Fragments from Saskia Sassen

The biosphere’s capacities to renew land, water, and air are remarkable. But they are predicated on specific temporalities and life cycles that our technical, chemical, and organizational innovations are rapidly outpacing. The surge of foreign land acquisitions by governments and firms is one of many sources of this destruc- tion. But the purchases are also partly a response to the crisis: more land and water need to be acquired to replace what has died. The trends point to accelerated histories and geographies of destruction on a scale our planet has not seen before, making substantive the notion of the Anthropocene, the age marked by major human impact on the environment. Most of the land and most of the water on our planet are still alive. But much of it is fragile. Scattered evidence in news media signals that the extent of this fragility may not be widely understood or recognized. For instance, polls suggest that few in the United States seem to know that the six major gyres that help keep our ocean currents going have now become massive trash zones, full of circling garbage that leads to the asphyxiation of marine life. Or that we have at least 400 clinically dead coastal ocean zones. We made this fragility and these deaths. We can think of such dead land and dead water as holes in the tissue of the biosphere, as sites marked by the expulsion of biospheric elements from their life space, and as the surface expression of deeper subterranean trends that are cutting across the world, regardless of the local politico-economic organi zation or mode of environmental destruction, a sort of generic condition. Erosion, desertification, and overuse through monocultures, heat waves, mining and industrial waste, widespread food shortages, more intense cyclones, hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal mining, nuclear accidents, deadly gases, radioactive waste, increased acidity level, rising sea levels, poisons discharge, extreme weather events, water grabs, carbon dioxide, ice sheet melt and feedback loops. The lowest common denominators make the task seemingly more manageable. We have the power to poison land, water, and air. The scale is enormous and neglect and accidents do occur. Scholars warn that water is likely to become “the new oil.” Chemicals from the plastics leach into aquatic plants and animals and become concentrated at the top of the food chain. The dualizing pattern of desertification in some regions and floods in others could appear in many different parts of the world. An exercise in economies of scale as the benefits for the communities shrink, yet governments does not acknowledge that a problem exists. The effort is not to reduce destruction but to maximize a state’s advantage in the right to destroy. There is a profound disjuncture between this planetary condition and its sources, on one hand, and the dominant logics shaping governmental responses and much policy, on the other. Damage produced in particular sites now scales up, driven by the vastness of destruction, and becomes a planetary problem that drifts back down to hit even those places that did not contribute to the damage. A global systematicity is at work, no matter its thick localized instantiations. It is deeper than the diverse geopolitical formations and economies we have built on our planet. There was a time when the environmental damage we produced remained somewhat localized, confi ned to specific places. That time is gone. What then is the biosphere? It is as if it does not belong on our planet, no matter that it accounts for a good share of the planet and that the biosphere is us.