Burning Through 250 Years

Hello Interactors,

Welcome to summer where Interplace turns its attention to physical geography and the environment. It’s already a crazy El Niño — thanks in large part to global warming — and the United States is having a big birthday. How might these be related and what to do about it?

What follows is not a celebration or a condemnation, but more of a reckoning. I look at what was built, what was deliberately forgotten, and what is now continually arriving, season by season, in forms of weather the founders could not have imagined.

Although Alexander Humboldt — one of the world’s most famous scientists at the time — did warn Jefferson of the effects of human-induced climate change in 1804. He based his prediction on changes he observed in forests and water systems as a result of mono-crops and industrial “steam and gas”. Jefferson ignored him.

BUILDING, BURNING, BILLOWING BACK

On this momentous 250th Fourth of July, when the world is experiencing record level extreme weather events, let’s reflect on how over the last 250 years the United States helped build, extract, and then burn the material and political conditions that made climate change possible. From the beginning, it tied itself to land, extraction, mobility, and expansion. Over time those commitments became an energy system built on coal, oil, gas, highways, suburbs, industrial agriculture, and a development model that treated nature as an inexhaustible storehouse. That legacy is now legible in the atmosphere itself. Let’s light a Roman Candle in celebration!

Even before the 4th of July fireworks celebrations create another nationwide 42% average increase in fine particulate matter (Seidel, et al., 2015), the United States bears the single largest share of cumulative historical CO₂ emissions of any nation . We represent roughly 20 percent of the global total since 1850 contributing approximately 0.2°C of warming to date (Carbon Brief, 2021; UNEP, 2023). To represent four percent of the world’s current population and be responsible for nearly a fifth of its cumulative warming is not a coincidence of geography or fake news. It is the outcome of deliberate choices about how a republic would be organized, energized, and expanded across two and a half centuries.

The United States has long imagined freedom in spatial terms: movement, property, settlement, mastery, frontier, and circulation. Those abstract ideals were made real through land theft and remade landscapes, as well as through infrastructure