Cruel Weather: Natural Disasters and Structural Violence

Abstract

Drawing upon the work of Johan Galtung, Pierre Bourdieu, Mike Davis, and other contemporary thinkers, this paper aims to establish a provisional framework for understanding the recent spate of global weather-related disasters not as arbitrary, independently-arising environmental accidents, but as expressions of “structural violence” – that is, the normal, unexceptional, anonymous, and often unscrutinized violence woven into the routine workings of prevailing power structures. In today’s context, the damage wrought by our increasingly entropic weather system cannot simply be attributed to brute, accidental and nonhuman origins; indeed, it has increasingly drawn attention to our own culpability in destabilizing the climate and undermining the support systems that help to shield us from its unmediated effects.

In this sense, ecological violence – that is, the callous misuse and despoliation of nature itself – rebounds back upon us as structural violence, destroying lives and livelihoods, amplifying existing conflicts and inequalities, and exposing countless people to severe storms, floods, drought, fire, disease, displacement, and chronic food and water insecurity. Responding effectively to the structural violence of climate change will require a correspondingly structural program of social change, oriented not simply towards small lifestyle improvements and technological fixes, but towards achieving a greater degree of democratic control over economic life, refitting the scale of production and consumption to respect environmental limits, reweaving our social and ecological safety nets, and creating a culture that respects the integrity, value, and complexity of human and nonhuman life.