Dust storms, green waves(while acknowledging that i'm actually still at page 17 of decolonisation is not a metaphor, v.v) this reminds me of
Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article.) Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage.
also thinking about this article on this same process in california linked to respiratory illness
The social and material landscapes of the Californian desert are indelibly marked by the large-scale infrastructural attempts of European settlers to render the supposedly wild, savage landscapes tame. At the same time, they are also marked by the unintended afterlives of such attempts, many of which have set in motion a wildness or savagery of a very different sort: patches of feral effects that outpaced the initial visions of the settler state. These unintended infrastructural effects offer an important perspective on settler histories and their relation to everyday life in the present.
and this one on the overburdening of the san joaquin valley which echoes this quote, again from decolonisation is not a metaphor, "He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because "civilization" is defined as production in excess of the "natural" world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world)."
While the water table continues to plummet and the land sinks, scientists are now warning that the water lost both intentionally and unintentionally in agricultural irrigation is transforming climates elsewhere, raising the sea level, and increasing the incidence and intensity of annual monsoons in the southwestern United States.7 Small wonder that the largest ever human alteration of the Earth’s surface has downwind effects.
finally, they mention slow violence near the end (see rob nixon) which makes me think of necropolitics (achille mbembe) but i haven't done the reading on that so i am not actually that sure???????
tl;dr: capitalism is bad for the environment