Book description of The Long Heat by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton:
"The world is crossing the 1.5°C global warming limit, perhaps exceeding 2°C soon after. What is to be done when these boundaries, set by the Paris Agreement, have been passed? In the overshoot era, schemes proliferate for muscular adaptation or for new technologies to turn the heat down at a later date by removing CO2 from the air or blocking sunlight. Such technologies are by no means safe; they come with immense risks and provide an excuse for those who would prefer to avoid limiting emissions in the present. But do they also hold out some potential? Can the catastrophe be reversed, masked or simply adapted to once it is a fact? Or will any such roundabout measures simply make things worse?"
"We are in a state of proleptic mourning for the planet," Kyla Wazana Tompkins wrote. Her book is Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. I read it last year.
She says in Chapter 4:
"The photography that caught me posed natural objects in illuminated white light and made deities of them. It preserved them in time and against time forever. And I felt intuitively that this could only be about the deep feeling lying underneath and between us all, that our ecologies were in peril and the reality of that was something that could not yet be believed. ... I think that, on the one hand, the West's unconscious is preparing itself for a time when there may not be anything left and all we have is pictures of what those things were. ... But at the same time, because capitalism, that vampire machine, is always ahead of us ... [it's] a way of making sure that what we crave, because and before it is going to disappear, has even more of an elevated exchange value."
Chapter 4, "Rot." p. 134.
Tompkins mentions Sylvia Wynter's essay "Rethinking 'Aesthetics'," which describes aesthetics as an instruction for perceiving people and objects — especially in a context of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism — and thus how to classify people and what people produce. Structurally, people often withdraw aesthetics from the spaces where others will be left to wither or actively exterminated.
"And I, like many of us following behind the steps of the Black radical tradition — and here I am learning from Cedric Robinson, Rod Ferguson, Grace Hong, Eric Williams, and Sylvia Wynter — see capitalism as fundamentally intertwined with the sorting of humans, matter, objects, spaces, language, and nonhuman species into the social and animacy hierarchies and cross-species assemblages from which, in Neel Ahuja's terms, the idea of the human would be abstracted. ... I also want to be attentive to the idea that the taxonomizing of humans ... are not outside this history [of how Western social values are organized] but are in fact central to it — as the colonial history of science shows us."
Chapter 4, "Rot." p. 132.
Valuing, sorting...
I saved those passages a year ago, and I remember them today, reading Sarah Kendzior's new essay ("The Shutdown"). She's writing from Missouri during the longest full federal government shutdown ever.
"I’m old enough to remember seasons. The way colorful leaves crunched under my feet: the satisfying sound of the reliable march of time. Autumn leaves scattered like crumpled drafts of a chapter near completion. They were absorbed into the soil, and in a few months’ time, earth’s story would begin anew.
Green leaves on the ground are empty pages. They did not get the chance to dazzle and die. They were shut down, like Congress.
I look at the leaves and resent the stolen season: resent it like my generation’s stolen social security and stolen retirement and litany of impending thefts. Stolen country, stolen time. The taking tree.
I look at the leaves and wonder what could have been. I don’t wonder that about Congress. The answer is nothing. When you decide to be nothing, to do nothing, to change nothing, you become nothing. You take everything and you are nothing.
Congress takes bribes, they take vacations, they take offense — they take everything but the heat. They save that for us, so it can scramble our seasons and kill our trees. The heat makes leaves fall too early and ignites fear for our children’s future: This is as much as you will see, this is as far as you will go."
Stopping, taking...
Developing mutual aid: What do we want? What do we need? What new things can we perceive?
"We must reconsider what it is that we want and what it is that we need. Our perception must shift. Our value is not tied to our careers or our earnings. It is intrinsic to our very being. That feeling we carry, that inner-critic that tells us we aren’t good enough or we aren’t successful enough, that we’ll feel whole if only we get that raise, that promotion, that financial success, is the voice of abusive capitalism driving us to work harder, work more, to sacrifice more and more of ourselves. We must set aside our culture of self-service and band together with our neighbors and friends and families and create the kind of mutual aid that will weather whatever is to come and craft the framework that will deliver a better future beyond this abominable system."
The Game They Make Us Play: Capitalism as a Ticking Time-Bomb We're standing at the end of a disastrous cycle that has played out time and time again. Jared Yates Sexton, Dispatches From a Collapsing State, Nov 26, 2025
