Canary

Our final warning

Original photographer unknown, design by Wietske Merison

From the earth we were created, into the earth we will be returned, and from the earth we will be brought back again. That is the teaching of the fifty-fifth verse of the twentieth chapter of the Qur’an, Surah Ta-Ha. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we say. But not all dust and ashes are created equal. In that brief period of time between dust and dust, between ashes and ashes, some manage to cultivate themselves into fertile soil, thriving as they enrich their human and non-human environments. Others find themselves to be a barren land, consumed by fires of rage, denial, and greed, their ashes are sprinkled with the dust of a life lived without beauty, morality, and purpose.

This week, up to two thousand men, women, and children returned to the earth as a landslide of Biblical proportions consumed the area around the village of Yambali in Papua New Guinea. The exact number of victims remains unknown since local authorities have only been able to recover six bodies within the critical timeframe of survival. An ocean apart, five men returned to the earth when an informal gold mine collapsed in Northern Kenya. Another ocean apart, at least forty-five men, women, and children returned to the earth when Israeli forces executed an air strike on a camp for displaced Palestinians in the city of Rafah.

As people living in a state of relative privilege, safety, and wealth in the Global North, it is easy to hear of these tragedies and feel a sense of compassion. We might share these tragic news items in conversation or on our social media platforms, we might include the victims in our prayers, or we might even donate a bit of our money to support emergency aid. Then, we might feel like good people. After all, these tragedies are not our fault, so our willingness to care about the victims in any way can only be a sign of the goodness of our hearts, right?

Well, what if, somehow, all these events were actually related, and the common factor was… us?

The landslide in Papua New Guinea was in no way a unique or isolated incident. Landslides are natural phenomena, like tornadoes, earthquakes, and wildfires. These natural catastrophes are, however, worsened because of human activity. Climate change, caused primarily by the mass-scale burning of fossil fuels ever since the Industrial Revolution, is the main reason natural catastrophes and severe weather events occur more frequently and have increasingly more severe impacts. The wealth, privilege, and stability of the Global North were, for a large part, created through mass-scale capitalist industrialization, by which wealth is generated at the expense of exploiting workers, marginalized peoples, non-human animals, and the land in a never-ending hunger for more efficiency, profit, and growth.

The global changes in climate that are the result of this never-ending hunger and growing inequality do not affect everyone equally. Mountainous Papua New Guinea has always been prone to landslides, but ever since large-scale deforestation has affected the country, the results have been simply disastrous. When under European colonization, Papua New Guinea was used for intensive extraction of all sorts, as cocoa, coconut, and copra plantations as well as gold mining, brought great wealth to the German empire. After the First World War, Australia took over the German colony and continued the lucrative extraction.

Since Papua New Guinea's independence in 1975, former colonial relations of exploitation have taken the new shape of common capitalist exploitation. Large-scale industrial logging, palm oil production, and mining for gold and other precious metals have resulted in large-scale deforestation, which has caused a great surge in landslides.

The vast majority of the resources produced and the gold mined in the Global South are meant for consumption and use in the Global North. As such, the gold mined in the mine that collapsed during a landslide in 2020, when 15 men, women, and children returned to the earth in Papua New Guinea, might well have been the source of the jewelry we wear today, or the smartphone, tablet, or computer you use to read this essay. Just as well, the gold mined in the informal mine in Kenya, where five men returned to the earth as it collapsed this week, may be the very gold used by our banks and governments to ensure our economic and societal stability.

The wealth of the people of the Global North has long outgrown the limits of our lands and labor. This is what German sociologists Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen called “The Imperial Mode of Living”. In his book, Slow Down, The Degrowth Manifesto, Kohei Saito explains, “The Imperial Mode of Living refers, essentially, to the societies of the Global North that rely on large-scale production and consumption. This is what makes our rich lifestyles possible. Beneath this surface, there exists a structure by which the cost of our consumption is extracted from the lands and labor of the people of the Global South. Without the exploitation of others who pay the cost, the Imperial Mode of Living would be unsustainable. Lowering the standard of living for those in the Global South is a prerequisite for the workings of capitalism, and the power imbalance between North and South is no anomaly - it is, in fact, a result of the system functioning normally.”

So how, might one ask, does this relate to the bombing of Rafah? During the Second World War, the ashes of 6 million men, women, and children were returned to the earth in Europe, systematically murdered in a matter of years simply for being Jewish. This abhorrent tragedy is commonly referred to in Hebrew as the Shoah, the ‘catastrophe’. When antisemitic Europe was faced with the legacy of this genocidal war, and with the question of what to do with its remaining and deeply traumatized minority Jewish population, it once again opted for an ‘Imperial’ solution. With European permission, Jewish refugees set sail for the land of Palestine, longing for a place to be Jewish in safety and dignity, far away from the horrors and traumas of the Shoah. When the Ottoman Empire had collapsed in the aftermath of the First World War, The League of Nations mandated (in other words, ‘handed over’) Syria and Lebanon to the control of France, and Palestine and Jordan to the control of Great Britain, in accordance with their earlier secret agreement, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which they split up the lands of the defeated Middle East like a birthday cake. The British mandate over Palestine lasted until 1948, and during this time they actively worked to welcome and facilitate the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine, promising them a Jewish National Home on Palestinian land. In a classic colonial manner, all of this was done without the consent and involvement of Palestine’s indigenous population, who were simply supposed to accept that their homeland no longer belonged to them. Jewish people had always been a part of the Palestinian population, also during the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The inhabitants of Palestine had always been religiously diverse due to the religious importance of the lands to many different communities of faith. The problem, however, was that these new European Jewish immigrants did not intend to become Palestinians or adapt to the local ways. Rather, they intended to create a colony, a new state on old land - a state for Jews: Israel.

In 1948, as violence between the European Jewish settlers and the Palestinian indigenous population continued to increase, the British withdrew from Palestine, not wanting to be involved in the rising conflict any further. They left the Jewish settlers and the Palestinian indigenous population to fight out a conflict that was partly a legacy of European genocidal antisemitism and partly a legacy of European imperialism. In May of 1948, Israel declared independence after a bloody war in which the Palestinian indigenous population was persecuted, killed and forcibly displaced from 500 different Palestinian villages, causing a displaced population of up to one million refugees, an event still remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, Arabic for the ‘catastrophe’.

Instead of solving the European problems of the ever-increasing sins of greed and arrogance, which are the root of capitalist industrialism and racism, on European territory, the problems were transferred to the margins of the European colonial empires. To create wealth in the Global North, land and indigenous peoples in Papua New Guinea and Kenya were and are exploited. To wash Europe clean of the catastrophe of the Shoah, the catastrophe was simply shifted into the marginalized lands of Palestine, causing the Nakba, the same catastrophe of genocide, expressed in a different language, suffered by different people. As history continues into the present, generations later, the Western colonial state of Israel continues its project. In doing so, it is not in any way unique, but rather perfectly aligned with other Western colonial states, such as the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all of which still have ongoing problematic relations with their indigenous populations. Although the violence as it currently continues to take place in Israel is abhorrent and arguably unmatched in these times, the historical genocidal projects of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have been undeniably worse, resulting over the centuries in collective colonial genocides in which hundreds of millions of men, women and children returned to the earth, killed, simply for living their lives on the land of their ancestors and for being willing to defend their property.

Though I do not believe that critiquing the state of Israel is inherently antisemitic, I do think it is problematic when ideals of justice are applied unequally. When for example, American citizens have no issue with living in a Western colonial state themselves and do not care for the rights or history of indigenous peoples in their homeland but do believe that the state of Israel is inherently illegitimate because it is a Western colonial state. That morality is incoherent. If this is then combined with, for example, an increased sense of compassion and solidarity with Palestinians solely because of a shared ethnicity or religion, or an increased sense of disapproval of the actions of Israelis because of their belonging to a different ethnicity or religion, there may be a valid argument for antisemitism or racism in these persons’ individual attitudes. But even though antisemitism may, in such cases, increase the critical attention on Israel’s atrocities for the wrong reasons, it would be absolute lunacy to then draw the conclusion that that would in any way justify the atrocities of Israel. Similarly, because of systemic racism in the United States, if both a Black man and a White man were to commit murder, the Black man is more likely to actually be arrested and convicted than the White man, who is more likely to get away with that same crime. That unequal application of justice is, of course, bad, but it is lunacy to argue that, therefore, murder is somehow justified, or both murders should be excused. The act is still wrong, regardless of the response.

Miners, like those in Kenya, have long been faced with many threats. Their bodies are the colonies exploited for the Imperial Mode of Living of the wealthier classes and nations. The violence against miners’ bodies, as they struggle daily with the threat of bodily harm and the danger of poisonous gases like carbon monoxide, ensures the safety, health, and warmth of richer bodies, not unlike the moving of societal unrest to Palestine ensured peace in post-war Europe.

Coal miners developed a strategy to protect themselves against carbon monoxide poisoning. Because carbon monoxide is clear and odorless, miners were in need of a way to detect it before it was too late and their bodies returned to the earth. As they went underground, they therefore took a little yellow happily chirping Canary with them in a cage. If the canary went silent and eventually collapsed, they knew there was poisonous gas in the air, and this was their final warning to get out of the mine alive.

All around us bird populations are collapsing. A recent study revealed that the bird population of North America has decreased by a staggering amount of nearly three billion since 1970. There is a decrease of 1 billion birds in North American forests alone as compared to fifty years ago, and the amount of grassland bird populations has halved. In a previous essay, I mentioned the shocking threat of the imminent extinction of a sixth of all bird species worldwide. Forty-four different species of the unique bird population of Papua New Guinea are threatened with extinction because of the widespread environmental degradation and loss of habitat. The same mercury pollution that is causing public health crises for gold mining communities in Kenya is also killing their bird populations. And, as if to prove that there is no distinction between the destruction of culture and nature, a large Israeli campaign was launched in an attempt to change the name of the Palestine Sunbird into the Orange-Tufted Sunbird, to eliminate its function as a symbol of Palestinian resistance. The name remained, but soon, instead of a symbol of resistance, it may be a symbol of yet another genocide committed in the name of the Imperial Mode of Living.

This is our final warning. We need to get out of the Imperial Mode of Living now, or else, we will find ourselves on that exact barren land we so feared, consumed by fires of rage, denial, and greed - our ashes sprinkled with the dust of a life lived without beauty, morality, and purpose.

The Global North may delude itself for a bit longer and pretend its soils are fertile because we waste the lands, bodies, and lives of those living in the Global South, as well as those in the margins of our own societies. But even if we survive that kind of delusional living in our lifetimes, Surah Ta-Ha reminds us that after all of our bodies have inevitably returned to the earth, they will be brought back again, and justice will be served. Sooner or later, justice will prevail, and when it does, I don’t fear the fate of those souls who spoke out against the atrocities of Israel and ended up on the blacklist of the Zionist ‘Canary Mission’. I don’t fear the fate of those souls arrested or killed in activism against the greed of the giants of fossil fuels, colonial pollution, genocide, and capitalist exploitation and destruction. What I do fear, is the fate of those, myself included, who saw the birds collapse and yet failed to act accordingly.

This is our final warning. If we stay in the mine, we lose everything.