Capital at the Brink: Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism

3. Neoliberalism, Environmentality, and the Specter of Sajinda Khan

Two influential books were published in 1962: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Friedman’s policies of an unregulated market economy, economic individual rights, and a limited government have become the defining structure of planetary development for the course of the last thirty years. From the Reagan-Thatcher, then Clinton and Blair eras in the US and the UK; to the Hawke-Keating governments in Australia; to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile; to Yeltsin in Russia; to Xiaoping in China, to Chrétien and others in Canada; and to nations in Europe, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, neoliberalism is now the decisive planetary organizational force. The negative effects of the so-called Chicago School have been well documented. [1] Constituted as an exceptionalist, end-of-history paradigm, its radical rejection of critical alternatives ushered in what Žižek has aptly termed the “post-political” era. [2] On the other end of the spectrum, Rachel Carson’s text ushered in a new critical awareness of ecological concern. The publication of her indictment of pesticides had a galvanizing effect, helping to generate an environmental movement that has expanded from the focus on chemicals toxins to various disciplinary efforts in the academy, and the increasingly comprehensive field of “ecocriticism” in my own field of literary studies. For the past five decades, these two areas of human production and concern have developed in a relatively autonomous fashion, although many environmentalists have been making the connection between capitalist economic policies and the destruction of specific environments. During this time, capitalism proceeded apace without any serious consideration for ecological concerns; conservatives, moderates, and libertarians tended to eschew, if not condemn outright, leftist and liberal pleas for a more sustainable lifestyle (barring the kind of lip-service found in green-friendly corporate advertising campaigns and institutionalized forms of environmentalism such as recycling and shop-for-a-better world entrepreneurship). This ostrich-like relationship on the part of neoliberals to the clear scientific evidence of global warming has begun to radically change in recent years—signaling, against its own structural desire, the logical self-destructive end of its essential character, and perhaps the first glimpse of the coming of the end of a monocratic economic paradigm.

That change can be defined as a new awareness of ecological necessity or eco-empiricism, one that has begun to draw attention away from economic production and development towards matters of national security. This eco-empiricism, as we shall see, is not the form of empiricism typically deployed to mount a convincing argument. As I will develop in this essay, it should more properly be understood as a new type of reproductive machine, one energized by state, military, and scientific authorities buttressing their activities on the futural event of environmental catastrophe. I define this machine’s consumption of environmental catastrophe, specifically the event of climate change now under way, through the use of two critical theoretical terms: “environmentality” and “the Accidental” (which I will define in detail below). Environmentality, in turn, is the force now confronting the neoliberal State, and it is beginning to transform this reigning state formation into a new, more complex political apparatus: a formation I will call the Accidental State.

The stakes of unsustainable practices have changed since the publication of both Carson’s and Friedman’s works. The event of planetary climate change has globalized regional ecological concerns. Capitalism began, as I have argued elsewhere, in conjunction with an essential transformation in the human-ecological nexus. From its beginnings, it defined itself in opposition to Feudalism—specifically in terms of a “freeing” of the individual from the drudgery of the land (serfdom). The structure of this freedom was made possible through the national, then global, expansion of the enclosure movement, which turned a communal and a sustainable (subsistence) relationship to the environment into an entrepreneurial enterprise by privatizing land. Once ecosystems were privatized, nature became a source or “energy,” on object needing to be “improved” and thus challenged to produce a “high yield,” to use the old discourse of enclosure terminology). From its beginnings, Capitalism has depended for its existence and development on the establishment of an injurious relationship to nature. As individual entrepreneurship and national aspirations become more competitive, the relationship to nature becomes increasingly abusive. Planetary climate change is the logical self-destructive conclusion of this economic form of anthropocentric development, revealing what capitalism looks like on the brink.

In 1988, the United Nations organizations of the World Meteorological Association and the United National Environment Program created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a body of thousands of scientists voluntarily working to address the risk of planetary climate change in order to provide information for policymakers. In 2007, the United Nations (IPCC) released its fourth in a series of climate change reports. Entitled Climate Change 2007 and known officially as “The Fourth Assessment Report,” the document is the product of 500 authors and the scrutiny of 2000 expert reviewers, representing over 50 nations and over a dozen international organizations. It confirms that global warming is “unequivocal,” and that it is the result primarily of human activities, with the greatest output of greenhouse gases occurring between 1970 and 2004 (a 70 percent increase since pre-industrial times). [3] The report was produced, in part, to give concrete authoritative advice to the international body established to address global warming—the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (The Framework Convention is the same body that produced the “Kyoto Protocol” in 1997.) Many of its projections are grim: by 2020 some 75 to 250 million people in Africa will be “be exposed to increased water stress”; in some African countries agricultural yields maybe be reduced by 50 percent; “water security” will intensify in southern and eastern Australia and New Zealand and water resources will decrease in sections of Africa, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere; agricultural yields in Latin American will be compromised; by mid century the eastern Amazonia forest will become a savanna; and there will be a significant loss of biodiversity in key geographical regions (such as the Great Barrier Reef).

One would think that such a report would have a profound effect on the ruling administration of social matters, not to mention public consciousness (and here I speak mostly of the economic policies of the neoliberal North and West). Even so, the majority of governing political structures and social discourses continue to thwart real efforts to legislate new environmentally-friendly policies—in part a symptom of the end-of-history, post-political age. The rhetoric of the report itself makes this clear. Despite the fact that the report describes itself as a “remarkable achievement,” the product of “enthusiastic” and “dedicated” scientists devoted to providing scientific information to policy makers, it is also consciously framed by a series of enunciations emphasizing its apolitical nature—statements designed to alleviate any anxiety that the conclusions drawn and the suggestions made for policy makers might be contaminated by any particular political agenda. Moreover, the IPCC describes itself on its home page as an organization that produces information that is “policy-relevant” yet also “policy-neutral” and therefore “never policy-prescriptive.” [4] The standard scientific approach to such statements is to read them as non-political, in the sense of non-partisan—they are the result of the objective, and clearly important fact-oriented work of the scientist. The self-evident nature of the report means that it does not succumb to the limitations of any particular ideological vision of human ordering; it transcends all ideological agendas. The IPCC speaks to nations across the planet about the environmental crisis, now clearly visible as a worldwide phenomenon. It urges governments to work together. Academic theorizations of the political teach us to critique this apolitical emphasis. Such disclaimers, for instance, can be seen as reflecting a metaphysical neutrality that is ultimately too transcendental to speak to any particular nation, and any particular ecological problem (for instance, the problem of shore erosion in small islands in the Pacific and the problem of changing patterns in rainfall in North America cannot be handled in the same manner). Moreover, suggesting that “facts” have little to do with the business of prescribing changes to policy opens the door to the kind of hollow agreements such as the Kyoto Accord (which enabled wealthy nations in the north to continue their production of green-house gases unabated by “selling” their carbon credits to poor nations in the global south).

Such a pat reading, however, misses something crucial about the two-fold ideological character of our contemporary global occasion—an economic system that has brought the planet to the brink of an ecological shift—that generates a gap between knowledge and desire. The report should more precisely be read as symptomatic of a larger structural problem, namely the inability to touch on the political (as an authentic act that breaks through the limitations of an established mode of existence). The report wishes to be political (like an ineffective desire running idle), yet somehow is caught within a neoliberal logical economy that assumes it should not be political (the essence of the Friedman school of knowledge production). To use the early postmodern terminology of Baudrillard, the report ends up being another example of the meaningless simulacra of “civilized debate” about climate change that ultimately produces no real threat to the status quo, despite its clear description of the urgency of our ecological occasion. In other words, this “knowing” by the IPCC that the report should not be political, buttressed by the unexamined coupling of the empirical/fact-oriented sciences to the apolitical, is a sign of a particular ontological and epistemological enclosure that governs social reality today. This is not a criticism of the IPCC; it is symptomatic description of the modern era’s fear of the political.

In the modern era, however, one nation-state body can perhaps be openly politically engaged without having to deal with the stigma of being condemned as political. During George W. Bush’s second term in office (a time when the White House openly denied global climate change) the Pentagon began to openly show a concern for the planet’s environment. [5] In 2004, the Pentagon urged the White House to begin to seriously consider the effects of climate change. After the publication of the “Fourth Assessment Report” the Pentagon began to use the report as the basis for a necessary transformation of our political reality. In March 2007, the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College (SSI) held a conference on the topic “The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” and produced a “Colloquium Brief” that argued the need for a “coordinated strategic communication plan” to inform and explicitly direct “public awareness.” In 2008, the SSI published an edited volume of over four hundred pages entitled “Global Climate Change: National Security Implications.” [6] In July of 2007, the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA)—the Navy and the Marine Corp’s federally funded research center—released its first major publication directly focused on the environment: “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.” The publication not only establishes the environment as a threat to global security, but links climate change directly to terrorism—on the basis that increased stress on resources will increase conflict. On July 27, 2008, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) brought together 45 scientists, military strategists, policy experts, and business executives from Asia, South Asia, Europe, and North America to engage in a new type of military exercise: the Climate Change War Game. The exercise was supported by an extensive governmental, military, scientific, and business community, including the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, the Center for Naval Analysis, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, McKinsey Global Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, The Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Sustainability Institute, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. [7] Though it was not stated directly in the post-game analysis report, the goal of the game clearly was to convince the Department of Defense to take a new course of military action based upon the findings of the IPCC.

Such activity is becoming generalized. The highest authorities in the military and the Department of Defense have ramped up their military investment in climate change, producing, since 2007, a flurry of reports designed to convince state authorities and global economic organizations that they need to take the troubled ecological status of the earth seriously. [8] Moreover, the military has begun to work openly with environmental scientists to address the issue of climate change. In 2012, the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE, the key political science organization recognized by state and military authorities) held its 12^th annual National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment. The theme was “Environment and Security,” and, in addition to leading members of the scientific community, the conference highlighted presentations by Sherri Goodman (Executive Director of the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) Military Advisory Board), Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (President of the CNA’s Institute for Public Research), Rear Admiral David Titley (director of the Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change), Major General Muniruzzaman (President of Bangladesh’s Institute of Peace and Security Studies), Marcia McNutt (Director of the US Geological Survey), Nancy Sutley (Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality), Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti (Commander UK Maritime Force and the UK government’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy), and a host of others. In addition, key economic players such as the IMF and the World Bank now openly expressed their concern for climate change. In 2008, president of the World Bank Robert Zoellick stated that the world is one harvest away from a global catastrophe.

Nonetheless, this neomilitary activity has yet to crack through the simulacra of climate change “doubt” that currently engulfs the public arena and forestalls any real political change. Here it is important to recognize the isomorphic power of this arena, generated by its post-political essence: namely, the ability to entertain differential sources of information and points of view while still maintaining the status quo. Here, the argument that would presumably change the coordinates of existence (what would amount to a real political act, according to Jacques Rancière) is effectively reduced to a particular agenda recognized immediately as “specialist” and therefore untrustworthy and requiring critical suspicion of a kind that can only come from an unbiased, apolitical mind. The IPCC, for instance, must confront the extreme pressures put on its findings over the course of the last fifteen years by conservative politicians, fossil-fuel dependent corporations, and think tanks supported by oil companies such as the George C. Marshall Institute (whose scientists directly deny any scientific evidence of human-caused warming). To recall a few of the instances, in 1995 the Institute reported in the Wall Street Journal that a key scientist working for the IPCC deliberately cleansed uncertainties from his findings to make global warming appear more indisputable. The accusation was proven to be false, but the impression that the IPCC could not be trusted remained, which only further solidified the hegemony of the fiction that global warming may be a hoax. [9] Less conservative media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC indirectly add fire to this fiction in and through their tendency to report on the IPCC almost only when a “controversy” arises: e.g., the “Climategate” scandal of 2009, when over a thousand emails from the IPCC’s affiliate the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University were illegally obtained by anti-climate change advocates. The statements made by researchers in the emails were taken out of context and used to “prove” that IPCC scientists were falsifying information to support their claims. [10] Again, the IPCC was vindicated in these same media outlets, but the mistrust for its scientists was only magnified. This discursive play of controversy was enhanced by views from alternative, leftist media sources—with the same result. Each new vindication of the IPCC only generates more “smoking guns,” more suspicion, and consequently more “dialogue” that further obscures any and all ability to make distinctions. The introduction of empirical evidence into this dialogic play, therefore, is absolutely innocuous. At best, such an approach can only support the ineffectual need to achieve an agreeable “consensus,” in which all points of view are given equal merit, ensuring that the overarching needs of the very market forces that threaten environments continue unchecked.

Thus the most resistant and clear-headed empiricist representation—even when generated by a vast apparatus of experts—actively participates in the pacifying field of representation that maintains the framework of existing political practices. More to the point, this interminably protracted diversification of “opinions” should be thought properly against the horizon of capitalist neoliberal globality that creates its conditions of possibility. Despite the fact that each representation is weighted with significance, in the multi-viewpoint economy of neoliberal democracy, in which each representation is “given its share,” rationality and empiricism can only ensure that this agitation is maintained. The continual production of agitation becomes an end in itself, transforming even the emancipatory agency that presumably comes from criticism and skepticism into the essential subsidizing force of existing relations. Hence, a narrative that would directly break through this protraction—such as the empirical Real of global warming that cannot be fully admitted in a profit-oriented structural economy—is entirely deprived of any performative force. Empiricism is crippled by its own indisputable ontic evidence, which is a key reason why this approach does not even come close to uncovering the ontological ground that constitutes the preset stage of this theatricalized debate.

It should be noted that this post-Cold War militarization of ecology links security to environmental matters at the global level, directly in and through the foregrounding of insecurity (planetary climate change, for instance, is frequently described as the successor to the insecurities of post-9/11 terrorism). The regulatory mechanisms of this militarized environmentalism operate according to the deployment of global environmental catastrophe: rising sea levels that will effect all national borders; the increasing stress put on border control by the movement of millions of “climate change refugees”; shifting weather patterns that will lead to drought and subsequent water and food insecurity; etc. The staged activity of this insecurity has begun to overshadow the many local/regional ecological concerns that, for years, defined the environmental movement and its struggles. Consequently, the new “environmentalism” beginning to define the political field of the early twenty-first century (once that field is politicized again), is a militarized environmentalism, one that overlooks the complexities of local concerns, not to mention the philosophical work of generating new conceptual human-nature relations.

A more critical strategy might begin to shed light on the planet’s various actors occluded by this globality and its illuminated terrain. For instance, very little media attention was given to a different form of environmental activism that uncannily paralleled the two decade-long operations of the IPCC. For instance, very little media attention was given to a different form of environmental activism that uncannily paralleled the two decade-long operations of the IPCC. It was uncanny because it directly conflicted with the precise manner in which the concerns of the IPCC became actualized as policy and substantially recast within the neoliberal paradigm (the Kyoto accord and carbon trading are the prime examples). The primary intermediary of this activism was a woman by the name of Sajida Khan, a South African Indian Muslim and political activist who spent the majority of her life in a struggle for a livable and ecologically-sound habitation. Khan fought first against the racial injustices of apartheid, then against the post-apartheid ecological climate policies of the Kyoto accord that paradoxically ensured that a toxic landfill would continue to fully function literally across the street from her house in Durban, South Africa. Known as the Bisasar Road landfill, it is South Africa’s largest formal garbage dump, which was created by apartheid bureaucrats in 1980 on the site of what was formerly a nature reserve in a mixed-race neighborhood. The Bisasar Road site is one of the most active landfills. It substantially exceeds the limits of waste emissions considered to be hazardous: “hydrogen chloride by 50%, cadmium by 200%, and lead by more than 1000%.” [11] Sewage slug is dumped at the site on a daily level—a direct violation of South Africa’s water law, which requires that sewage be transported and disposed of so as not to cause a hazard. [12] The decomposition of the landfill’s waste produces heavy concentrations of methane, benzene, toluene, trichloroethylene, and formaldehyde. Each of these poses both short-term and long-term problems. Benzene, for instance, causes dizziness, tremors, confusion, unconsciousness, and death if experienced in a high enough dose. Long-term exposure to high levels of benzene in the air, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, can cause leukemia. Women in particular who live near landfills have a four-fold increased susceptibility to cancer (Khan herself died of cancer in 2007). [13] A survey found that seven out of ten households in the area reported cases of tumors. The government promised to close the dump in 1987, but it continues to function to this day.

In 2002, a team from the World Bank met with Durban officials and, under the official carbon-trading credits system of the Kyoto accord, convinced local officials to keep the landfill open an additional 7 to 20 years. Carbon trading is one of the “realistic solutions” to climate change generated by global capitalism (the idea was written into the accord by the United States, before it backed out from signing the agreement). It essentially turns ecological protection into eco-prostitution. The carbon-trading credits systems functions as follows: The Kyoto accord requires that nations across the planet reduce a certain percentage of their carbon output. It recognizes at the same time that developing countries do not necessarily have the wealth and infrastructural means to transform their environmental practices to meet these reductions. Thus the burden of ecological change is supposedly put on the wealthy nation (which typically produces more CO2s/greenhouse gases). However, if a wealthy nation does not want to meet this requirement it can buy “carbon credit” from a less wealthy nation by helping that nation reduce its greenhouse gas production. This has all the appearance of colonization turned on its head, with a colonial authority deploying “green” standards of existence it refuses to meet at home on its peripheral colonies. This is why the Bisasar Road landfill is so “productive” to keep open. The toxins the landfill produces are a “clean development mechanism”: the methane it radiates can be reclaimed so as to produce electricity, which is a more “environmentally sound” method than, say, coal (which produces greenhouse gases). For this reason, nations in the north financially support the Bisasar methane-to-electricity project because of its reduction of greenhouse emissions. In this way a northern nation can continue its high level of greenhouse gas production at home, and still meet the required percentage of reduction set by the Kyoto accord by buying carbon “credit” from abroad.

Sajita Khan’s struggle for a livable inhabitancy is symptomatic of a fundamental limitation that rules in today’s world of geopolitics—a framework that I define according to an organizational machine that I refer to as “environmentality.” “Environmentality,” like Foucault’s governmentality, refers to the structural administration of environmental matters by state organizations, the neomilitary machine, and corporate-global actors. The term is designed to show the indissoluble relation to the increasing control of public life by military modes of thought and structures of existence. Environmentality thus names the generation of scientific and state environmental authorities within militarized paradigm, in turn buttressed by the machine of neoliberal economic globalization. The complex and unpredictable flow of multinational and transnational corporate and speculative capital thus works in tandem, not against, this ecological war machine. The two are interrelated, and can be defined in part as the return of a certain coloniality that controls the flow of energy resources, creating monumental inequalities between the nations of the North and the West over the South and near East, and unforeseen financial and ecological impoverishments in all countries.

In this framework, both universalizing forces of apolitical disinterest and particular forces of brutal, local essentialism work in tandem and define the terrain of human possibility. This terrain is divided geographically. Universalizing forces predominate in the north and west—areas presumed to exist in the advanced state of the “end of history,” where wars and essentialist political struggles have supposedly disappeared. In these regions, human subjectivity is not constituted in terms of ecological habitations but along the complex and paradoxical lines of a sovereignty that controls and encloses but also transcends all habitations. This sovereign subjectivity is fluid and mobile, and not tied to any particular identity (racial, ethnic, etc.). In this sense it is “developed” and “exceptionalist.” It is the offspring of the imperial subject, yet unlike the essentialist identity of its near ancestor, its adaptable identity is “speculative” (in a primarily economic sense). Hence, it is also subject to the uncertainties of a global geopolitical economy. In opposition stands the subject of developing countries. This form of subjectivity is identified (by the exceptionalist subject) in terms of its passionate and essentialist connection to a particular habitation or ecosystem. This subjectivity remains mired in the colonial and postcolonial history and political struggle that marks underdeveloped regions (ethnic identities associated with specific geographical regions; indigenous populations underrepresented by the States that surround them; racial identities associated with particular neighborhoods). The neighborhood of Bisasar, for instance, has its origins in the racist and military practices of Apartheid—in an imperial, essentialist conception of the land based on the discourse of blood-and-soil politics that marks so much of twentieth-century world affairs. The tendency of planetary organizations to supersede the needs of local differences, coupled with the instability generated by the speculative logic of late capital only supports the increase of these essentialist claims: the blood-and-soil position thus arises directly in relation to the fluidity of exceptionalist, apolitical forces. They are two sides of the same coin.

The complexities of these forces need to be taken into account when analyzing the various and growing struggles for inhabitancy in our current historical occasion, such as Khan’s. For starters, we should be careful not to condemn the impact of the Kyoto accord on the Bisasar landfill as a sign of government hypocrisy (the typical libertarian stance). Instead, we need to diagnose it as symptom of the founding foreclosure that defines today’s new radical neoliberalism—a neoliberalism defined less by economic necessity than by the empirical necessity of national security (in the ecological forms of “energy security,” “food security,” and “water security”). This foreclosure is difficult to uncover, for it is mystified in the way we (mis)perceive reality in terms of the tension outlined above: between “global” administrative orders (that present themselves as disinterested and non-partisan) and the “local” desires of particular communities and individuals (who are seen as fully enmeshed in their special concerns and interests, and therefore less able to intervene “objectively” in matters of policy). The carbon-trading system is an attempt to keep the struggle for environmental change literally off the ground, by overlooking the antagonistic “essence” of this “ground” in principle. Being “off the ground” is constituted as liberatory (postmodern and post-political). It is made possible by the idea of being “on the ground,” which is deployed as a disease of the historically arrested. It is one of the key ways that an erasure of an alternative to either the essentialist or the speculative conception of geography is inscribed into the very system of globality in which the Kyoto agreement participates. It is also the same globality to which many environmentalists unwittingly subscribe.

In addition, underdeveloped national administrations more often than not fully support their transnational counterparts in maintaining this global framework. South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism’s climate change “response strategy” states that “clean development mechanisms” (such as the Bisasar landfill) present “a range of commercial opportunities” and an “important source of foreign direct investment.” [14] What this unabashed neoliberal calculus of human lives reveals—in its direct, even ruthless disrespect for the “other”—is a waning of postmodern political correctness in favor of a neoimperial structure of marginalization that feels no need to give the slightest lip service to the struggles of disenfranchised peoples. My key claim here is that this neoimperial structure functions by mobilizing a fear and orchestrating a patent dismissal of any and all attempts to conceptualize and actualize a philosophy of inhabitancy—that is, a realization of the human (and the nonhuman) from the standpoint of a fundamental right to a habitation. Instead, human subjects are either formed as deputies and attendants in relation to what might be called “above-surface” structures—corporate transnational agencies, global governance bodies, international judicial systems—or they are fashioned as dispensable, nonessential remainders stripped of all rights and liberties, capable of being displaced whenever the fluctuations of market forces or the new policies of an administrative order deem it necessary.

These complex forces manifest themselves in terms of a generalized war against land that involves the coconstitutions of 1) a no-man’s land and landless peoples, 2) a new understanding of geography based on a militarized “omni-surveillance,” and 3) new conception of nature. The last of these involved the reconceptualization of nature in terms of “energy,” which in the 21^st century is grounded in the military problematic as “energy security.” “Energy security,” which was always operative in a mode that is more properly defined as colonial during the 17^th to the 20^th centuries, is now in the process of reaching its logical conclusion, in the sense of its uttermost fulfillment on a global scale. The military ecological maneuvers listed above reflect this reconstellation of nature within the discourse of energy security. Another sign is the recent concern for environmental causes on the part of neoconservatives in the US—organizations such as the Green Patriots and the Set America Free Coalition that wish to reterritorialize entire ecosystems in terms of their potential as non-petroleum sources of energy. Robert Zubrin’s 2007 book Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil—in which he makes the case for essentially the total enclosure of practically all third-world agricultural communities in order for the first world to make the transition to alcohol-based fuels—is exemplary in this aspect. Zubrin’s argument is based on the fact that the crop base for producing methanol includes “all plants, without exception”: “Not only the edible and inedible parts of commercial crops, but weeds, wild jungle underbush, trees, grasses, fallen leaves and branches, water lilies, swamp and river plants, seaweed, and algae, can all be used to produce methanol…. By switching to alcohol we could quadruple our purchases of third world agricultural goods…. A huge engine for world development would thus be created.” [15] Thus the various critical signifiers that disclose the truth of the many threats to the planet’s ecosystem are being overwritten and erased by the single conservative allotrope “US Energy Security.” Here, the land and its inhabitants—the human and the non-human—come to presence in the neoliberal paradigm as a military problem. Reorganized in this new stratocracy, environmental activism is thus co-opted and managed in an environmentality that reigns over human and nonhuman existence, with little concern for the specifics of ecological habitations and their nonhuman and human inhabitants.

This, finally, leads me to central organizational mechanism that enable the threefold combination of neoliberalism, the military machine, and the environment—a mechanism I would like to identify with the critical conceptual name of “the Accidental.” The Accidental is a term that combines Kant’s concept of the transcendental and Paul Virilio’s “accidental thesis.” In his work on ecology, Virilio has identified a much longer historical relation between the military and ecological concerns. Part of the military’s approach to ecological concerns relates to late modernity’s mandate to expose and fully explain the totality of existence:

Virilio’s thesis is that this drive to “overexpose” for purposes of total control, technological manipulation, and economic development (typified by the high-yield demand of economic liberalization and the subsequent military need to secure these developed environments) creates a world of increasingly dangerous and globally-consequential accidents: from flight disasters to Chernobyl to the unexpected outcomes of the genetic manipulation of crops. Virilio’s name for this is “the accident thesis.” [17] It characterizes how increased pressure to overcome obstacles to the production of high-yields through technological manipulation creates an increased potential for accidents to occur. In a “totally discovered and overexposed habitat”—an asphyxiating version of “the end of history”—the potential for transcendence disappears and is replaced by the different form of a “breakage of/from the system”: the accident. Developing this idea, I argue that transcendence from the disciplinary confines of context becomes increasingly impossible; it is replaced by acid-ence—forms of momentary breakdown that only occur within and because of the system, not breakdowns that radically open a free space for the potential to restructure the system. It is in and through the Accidental that environments are militarized.

To give an example of full global enclosure and exposure, and the erasure of any potential to transcend context: the colonization of the environment for military purposes reaches its full development in the 20^th century, even before the environment became an issue in public consciousness with the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring. It was during the post WWII Cold War nuclear experiments by the US military industrial complex that ecology became a field of study in the university system. The Atomic Energy Commission created the field of “radiation ecology,” which began with the study of effects of militarized radioactivity on the environment around the Pacific island of Bikini Atoll. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey so powerfully documents, the establishment of this field began with the hundreds of nuclear tests conducted in what was known as the “Pacific Proving Grounds.” To name two: the H-Bomb Mike was dropped in 1952 and blew the island of Eugelab out of existence. According to DeLoughrey, at 10 megatons (700 times the explosive force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima), Mike’s radioactive fallout was measured in rain over Japan, in India, and in the US and Europe. Two years later, the next bomb dropped increased this yield to 15 megatons. A scientist working for the AEC declared in 1954 that after just two years of testing, that all humans on the planet now had “hot” strontium in their bones and teeth and “hot” iodine in their thyroid glands: “Nobody believed you could contaminate the world from one spot. It was like Columbus when no one believed the world was round.” In 1958, the US, UK, and USSR exploded nearly 100 nuclear weapons, leading to record levels of strontium-90 in American soil, wheat, and milk. Total control through targeting leads to the accident of total exposure and the impossibility for any human to transcend this contamination.

In this erasure of the transcendental in favor of the accidental, our access to ecology changes fundamentally. Instead of “ecology” or “environmentalism” we now have environmentality. In addition to the definition I’ve given this term above, we can now see that this discourse of environmentality combines 1) neoconservative efforts to pass legislation for the control of third world agricultural communities in key geographical regions across the planet; 2) the changing status of neoliberalism and its “concern” for the environment; and 3) the shift on the part of the State and its corporate supporters from a focus on the constitution of human subjects in terms of biopower to a focus on the environment as an ecopower that ultimately trumps human subjectivity (for instance, the attention paid by military and state actors to the coming catastrophe of climate change manifests itself most strongly in terms of the climate change refugee category—of the near-future migration of millions of people across the planet currently living in coastal regions and on island nations that will eventually disappear by 2050). The diversity operative in traditional liberalization is now giving way to a form of diversity evacuated of any political agency and cultural content (it does not matter which culture appears as the next accident—all cultures are equal and equally reduced as accidents, and are only accepted as such).

Manipulation can thus be addressed more critically (i.e. outside dominant theories of sovereignty) in terms of the lines being drawn between corporate/State flows of power and ecosystemic developments—namely the corporate, judicial, and legislative alliances being formed around the struggle for diminishing resources, and the impending shift to non-petroleum sources for global mass transportation and global mass consumption. Though the State is part of this shift, it and the cultural socius lag behind the direct activity of what should be understood properly as the developing Accidental State—a structure composed of environmental organizations, State and corporate officials, security institutes, centers for foreign and domestic policy, private companies, and the military.

We can extend Virilio’s work here by first drawing a firm connection between the accident, the environment, and what I have referred to elsewhere as the war on inhabitancy. The event of the Love Canal disaster in the US, which galvanized a specific environmental awareness and movement, is one example of an “accident” that irreparably damaged an environment and its inhabitants. But the accident is more firmly connected, even embedded now, in the planet’s ecosystems in the late enclosing age of postmodernity, as we can see in the overproduction and subsequent destruction of ecosystems for today’s high yield-oriented profit system. The capitalist technological manipulation of land that defined the Green Revolution in the Punjab is symptomatic of an “overexposing” of land that leads to the “accident” of excess salinity and waterlogging. This in turn leads to the “accident” of mass hunger and a global decrease in calorie intake. The push to monocrop by transnational corporations turns food into a commodity for sale on the international market. Monocropping eliminates the chances of a community to fall back on locally produced food and forces the community to pay for food produced elsewhere. When an “accidental” dip occurs in the market, agricultural workers’ pay drops and communities already underpaid find themselves in the position of having no money to buy food. The struggle to survive produces the “threat” of encroachment by these communities in forests and privatized farmland. This in turn requires the transformation of nature into “threatened” nature, which in term produces legislation that represents nature as a being in need of “environmental protection.” In the ontology of the accidental humans are constituted in terms of their ability, and consent, to “protect” the environment (in other words, securing the highest yield of energy). For bad subjects and the poorest of humans, especially those working in the worst possible conditions in agricultural communities in the third world, the shadow humans that make the north and the west possible, they are increasingly seen as a threat to the environment, and to this new environmentality. [18]

The massacre of Marichjhãpi in the Sundarbans of India is another example. In the aftermath of Partition, low-caste and impoverished refugees from the war, Dalites, moving from East Pakistan into India, were taken to locations outside of West Bengal. The refugees resettled in what were called Permanent Liability Camps that were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded. With the encouragement of the CPI(M) party (before it came to power in 1978), the refugees organized an escape and made their way toward the east in the hope of settling in the area of the Sundarbans. In a place where there had been no inhabitants before there were now thousands, almost overnight. Once the Leftist government came to power, however, they began to recast the refugees’ plight by transforming them from a people struggling to find a habitation into a “threat” to the Sundarban environment, which subsequently led to their forced eviction and massacre. This transformation was in part the responsibility of the party itself, which originally spoke on behalf of the refugees, but ultimately used them for gaining a broader support base. In the wake of these events the human and the nonhuman were posed as mutually-exclusive problems to a state caught within the accidental problematic, and when one problem entered the domain of the other the “solution” could only be a destructive one: the “accident” of encroachment and subsequent violent “accident” of forced eviction and massacre. These and similar events—environmental disaster and human excess—are now coproduced by the State within the ontology of the accidental. The result is that threatened environments unavoidably contribute to the endotic logic of closing humans off from their ability to inhabit the land.

This increase in the number of accidents (catastrophes) defines human culture and its environment at the level of its being in our current historical occasion and plays a role in the way our minds constitute Third World environments as objects of investigation and use. The foreclosure of encounters with anti-systemic phenomena brought about by the occasion of “overexposure” (the total enclosure of the heterogeneous being of nature as monocrop-commodity; the submerging of geographical differences and distances under the signifier “space” so as to transform it into an obstacle for technology to overcome in favor of “speed” and “immediacy”) repositions the appearance of the unexpected from the exterior to the interior. Hence the unexpected begins to appear as an internalized accident. It is paradoxically surprising but also expected. The foreclosed system of the Accidental puts people on the alert for accidents, generating a state of hyperactive awareness. The accident thus offers no transcendence from the system, and on this basis can be named the accidental. The accidental names a world in which events—the struggles of constituents and their environments that emerge in the media—can only appear in the form of accidents. It evacuates the political sphere of both national sovereignty and citizen sovereignty.

Thus a peculiar ontological understanding of the world rules relations between humanity and the environment today—made manifest by this glut of symbolic investiture in popularized eco-political polemics. This ontology makes the possibility of inhabitancy on our planet—for both humans and non-humans—increasingly untenable. The Accidental is thus the name for a specific status of humans and the environment. [19] It is the nature of the Accidental, to co-opt both the life struggles of poor communities and threatened habitats. It is highly mobile and freefloating, shifting incessantly in its chase for the next accident. It incites a certain form of heterogeneity, and in this sense is decentered and postmodern. It parallels the logic of the contemporary occasion of neoliberalism, variously called “post-Fordism,” “late capitalism,” “flexible accumulation,” “bare life,” “empire” after colonial imperialism, etc. As such it cannot be located within any classical notion of national sovereignty, though the nation is still retained as a part of the functioning of the accidental. But the accidental evacuates the political sphere of both national sovereignty and citizen sovereignty. A certain form of political conservatism still operates within this liberal structure, but this mainly functions in order to manipulate public opinion by directing it toward the next impending accident: it is a form of terrorism directed at all. What we are thus seeing is the coming of the end of neoliberalism as we know it. Friedman’s ideal form of human (non)political existence is being replaced by environmentality—a new form of human ontological existence that foregrounds the environment not as space for the development of new, non-anthropocentric relations and modes of production, but as a threatening space, as the space of catastrophic insecurity. In turn, this ontology is being administered through its co-constituent structure—the Accidental State—which has begun to replace former nation-state structures and transform the developmental economy of the neoliberal state.