Image by Mike Newbry .
British Columbia, Canada is my home and once again, it’s burning. More than 100 fires were burning across the province as B.C. declared a state of emergency.
Across the border, Washington and Oregon are burning too as wildfires spread through the American West. Across the Atlantic, wildfires have swept through France, Spain, Greece, Croatia and Germany.
And despite all that, so much mainstream discussion about climate change is inadequate. A whole lot of carbon talk while barely discussing power. And if we want to understand the power which results in a burning planet, eventually we have to talk about white supremacy.
White supremacy is not merely the belief that one race is superior to another. It is a system of power that determines whose relationship to land matters, whose knowledge counts, what land is for, who has the right to extract from it and whose lives and communities can be sacrificed to absorb the consequences. It is the logic that makes it possible for the prosperity of some to depend on the dispossession, exploitation and suffering of others
Empire’s big trick was that the benefit could remain at the centre while the consequence was pushed outward.
Land could be taken somewhere else ,forests could be cut somewhere else ,water could be poisoned somewhere else, pollution could be somewhere else.The people living with those consequences could be Indigenous, African, colonized, racialized, poor. Their lands could become sacrifice zones so that somewhere else could experience itself as prosperous.
This arrangement is made morally possible because white supremacy had already established that some lives matter less than others and so sacrifice zones became part of its architecture.
Climate Change Destroys the Possibility of Elsewhere
Climate change is exposing the physical limits of white supremacy’s arrangement because the climate doesn’t obey the same geographical trick
There is NO ELSEWHERE and the sacrifice zone is now planetary
Because carbon does not stay above the community that produced it and heat and smoke does not recognize any kind of borders.
Fire moves through Crown land, private property, Indigenous territory, vineyards, forests, suburbs and resort towns without recognizing the distinctions humans placed between them
The system could once place the mine and poisoned river somewhere else and the people made sick by extraction somewhere else.It could even place the consequences in another time with future generations becoming another kind of sacrifice zone.
Climate change is collapsing both arrangements and a world built around extracting benefits while displacing consequences has finally encountered a consequence that cannot be permanently displaced.
There is nowhere outside the system where the damage can be sent forever because the atmosphere has no colony.
The Morality That Created the Crisis Still Defines the Response
And this is the part that should be far more disturbing than it apparently is.
Even as the idea of elsewhere collapses, the morality that created it remains in charge and defines the response
We still protect growth, extraction and profitability first and ask forests, communities and the climate to “adapt”.
Under white supremacy’s logic European knowledge was elevated as science whilst Indigenous knowledge was dismissed folklore or superstition. Corporate extraction gets framed as economic development yet living within ecological limits is treated as backwardness
So everything is expected to adjust around the idea that growth is “reasonable” and extraction is “ necessary “ . We just have to learn to live with smoke and become resilient, as do the forests. Government needs better evacuation plans and cities just need to hunker down and prepare for heat. In other words, we all just need to adapt around the economy but it doesn’t need to answer for what it’s done to the world
And this is why white supremacy has to be understood as larger than racism alone. It normalized a world in which someone else could always be made to pay. Overt racism became less publicly acceptable but the deeper arrangement remains: prosperity for some can still depend on costs being displaced onto other people and their lands
And this is the connection that too many are still reluctant to make and yet is most crucial: We continue allowing the morality that invented the sacrifice zone to define what counts as reasonable
Once we make that connection, climate change stops being merely an environmental problem that can be solved by buying an electric car or carrying a reusable cup . It becomes a question of power: who has historically been permitted to take and who has been forced to live with what is left?
And that same hierarchy is visible after the fire begins as some people leave for a second home while others sleep in evacuation centres. The consequences remain radically unequal because wealth still purchases mobility, insurance, air filtration, political attention and another place to sleep.
Communities with the least responsibility for the climate crisis often remain among those least protected from it. Some communities have enormous political influence when they demand protection while others have spent decades asking governments for basic infrastructure.
And Indigenous communities are repeatedly placed in the grotesque position of watching governments struggle with landscapes their ancestors knew how to care for, while being invited back into the conversation only after the dominant system has failed.
Long before climate change became an annual emergency, Indigenous peoples across this continent were managing landscapes through sophisticated systems of stewardship, including cultural and prescribed burning
Colonial governments arrived and they criminalized and dismissed many of the practices that had maintained those landscapes.
This is one of the central absurdities of colonialism and one of white supremacy’s most enduring habits: suppress systems of land stewardship because you consider the people who created them inferior, replace them with your own and then confront a wildfire crisis intensified by an extractive economy while describing it as simply as a natural disaster.
White supremacy teaches distrust of the people with the knowledge to live differently, breaks human relationship with the land and then appoints itself the authority on how to repair it. Until we confront white supremacy as the logic that made domination look like responsible governance, we will remain trapped inside the burning world it built.
