Edifice in NOEMA
"The Linked Environmental Future of the U.S. and China" by Roman Shemakov
After spending a month in the Taklamakan Desert and being enamored by the 48-hour trains, dust storms, and miles of solar panels, I wrote this piece about the geochemical, infrastructural, and political binds that the U.S. and China are intimately enmeshed in. While stuck at a checkpoint in Kashgar, the security guards were flipping channels, alternating between news on local desertification efforts and the latest trending music flicks, terrified of missing updates on either.
This scene deserved to be memorialized forever!
French philosopher, Bruno Latour, tried to do just that. In 2020, he curated the Taipei Art Biennial titled “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet.” The message of the exhibition was simple, politics has gotten in the way of earnestly engaging with the planet on Gaia’s terms.
For Latour, and his decades-long philosophical project, the earth needs to be re-enchanted because it has been alienated from us by international capital. According to him, climate change, migration, and shifting geopolitical alliances have challenged traditional nation-state boundaries. Now we need a new ways of understanding territoriality.
“The question no longer concerns different visions of the same planet, but the composition and shape of several planets in conflict with one another,” said Latour.
How is ExxonMobile’s vision of the planet different from that of the World Resource Institute? More importantly, who cares?
Latour is wrong; you and I do live on the same planet. In all likelihood, his liberal panpsychism is the root of the problem. Either way you slice the financial and cultural divergence, the planet doesn’t care.
The following is a brief excerpt from the piece in Noema.
In the early 2010s, researchers compared two atmospheric rivers that were practically identical in temperature and water content. But one contained dust from the Taklamakan Desert that it had picked up after a sandstorm and carried across the Pacific. It released almost 40% more water — a difference of 1.5 million acre-feet of water, more than in the entirety of California’s largest water reservoir — than the one that had no desert dust.
In order for clouds to drop rain, water particles must coagulate and ice over. The icing can be accelerated with certain minerals, like the artificial silver iodide used for cloud seeding. In 2013, scientists discovered a group of minerals called potassium feldspars were natural cloud seeders; their crystal structure offers an extremely convenient scaffolding for water molecules to bind to. While K-feldspars, as they are known, make up a tiny proportion of dust on a global scale, they are abundant in the Taklamakan. The desert — “Place of No Return” in the local folk history — is encircled by the Kunlun, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges, which formed a reserve of finely ground dust with nowhere to go but north, toward the Siberian jet stream. More than 400 million tons of sand from the Taklamakan and other Asian deserts are blown over the Pacific every year.
Perhaps even more importantly, the Taklamakan dust that ends up in the American West carries “hitchhikers” — desert microbes like bacteria whose biological structure is designed to survive in the hot desert and also protect them on a winding journey across the Pacific. Dust also can carry viruses, which (unlike bacteria) are often protected by a solid protein casing, a lattice figure of alternating positive and negative charges that water molecules easily latch onto.
Similar winds bring sand from the Sahara to feed the Amazon rainforest and from the Mojave to the Colorado Plateau. Every day, minerals and microorganisms journey across the planet, wafted aloft into the atmosphere among the clouds, maintaining vast and elaborate planetary relationships. These winds have shaped the rise and fall of empires and influenced pivotal political developments, all unbeknownst to humans.
In recent decades, atmospheric wind connections between the U.S. and China have shifted considerably. The frequency of dust storms in northern China has decreased, partly due to China’s Great Green Wall initiative that aims to plant millions of acres of forest to hold back the desert. Taklamakan dust is also not as effective in the presence of air pollution, which has increased significantly along the U.S. West Coast and throughout northern China.
This particular planetary relationship between sand and rain began more than 25 million years ago, during the Oligocene Era’s tectonic uplift of the Tibetan-Pamir Plateau, which enclosed the area that became the Taklamakan Desert. This geochemistry does not have political borders or allegiances. Simultaneously, our anthropogenic world of international relations is agnostic to these geological epochs, which to its detriment misses something fundamental in the distinction between “geopolitics” and “politics.” The drying of cities such as Phoenix and San Diego, for example, is linked to the anti-desertification measures in Kashgar, one of China’s westernmost cities. Planting more trees there, paradoxically, could mean less rainfall halfway across the world.
The planet was never the problem. The “problem” was always technology.
A much more brilliant and forward thinking philosopher on the issue is Lukáš Likavčan, most recently in his essay Deep Politics.
Ecological normativity explains what deep politics is and how it relates to political ecology: it is not an extension of politics as we know it, politics as the public negotiation of values, to the sphere of ecology, but a deduction of a hidden layer of politics-to-come from ecology, with its own laws, struggles, and actors.
The imperative of ecological normativity, then, is clearly not to “follow nature,” but to pursue species-specific normative projects (in ethical and political domains, for example) without running into sharp conflict with the older layers of normativity. Returning to the concept of verticality at the beginning of this essay, the “deep” in “deep politics” indicates that the realm of normativity is modelled on geology as a layered topology, where each new layer extends and even overcomes older layers.
Older layers are conditioned by newer layers, which thus remain constrained (but not fully determined) by older layers (for example, the thermodynamic boundaries imposed on artificial metabolism). That gives the agents in the most recent layers a maneuvering space that is surprizingly generous, even allowing for interventions at the planetary scale usually referred to as “geoengineering.” The ecological normativity of deep politics implies that the political situation of climate crisis that we are witnessing is a struggle over the chemical composition of the atmosphere, not over the discursive composition of the noosphere.
It also instructs us to judge technology– understood as exosomatic instruments, following mathematician Alfred Lotka–not through alignments between the essence of technology and the environment in which it is deployed, but through strategies for production and reproduction of the viable environmental conditions of the artificial metabolism already taking place. As Georgescu-Roegen wrote, “Man’s existence is now irrevocably tied to the use of exosomatic instruments and hence to the use of natural resources just as it is tied to the use of his lungs and of air in breathing…”
Interesting article in Noema. You're a desert expert now. A Ukrainian Paul Atreides.