Still, this narrative misses some important aspects of the crisis—especially its historical resonances. In the first place, the term “natural disaster” elides over the human agency in this or any other such event. We should take seriously Mike Davies’ observation that “natural disasters” are frequently driven by human calculation. The Victorians tended to look at the apocalyptic famines wracking their empires as markers of backwardness by stagnant societies indifferent to human suffering, not “holocausts” delivered by Europeans in the name of profit. Davies argues that the places most wracked by the introduction of market capitalism and imperialism—what we would now call the global “South”—evolved in ecologically vulnerable zones and relied on institutions that evolved from long experience to cope with such vulnerability. When these “traditional” institutions ran afoul of what was taken as “progress” the human toll was staggering. While not Ireland during the Black ’47 or India of 1877, Russia is precisely one of those civilizations built in an ecologically vulnerable zone—one in which drought and heat may portend much greater crises. To put it simply, while the fires are spectacular, it is the withering wheat fields that should be attracting greater attention.
The massive wildfires and killer heat wave in Russia has captured the imagination of Western audiences as a harbinger of doom. The wildfires which have choked Moscow in a suffocating cloud are paired with the horrific flood in Pakistan in a sort of “nature run amuck” narrative, a cautionary tale about global climate change. As chunks of glaciers bigger than Manhattan float off to sea and landslides inundate China, the conventional wisdom is the planetary climate has now entered a “weirding” phase. The problem with this narrative is not that it is wrong (Moscow broke the 100 degree F mark for the first time in 130 years of measurements and regularly reached record highs this summer); by any stretch of the imagination the Russian heat wave of 2010 is much worse than the killer heat wave centered on France in 2003:
Russia’s Burning While the Kremlin Fiddles
