Collapse

The vast Anthropocene reshaping of the planet that is now under way extends to water as well as land. The Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtze River in China impounds so much water that it has measurably slowed the rotation speed of the Earth. Oil extraction from the Alberta tar sands uses more than 200bn litres of fresh water a year: this is abstracted from the Athabasca River, rendered toxic – and then injected back into aquifers by way of “disposal”. Europe has the most obstructed river system of any continent, with more than 1m barriers fragmenting flow and only a handful of free-running waterways remaining.

It has long been in the interests of power to deem nature dead, in preparation for its extraction, conversion and consumption. This systematic de-animation process has been accelerated to calamity speed by the new US administration. Trump’s inaugural address was obsessively focused on “land”; his speech a bingo card of 19th-century settler-Christian tropes glorifying first the subjugation then exploitation of the continent’s “resources”, natural and human: manifest destiny, the “untamed wilderness”, the “frontier hypothesis”. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Doug Burgum – the new interior secretary – described public lands and waters as “America’s balance sheet”, which he would “unleash” for “economic activity