not so much because there are too many people on earth, but because more of the people on earth demand ever larger and more secure supplies of food. World grain production per capita peaked in the 1980s. In 2003, China, the world’s most populous country, became a net importer of grain. In the twenty-first century, world grain stocks have never exceeded more than a few months’ supply. During the hot summer and droughts of 2008, fires in fields led major food suppliers to cease exports altogether, and food riots broke out in Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. In 2010, the prices of agricultural commodities spiked again, leading to protests, revolution, ethnic cleansing, and revolution in the Middle East.

Though the world is not likely to run out of food as such, richer societies may again become concerned about future supplies. Their elites could find themselves once again facing choices about how to define the relationship between politics and science. As Hitler demonstrated, merging the two opens the way to ideology that can seem to both explain and resolve the sense of panic. In a scenario of mass killing that resembled the Holocaust, leaders of a developed country might follow or induce panic about future shortages and act preemptively, specifying a human group as the source of an ecological problem, destroying other states by design or by accident. There need not be any compelling reason for concern about life and death, as the Nazi example shows, only a momentary conviction that dramatic action is needed to preserve a way of life.

It seems reasonable to worry that the second sense of the term Lebensraum, seeing other people’s land as habitat, is latent. In much of the world, the dominant sense of time is coming to resemble, in some respects, the catastrophism of Hitler’s era. During the second half of the twentieth century—the decades of the Green Revolution—the future appeared as a gift that was on the way. The dueling ideologies of capitalism and communism accepted the future as their realm of competition and promised a coming bounty. In the plans of government agencies, the plotlines of novels, and the drawings of children, the future was resplendent in anticipation. This sensibility seems to have disappeared. In high culture the future now clings to us, heavy with complications and crises, dense with dilemmas and disappointments. In vernacular media—films, video games, and graphic novels—the future is presented as post-catastrophic. Nature has taken some revenge that makes conventional politics seem irrelevant, reducing society to struggle and rescue. The earth’s surface grows wild, humans go feral, and anything is possible.

Hitler the thinker was wrong that politics and science are the same thing. Hitler the politician was right that conflating them creates a rapturous sense of catastrophic time and thus the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural, and demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore. A sound policy for our world, then, would be one that keeps the fear of planetary catastrophe as far away as possible. This means accepting the autonomy of science from politics, and making the political choice to support the pertinent kinds of science that will allow conventional politics to proceed.

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The planet is changing in ways that might make Hitlerian descriptions of life, space, and time more plausible. The expected increase of average global temperatures by four degrees Celsius this century would transform human life on much of the globe. Climate change is unpredictable, which exacerbates the problem. Present trends can mislead, since feedback effects await. If ice sheets collapse, heat from the sun will be absorbed by seawater rather than reflected back into space. If the Siberian tundra melts, methane will rise from the earth, trapping heat in the atmosphere. If the Amazon basin is stripped of jungle, it will release a massive pulse of carbon dioxide. Global processes are always experienced locally, and local factors can either restrain or amplify them. The coasts are likely to flood, but where and when is impossible to say. Half of the world’s cities are threatened, but which one will be lost first cannot be known. Its end will not come in one huge wave, but after countless cumulative breaches. No individual storm will be subject to prediction more than a few days in advance. Each will be unique, and yet each will belong to a cumulative trend.

Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms or relentless droughts will jar expectations about the security of basic resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated during the Great Depression, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can effect the conflations Hitler pioneered: between nature and politics, between ecosystem and household, between need and desire. A global problem that seems otherwise insoluble can be blamed upon a specific group of human beings.