Death comes for us all. We are outlived, as Barkandji man Woddy Harris would have it, by Mother Nature, who holds us in something that I think he would liken to ‘eternity’.
By what logic, then, must Mother Nature also die?
The Barkandji in Wilcannia and nearby Menindee had been protesting and putting their effort into protecting what they feared might be a dying river – the Barka, their mother – for years when in 2018 the first horrors of mass fish kills hit the news.
Millions of native bony bream fish died in what we air-breathing types would think of as ‘gasping’. Golden Perch. That pesky Carp. And century-old Murray Cod. Hardy fish – too hardy, perhaps, in the case of the Carp. Nature too has agency, as the more-than-human scholars remind us, and it is this agency that strikes at our hearts.[i] Native fish, whose strategies for survival ensured individual fish outlasted drought after drought, and flood after flood, now floated on the surface of what their deaths turned into a stinky, polluted waterway.
The first shock was in 2018-19, at what might have been the peak of that awful drought and was certainly the peak of Barkandji anxiety about their mother, the Barka River. An even worse fish kill hit in 2023 after three years of rain. This shows that it was not just seasonal. There were no natural cycles of death at work here. It was about the river.
In the sickly river, fish ran out of oxygen. Too much water, an expert panel found, over too many years, was diverted for agricultural profit. The Barka became too weak to nourish life.[ii] The logic of exploitation was not confined to the drought that united all farmers in the desperate search for water. It was a long-term problem. Under capitalism, water was not for nourishment, it was extracted for profit, even to death.
When the river is sick unto death, Mother Nature herself looks far less eternal than the faith in its eternity that Woddy Harris expressed. The battles over water during our last awful drought have exposed a relationship to nature that is not dissimilar to the deadly working conditions and system of exploitation faced by mine workers in Broken Hill, beginning more than a century ago.
With every new cataclysmic weather event we feel death loom. Mass extinction is possible, beyond those beautiful fish. That which seemed so eternal now looks as mortal as the rest of us. Certainly, nature is as subjected to the same capitalist exploitation.
To quote from Professor of Aboriginal Politics, Heidi Norman, in a piece written with John Janson-Moore: ‘Television images of cod fish cradled as if slain children in the arms of grieving farmers reverberated with a concerned public. But for Barkandji people, this underscored their powerlessness in the debate over their river.’[i]
That powerlessness has evidently been engineered, since First Nations sovereignty presents an existential threat to the order imposed by colonial capitalism. Disunity too is actively sustained, falsely dividing those humans performing labour in mines from fish murdered by too little oxygen in their only environment, both for a certain kind of profit.
The logic of capitalism is to kill – and as things are going, it may kill even itself.
[i] Norman, Heidi and John Janson-Moore (2019) ‘Friday essay: death on the Darling, colonialism’s final encounter with the Barkandji’ The Conversation https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-death-on-the-darling-colonialisms-final-encounter-with-the-barkandji-114275 Retrieved 12 January 2024.
[i] O’Gorman, Emily, and Andrea Gaynor (2020) ‘More-than-human histories’ Environmental History 25, 711–735
[ii] Kingsford, Richard (2023) ‘How Did Millions of Fish Die Gasping in the Darling – After Three Years of Rain?’ https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/how-did-millions-fish-die-gasping-darling-%E2%80%93-after-three-years-rain Retrieved 12 January 2024.
{ 13 comments }
Austin Loomis 11.05.25 at 9:49 pm
“Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will regret its absence.”
— Col. Joseph Moran, d/b/a Immortan Joe
“Who killed the world?”
John Q 11.05.25 at 11:29 pm
The first really big disaster was the toxic blue-green algae bloom in 1991. That did generate some action, most notably the Cap on water extractions, but we seem to have become habituated to disaster now
https://insidestory.org.au/no-triple-bypass-no-miracle-cure-just-a-long-haul-back/
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 11.06.25 at 4:06 am
“Under capitalism, water was not for nourishment, it was extracted for profit, even to death.”
Here’s a fun little exercise. Take a detailed, recent, map of the world and look at 45 degrees North, 60 degrees East. Then find an old map, say 1970s, and look at the same place.
John Q 11.06.25 at 10:26 am
GRSW, don’t need to look for the location of the Caspian Sea to infer that you are repeating the same point – capitalism isn’t alone in destroying the environment. But you’ve already said that twice, so I’d say that we can take it as read.
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 11.06.25 at 6:15 pm
This is the first time I’ve mentioned the environment at all: the previous thread was about worker safety.
John Q 11.06.25 at 8:26 pm
Seriously, give it a break. It was a relevant point the first time, now it’s just snark.
Roger_f 11.06.25 at 9:27 pm
Referring to the central premise of the thread is this recently published article; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1031461X.2025.2570723#d1e247
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 11.07.25 at 8:14 am
Fair enough. I will have to correct you that I was talking about the Aral Sea, which the Soviet Union turned into a toxic desert the size of Ireland, not the Caspian Sea.
Tm 11.10.25 at 8:01 am
I have to agree with Wilson. I don’t think that a statement like “The logic of capitalism is to kill” has any alanytic value. Maybe it has value as a catchy political slogan – I doubt it – but if it’s supposed to tell us anything of relevance about the causes of environmental destruction, it’s no more useful than “the logic of the industrial economy is to kill” or “the logic of economic growth is to kill”.
notGoodenough 11.11.25 at 10:57 am
Comment:
Briefly and simplistically, I would say that capitalism may be characterised as an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, with goods and services distributed primarily through markets driven by supply and demand (while I’m sure quibbles and corrections may be made, I don’t think this is such an exceptionally unreasonable characterisation). Fundamental to capitalism, therefore, is the accumulation of capital (investment of surplus value to generate more value), and within capitalist societies this has the tendency to lead to capital concentration (wealth, productive assets, and financial resources become increasingly owned or controlled by a smaller number of individuals, corporations, or institutions). As capital concentrates, it may be (and, empirically, frequently is) that some is invested in overturning restraining mechanisms which are in opposition to this (e.g. labour movements and collective bargaining, democratic pressure, competition policies, progressive taxation, regulation, nationalization, etc.) via numerous approaches (e.g. control of the media to propagandise, funding think-tanks to generate pseudo-academic post-hoc rationalisations, lobbyists to directly influence, etc.). This leads to a tension between things which are beneficial for people (such as strong labour movements, universal access to things – like healthcare, education, etc. – which might otherwise be commodified, regulation, intervention against negative externalities, etc.) and things which are beneficial to the accumulation (and concentration) of capital; and where capital wins out (as it frequently does, because capital represents economic power which may be translated into political and cultural influence) it does so to its own advantage (which, again frequently, translates to the disadvantage of everyone else). My objection to capitalism, therefore, is not so much to the concept of property per se, but to the control and operation of society to the benefit of the few over the many which seems empirically to accompany the capital accumulation fundamental to the system.
(As a slight side-track, I would say that this process of economic – and subsequent cultural and political – stratification dovetails neatly with fundamentally hierarchical world views; I don’t think it is entirely coincidental that the increasing concentration of capital has been accompanied by increasing anti-egalitarianism.)
So, to condense a little, accumulation is inherent to capitalism, which frequently leads to capital concentration, which in turn drives systemic opposition to things broadly beneficial to the well-being of populace.
General ramblings outside of this (included here to avoid derailment):
One point that appears to frequently be raised in conversations of this sort is to the effect that the concentration of capital is not necessarily an inherent inevitability. It seems to me that while this is true in the sense that it is not definitionally required (for example, one can theorise a perfectly competitive capitalism), in practice the concentration of capital is, and has been, strongly tied to how capitalism operates (and once again the specter of Stafford Beer wiggles his eyebrows meaningfully).
Another point that seems to reoccur is that other systems may also lead to the control and operation of society to the benefit of the few over the many (albeit sometimes via mechanisms other than concentration of capital). This is a not necessarily an unreasonable comment (for example, an undemocratic and authoritarian state may lead to similar oppression through elite-control of state power rather than capital – something I would object to, a position perhaps not quite as unique amongst socialists as some seem to believe), though I think one should consider the possibility of addressing this via an emphasis on power with systems (surely a consideration for anyone designing any form of societal system). I would, however, note that criticism (however legitimate) of other systems does not fundamentally excuse the failings of capitalism, nor does it change the dynamics and incentives of the system, nor the events taking place in practice – and it doesn’t really seem to be advancing much of a theory of how to proceed.
And finally, to try to forestall a little some potential waffle-pancake style responses, I will note that I am not claiming that capitalism is always harmful in every conceivable and possible case at all times, period; nor am I claiming that capitalism is the only possible source of harm; nor am I claiming that other systems are necessarily superior simply by virtue of not being capitalism. I am simply making the point that there is an inherent part of capitalism which – again, in practice – seems to lead anti-egalitarian hierarchical domination, which in turn seems to result in harm. I hope I may confess, gentle reader, to experiencing a degree of frustration when people seem to have a strong desire to attribute to me – or require me to defend – positions which I have not adopted. I would respectfully ask, therefore, that if someone wishes to respond to me they take a little trouble to ensure they are engaging with me – I fear my patience with repeatedly litigating every preposition I’ve ever said with people who seem more interested in the aesthetics of my comments rather than their substance is rather low these days.
Roger_f 11.11.25 at 7:27 pm
I was reliably informed that the decision to release the waters from Menindee was made by one person and this person has taken early retirement and has moved out of the district. It was a bureaucratic bungle, a management failure of epic proportions.
Tm 11.17.25 at 5:07 pm
Re 10: Recall the statement “The logic of capitalism is to kill” (specifically, the planet).
I don’t quarrel with your general analysis. Like most other economic arrangements, capitalism requires and creates inequality and concentrates power in the hands of a small elite. But what kills the planet is our overuse of planetary resources. Socialist economies, as well as some premodern economies, have also been known to overuse resources. Industrial capitalism is worse mainly because it’s the most efficient production system in human history, in terms of extraction, production, and consumption. And we, including those on the left, are mostly unwilling to face the reality that we need to develop a sustainable, steady-state economy that doesn’t rely on economic growth. Many socialists (maybe not in this thread) delude themselves into thinking that growth isn’t the problem, only capitalist growth. It’s bullshit and that’s why I have little patience with superficial analyses that pretend that if only we could get rid of capitalism – nobody knows how and what to replace it with but whatever – everything would be fine. Blaming “capitalism” in this essentialist way is both too broad (there are better and worse versions of capitalism) and too narrow (noncapitalist economies aren’t necessarily better) and doesn’t really show us the way forward, imho.
freightRail 11.19.25 at 1:54 pm
Postel, Replenish, is a great book about water projects at many different scales that worked.
The author was involved in most of them personally; excellent info about how you can make a difference.
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