BROOKE ELLSWORTH

Serenade gets reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly here.

I answer some questions for rob mclennan in this interview.  

“Most of Serenade was written in a frenzy during the late summer of 2014.  In many ways, it was more of me working out the tangles from my first two chapbooks,Thrown and Mud.  I press upon a lot of history of feminine brutality and eco-disaster, do a lot of urgent lineation around flood zones.  Serenade became some metacognition of me listening to water, while realizing this was a self-eroding reflection.  Serenade changed everything, because I let the editing process chip away at the poems’ temporality.  I was doing a lot of hiking around the tidal estuary surrounding Indian Point Energy Center.”        

Written (and posted on Facebook) by Dark Matter Poets December 24, 2015

People have asked us about the connections between ‪#‎climatechange‬ and colonialism. Many activists and scholars have been making these connections for a very long time--a simple search will yield a lot of results. But, perhaps as a starter for people who aren't familiar with these connections (and as an invitation to learn more!), here are a few thoughts on how climate change is linked to the historical and contemporary reality of colonialism(s). In the aftermath of ‪#‎COP21‬ in Paris, as many peoples demand more urgent action and reparations from global powers for the impacts of climate change, hopefully this might help some understand why every dollar/pound/euro and policy that is being demanded is not only deserved but incredibly, urgently necessary.

1. "Global warming" is a misleading term, both scientifically and politically. The earth is not all warming at once, and not at all uniformly. Misunderstanding of this fact is why you can have Republican Senator Jim Inhofe bring a snowball to the Senate floor and claim that climate change is a hoax. Climate change is *not* a globally uniform phenomenon, at all. Its impacts are incredibly regionally contingent, and often the higher level of uncertainty and flux (in temperature, storm events, and rainfall) brought on by climate change is a greater immediate threat than overall warming. What does this have to do with colonialism? Well, the communities that are most immediately impacted by climate change include small farmers, fisherfolk, and others who economies rely more directly on environmental "predictability”. For a simple example: South Asian wheat farmers are expected to lose *at least* 1/3 of their crop yield by 2050, but it’s highly highly unlikely the guys on Wall Street or real estate investors are going to see drops that rapidly. (Can you imagine if Wall Street was crashing that bad across the board? They would jump into action asap!) Essentially, climate change is hitting a lot of peoples' economies NOW. And those peoples tend to be formerly or presently colonized communities.

2. Climate change is intimately linked to fossil fuel consumption and overuse. The process is something like this: fossil fuels are burned, CO2 and other carbon compounds are released into the air, they create a “greenhouse gas effect” that traps heat in the atmosphere, and the various compounded and complex effects of climate change result from there. The hyper-demand for fossil fuel use is hugely linked to the history of colonialism. The rapid project of settlement and expansion in the colonial United States (e.g. the building of the Transcontinental Railroad), for example, required a very concentrated and “easy” energy source, along with cheap labor. The Industrial Revolution, and the increased accumulation of wealth and power in the West that accompanied it, was extremely dependent on fossil fuel use. Fossil fuels also rank high among resources that have been colonially pilfered from land and water across the world to make that wealth accumulation possible. For example: look up the history of British Petroleum’s linkages to the colonization of Nigeria and present-day political repression Azerbaijan.

3. War is a staple of how colonial maintenance of control (over land, people, sovereignty, and resources) is executed. It also happens to be a huge fore of climate change. For example: the United States Department of Defense, on its own, is the world’s 34th largest emitter. Ideologically, this is consistent. The logic of war is consistent with the driving logic of Western power’s inaction on climate change: that the land, water, and air are somehow “theirs” though accountability and stewardship for the same is not.

4. Much of colonialism is/was actually carried out not only by governments but by corporations that had heavy links (i.e. revolving doors) to and monopolies granted by those governments. Think “Dutch East India Company”. Similarly, climate change is not some accident caused by individual consumers across the world. The thinking that both climate change and other colonial processes are highly dispersed phenomena makes it harder to target the institutions carrying out the majority of the violences (states & corporations). 2/3 of all carbon emissions are actually caused by just 90 multinational corporations, including several government-run enterprises like enterprises like Saudi Aramco and Norway’s Statoil. Fossil fuel lobbies are huge and corrupt—and they have no interest in genuinely shutting down this machine.

5. At the moment, climate change is already creating large-scale displacement, especially for island nations like Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Marshall Islands. The UN estimates that about 200 million people will be displaced by climate-related phenomena by 2050. Why are you not hearing about this? Corporate media doesn’t care. Essentially, climate change is one mechanism by which, without even sending in a traditional ‘army;, governments and corporations are able to destroy economies, lands, and community sovereignty. They weaponize the earth instead. And powerful nations are already failing to claim responsibility. For example: look up the case of Ioane Teitiota, a climate refugee from Kiribati, whose claim was refused by New Zealand courts.

This past spring, Coldfront included my thoughts on X-Ray Spex’s song, “Identity” for their Song of the Week column (the No, Dear residency).