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Reva Blau, Judith Blau, Review of “Climate Chaos and its Origins in Slavery and Capitalism”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 1, September 2021, Page e22, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab046
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Reviewed by: Richard York, University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
We are living through an ever-worsening climate crisis. Droughts, wildfires, sea level rise, extreme temperatures, and more frequent and more powerful hurricanes are but a few of the disastrous consequences with which we must struggle. By the end of this century, if not before, anthropogenic climate change may undermine the material bases of societies across the globe and push many species to extinction. Despite the chatter from climate denialists, this dreary reality is now recognized by many thinking people the world over. However, what is not well understood by most mainstream politicians and the general public is the social, political, and economic reasons why we find ourselves in this conundrum. Blau and Blau have produced a short and accessible book that provides a challenge to the mainstream explanations of and market-based solutions to climate change.
Climate Chaos and its Origins in Slavery and Capitalism is not a dry, academic book, but rather a work with the clear purpose of advocating for fundamental social change. As the book’s title makes clear, Blau and Blau are not presenting a drab policy assessment, but rather, they are showing how deeply rooted our global ecological crisis is in the foundations of the modern world. They argue that capitalism, which developed as part of the depredations of European colonialism and slavery, is the core force behind the rise of fossil fuels and social injustices that characterize our current dilemma. After starting with a brief review of the emergence of our understanding of climate change and its consequences, they focus on explaining (drawing on the 1619 Project) how central slavery and white supremacy were to the establishment of US capitalism, which was built with murderously coerced labor. The Industrial Revolution, with its voracious appetite for fossil fuels, to a remarkable extent relied on the wealth plundered from enslaved and colonized peoples to fund its development. Blau and Blau highlight how the carnage of the US capitalist-slavery system left a legacy of environmental destruction, inequality, poverty, and injustice not only in the United States, but around the world, especially in the African nations that were most heavily preyed upon by slavers. Thus, the authors show how the social inequalities and human misery of the present and the climate crisis share their origin in, and are driven and sustained by, capitalism.
