Disasters are Everyday Like the Weather

Chaya Ocampo Go

doi:10.5195/jwsr.2020.999

Abstract

This essay offers an urgent intervention from the global South in contribution to this special issue on the Anthropocene. Drawing from Rob Nixon's work on slow violence, the author offers sobering reflections on the everyday realities of what she writes as the “Philippine Anthropocene”: not only is this defined by spectacular freak weather conditions, but also shaped by normalized and state-sanctioned forms of abandonment and terror. Written in the present political context of intensifying state attacks on civil society in the country, the author recasts the light on anthropogenic forces of violence which endanger lives at the front lines of daily disasters, more lethal than the strongest storm in recorded history.

Highlights

This essay offers an urgent intervention from the global South in contribution to this special issue on the Anthropocene
Climate justice movements led by racialized6 and Indigenous7 communities across the global North today offer critical frameworks and responses to the calamitous impacts of the Anthropocene as these unfold unevenly across geographies of disasters
While I take hope in the surge of feminist, Indigenous, and anti-racist work in these social movements across Turtle Island (North America), I offer this piece as an urgent intervention from the global South as postcolonial realities still remain starkly missing in academic and activist discourses of the Anthropocene

Summary

Introduction

In present-day postcolonial Philippines, I claim that anthropogenic climate change is not a singular, external, existential force threatening the future fate of an archipelagic nation ranked most vulnerable to disasters by the World Risk Index; instead the nature of this violence unfolds through and compounds catastrophically with chronic poverty, ecological degradation, racial and gendered violence, militant terror, and an emergent authoritarian state. I grew up in Manila immersed in this pervasive culture of disasters (Bankoff 2001), wherein catastrophes have become so deeply entrenched into the schema of daily life that both the political organization of Filipino society and people’s beliefs, behaviors and responses to such normalized violence shape Journal of World-Systems Research | Vol 26 Issue 2 | Disasters are Everyday like the Weather one another in a tight dialectic.

Results

Conclusion