Poetry for the Storms to Come

Abstract

November 2017. New Brunswick, Canada. Having spent five hours banding lobster claws, Karissa Lindstrand detects an anomaly on one of the crustaceans. Inscribed on its left pincer is a familiar yet resolutely inorganic swirl of red, blue, and white. A corporate sigil branded onto the exoskeletal form of aquatic life: the Pepsi globe. While marine biologists disagree about the conditions under which the lobster acquired its tattoo – one suggestion is that the creature grew into a discarded can, another is that a cardboard box adhered to its propodite limb – the specific cause is less significant than what the marking represents on a world-historical scale. From this position, the lobster's deformation can be seen as an embodiment of the metabolic rift between global capitalism and nonhuman nature, presenting itself here as a grotesque reminder that human society exists within an earthly metabolism and that our hegemonic social arrangement – engineering profit through the mass production of commodities – is disrupting an equilibrium required for the sustenance of life on this planet. We encounter that rift in more ways than one: in the lobster's biological fusion with the refuse of one commodity, a melding together of two radically dissimilar sets of armor, but also in the fact that the moment the lobster is dredged from the ocean it is transformed, by the human labor of fishing, from a natural resource into a sellable form. “It is probably in Boston,” Lindstrand speculated on the lobster's passage through the market to its ultimate destiny as luxury comestible. The idea that capitalism is averse to the ecological matrix within which all life adheres, opening up a rift between a humanly engineered economy and its nonhuman biosphere, is not new. It originated in the nineteenth century, when Karl Marx theorized that capitalist production inaugurates “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” And yet that rift has widened and deepened through the ecohistorical period beginning around 1945, during what is often described as the Great Acceleration, an economically conditioned phase of planetary time when anthropogenic activity presaged environmental transformation on an unprecedented scale. Toxic sludge, oil spills, nuclear winter, extinction events wrought in flood and fire: such are the forms of our metabolic rift, in the context of whose proliferation “climate change” reads as the most inadequate of all euphemisms. That is what we are given to behold, as a kind of biomorphic prosopopoeia, in the lobster's claw.