Let Us Burn

A plume of black smoke tarnished the baby blue sky. My bumper was glued to the Ford F150 in front of me. I could not tell where the smoke was coming from but I knew I was moving towards it. I bent slowly around dilapidated houses overgrown with summer brush, inching towards I-80 on my end-of-the-week drive home. When I took the first exit, I joined the caterpillar crawl and laid back into my seat. I looked outside my driver-side window at the ashen hill, little flames licking the asphalt on the other side of the highway. The traffic kept moving and the world kept burning. The skin on my forehead knotted and I looked off in the distance at the cars in front of me. 

I inhaled deeply from the small marbled pipe, coughing and spitting out smoke into the window next to me. Sitting comfortably on my couch, I chugged a cup of water and turned my attention to the TV in front of me as my fingers began to tingle and the room began to vibrate. 4K Drone Footage of a Hawaiian rainforest played in the background with soft classical music. I was happy but my eyes were watering. How long would this last? How long would we last? I waited for an answer and brought the lighter back to the pipe for one more try. 

We must allow ourselves to prepare for and accept the worst consequences of our ancestor’s actions.

In an interview with Vox journalist Sean Illing, Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days, a social history of the Millennial generation, argues that for today’s generation, “our entire lives are framed around becoming cheaper and more efficient economic instruments for capital[ism].” As we walk into a nearby career fair, post furiously on Linkedin, and try to gain marketable skills in every facet of our life, we must remember that like land, like oil and coal, and like the rainforests, we are the tinder that capitalism burns on. In a world where it is difficult to predict the future costs of the actions we take, capitalism is unchained, free to prey on the uncertainty of the public costs that private welfare creates. Private interests have become more adept at developing land, extracting natural resources, and transporting goods and people across borders within existing regulatory constraints. At the same time, they have also become more prepared to use the human resources they depend on more efficiently by passing on the cost of education, providing fewer benefits like pensions, health insurance, and by reinvesting the profits that increased productivity brings into capital rather than into worker’s compensation. 

To America and the world, I say let us burn. Let us burn our environment, erasing the biodiversity and priceless ecosystem services (carbon cycling, nutrient capture, temperature regulation, etc.) that our natural world provides us largely for free. Let us burn out of our idealized professions, isolating us from the people we care about and the people who care about us, and spend more of our adult lives working than any previous generation had the opportunity to. Let’s take a match to our mental health, and spend an enormous amount of time, money, and intellectual thought trying to piece together a haphazard self-care routine to make ourselves feel better at night. And lastly, let us burn controlled substances in our homes, in the bathroom, and in the library to try to cope with the flames around us and make it to tomorrow. 

According to an analysis by the Global Footprint Network, only one country in the world, Cuba, was assessed to be operating a sustainable economy when comparing its human development index to its ecological footprint. While this isn’t a perfect measurement of sustainability, it is clear that globally our rate of consumption is so far from sustainable that it would take immense conservation efforts targeted at our wellbeing and the wellbeing of our environment to come even close to preserving generational equity. Why are we holding on so dearly to a world and civilization which is going to destroy itself? Today’s definition of progress and growth under extreme capitalism, one which incorporates the worst of deregulation with the entrenched protection of monopoly power,  is at odds with our survival and the survival of the environment. Our children are likely to inherit a world far worse than their parents have lived in. Why don’t we let it burn?

In Harris’s interview with Vox, he later admits, “The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the historical task confronting us may be larger than we ever imagined. It may well be that America dies or the world dies, or that this global economic order dies or our problems just get worse.” We must allow ourselves to prepare for and accept the worst consequences of our ancestor’s actions. This will require us to stop trying to put up with the absurdities that extreme capitalism created in modern society. We will have to let ourselves burn and tell the world about it. 

Ishaan Shah ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at ishaanshah@wustl.edu.