The Wildfire of Capitalism
On metaphor in the face of catastrophe.
Global warming has always had trouble being terrifying. Invisible gases trapped high in the sky have never made great villains, nor have their mundane terrestrial sources. The crisis’ timescale, measured in a degree or inch here and a part-per-million there, is in some ways literally glacial, which isn’t exactly the pace of most monsters. And the link between its causes and longer-term impacts—floods, famines, mass migrations, wars, and such—can feel intangible enough to require leaps of faith.
There is a reason, in other words, why many resort to metaphors when trying to explain or understand the problem. Global warming, we hear, is a greenhouse, a hothouse, a house in flames. It is a planetary fever, a fast-approaching meteor, a time bomb. Its oblivious victims are the proverbial slowly boiled frog. All of these have been attempts to bring a problem that in many ways exceeds the bounds of human cognition down to the level of everyday life and make it feel, as it were, closer to home.
Among the more common of these metaphors for global warming, the wildfire makes for a particularly interesting case. To be sure, wildfires can be made to symbolize just about anything that’s terrible. Bad things that spread. Bad things that happen quickly. Bad things that destroy completely and without remorse. There is also the long list of things they are said to symptomatize: human hubris or ecological neglect, the creative destruction of nature, the absence of the New Testament god as a guarantor of mercy, the presence of the Old Testament god as a punisher of sin.
But what is interesting about the wildfire as a metaphor for climate change is the way these two things relate not merely in a symbolic capacity but also more literally as cause and effect. It is common enough knowledge that the last of these is true: wildfires are undoubtedly an effect of climate change. Research has found that climate change-induced drought more than doubled the chance of the recent Canadian infernos while increasing their severity by at least 20%. Similar statistics could be offered to explain the fires in Los Angeles, Hawaii, California, Greece, and elsewhere.
It is less widely known that fires themselves contribute to warming. When a forest burns, trees that once helped to absorb carbon dioxide as a carbon sink release that carbon back into the atmosphere. In Canada in 2023, the incineration of vast tracts of boreal forest released twice as much carbon as the country produced that year through electricity generation, transportation, heavy industry, construction, and agriculture combined. Since 2020, fires have raised the country’s emissions by 50%. In California, the 2020 fire season erased all of the emissions gains the state had made over the previous sixteen years. Adding to all of this is the fact that wildfires produce soot, or black carbon, which, when spewed by the ton into the atmosphere, absorbs light and thus heat and contributes even further to warming.
But even as wildfires serve as a nexus of these feedback loops of climate change, helping to cause and being caused by it, they also serve as implausibly clear object lessons in the entire process. Like a macabre twist on Goethe’s notion of self-similarity in nature, they exist as contributing parts while also echoing the hellish whole. They do this by embodying the phenomenon of global warming at its most basic: when carbon burns out of control, ending up in the air, it disturbs human ways of life to the point of threatening ecological health and survival. Wildfires demonstrate this with little subtlety.
Yet they also echo and repeat specific phenomena that occur as a part of this larger process. For example, wildfires can worsen the weather, much as global warming does; when a blaze is intense enough, it can create massive pyrocumulonimbus clouds—hellish conflagrations of smoke, gasses, and moisture towering higher than Mt. Everest—that unleash lightning, tornados, and torrents of rain on the firescape. Then there are the feedback loops. These ultra-hot fires can also destroy native seedbanks and alter the ecology of an area to such an extent that native plant species can no longer grow in the soil, giving way to highly combustible grasses that only increase the risk of future fires. It is not unlike the way the snow melt generated by global warming results in darker ground, allowing the Earth to absorb even more solar radiation than it otherwise would, which only adds to rates of subsequent snow melt and temperature rise.
All of this together forms a darkly allegorical landscape that helps to make the otherwise intangible aspects of climate change luridly concrete. In the wildfire’s flames, we have an animated materialization of terrestrial warming and its impacts that is ominous to the point of camp. In the wildfire’s smoke, it is as though noxious CO2, methane, and other invisible greenhouse gasses had been rendered visible, draped in sooty funereal garb or dusted like fingerprints on a manhandled sky. And in the slow drift of that smoke across time zones, drawing a veil over our common sun, it is as though wildfires were mocking the borderless public nature of an atmosphere that had been co-opted as a dumping ground by private corporations. In this grim ecological theater, smoke and flame become the medium of some sort of twisted performance art, staged by one disaster to draw attention to another.
But these forays into symbol searching can be problematic. For one, they invite us to project onto non-human nature our all-too-human cries for action—the wildfire as an act of self-immolation by a grieving Mother Nature, and so on—and few good things ever came from that. It also risks aestheticizing disaster, reducing tragedy to the fodder of self-indulgent exercises in formalism. None of this really teaches us much about the real causes of the problems at hand. It’s fine, of course, to explore the ways nature repeats and doubles itself, contains and represents itself. It’s just not fine to confuse this pattern hunting for politics.
To avoid doing that, what can be more productive than reveling in the likeness we find between some things is to ask why we resist seeing it in others, even when there’s ample evidence to suggest the connection. A productive example would be the wildfire and capitalism, the real engine behind the warming that is enabling these disasters. Why might we resist seeing one in the other? What type of ideological work might be at play?
We can start to answer by considering capitalism’s own fires. We refer to things as wild when they cannot be contained or controlled and we feel like they should be, usually due to the threat they pose to human ways of life. And so we refer to fires in which the unchecked burning of carbon, in the form of trees and chaparral and grassland and houses big and small, as being wild. Yet we do not speak of capitalism’s own unchecked burning of carbon in a similar way. This is in part because the myriad fires of capitalism—beneath us in our boilers, above us in our airplanes, and around us in our power plants, lawnmowers, buses, and cars—are dispersed in a way that makes them hard to see as a singular threatening thing. What’s more, this dispersed state allows them to seem to be contained and controlled as tools serving a concrete need. From this perspective, there is nothing wild about them. So controlled are these flames that they can be made to burn in minute increments that maintain precise speeds on our highways and precise temperatures in our homes.
Yet this is deceptive. For one, fires don’t need to exist as a single mass to be wild and destructive. Individual homes in the Palisades, turned to ash by embers dispersed by Santa Anna winds, prove as much. The flame itself isn’t the problem so much as the conditions that enable it to destructively spread. Under capitalism, the wind that blows the embers, ensuring the unchecked spreading of fossil-fueled flames, is what Marx called its “mute compulsion,” the relentless pressure exerted by the economic system to grow at whatever social or environmental cost. It is not, in other words, a pressure exerted by individual capitalists as a function of their morality and thus one that could be tempered by conscience. It is a far more blind, impersonal, and transcendent pressure stemming from the structurally induced competitive mandates of the system itself, compelling producers to endlessly expand production lest they perish, and regardless of ecological limits. Nothing about this is not wild.
We also cannot say that these dispersed flames are truly contained and controlled. This would be true only to the extent that we ignored the collective damage done by the emissions that those flames invisibly produce. In this sense, they are fantastic metaphors for capitalism in general as a system that, in order to remain socially viable, must disavow and make invisible its own ineluctable destructive tendencies. We find this disavowal in the most common platitude used to defend the system: capitalism as nothing less than a playground for liberalism’s formal liberties—free workers freely entering the marketplace and freely selling their labor power to other free people in exchange for a fair wage. Freedom. Not wildness.
But also more deception. What this account leaves out are the unsustainable and expropriative background conditions that prefigure and enable these supposed freedoms. Workers freely sell their labor power only insofar as we forget that it is the historical theft of their land—together with the perpetuation of that disparity through the generations—that has created their need to do this in the first place. And the wages capital provides are contractual and fair only to the extent that we forget how little leverage workers have to raise them, how insufficient they are relative to the social surplus, and about all of unpaid, non-contractual labor that capitalism quietly depends on behind the scenes for its profits. Capitalism doesn’t pay for the care work, largely done by women, that nourishes and replenishes those paid workers so they can continue clocking in. It doesn’t pay to replenish or repair ecosystems after it strips them of the raw materials. It doesn’t pay to use our public atmosphere as a private dumping ground for its greenhouse gasses. And it doesn’t pay for the endless public health impacts—including those caused by climate change-fueled wildfires—that flow therefrom.
Capitalism, in short, takes vastly more than it gives. And it does so due to its structural mandate to grow as cheaply as possible for profit. What we must see is how this form of growth is inseparable from destruction, achievable only by pushing its enabling conditions—its workers, its sources of raw materials—to the breaking point. It cannot occur, in other words, without exhausting what fuels it from one moment to the next before moving on to new frontiers of expropriation. Which is to say that it resembles nothing so much as the exponentially expanding circumference of a wildfire.
But we should also consider another, related way that we use the word wild: to mean the primitive, as in the opposite of the civilized, something that is part of lowly nature and not culture. Because wildfires are so destructive and terrifying, we want to believe that they originate in a place apart from us, the civilized. To call a raging fire wild therefore allows us to distance ourselves from it and to believe that it is not somehow an extension of our own irresponsibility, oversight, or proclivities towards self-destruction. This is the ideology of the so-called natural disaster: it is entirely this thing called nature’s fault, not ours.
Yet with this, we come to a way that capitalism has avoided responsibility not only for its general wildness but also for its role in enabling actual wildfires themselves. Like humans, capitalism also wants to believe that it is above nature and the wild—that its deregulated markets and free enterprise represent the end of history, not the beginning. But it turns out that this commonplace concept of nature—nature as the opposite of the civilized and human—was largely an opportunistic invention of capitalism itself. Emerging alongside the sixteenth-century colonial expeditions of Western Europe, the concept of nature provided a convenient way of classifying certain racialized workers as less-than-human and thus less-than-deserving of a wage or compensatory care. As the scholar Jason W. Moore has written, it was and continues to be an ideological tool used to cheapen certain forms of work and rationalize inadequate compensation en route to higher returns. This was certainly true of the indigenous and enslaved peoples of the colonial and mercantile eras—deemed naturales, all but animals—and it is a legacy that has continued on with the racialized, criminally underpaid workers of the Global South. But it is also true of what we more typically think of as nature: the non-human labor done by the earth and atmosphere to produce food and raw materials and store waste. As the nutrient-depleted fields of Big Ag and our carbon-choked atmosphere attest, this is work that has, in its own way, also gone without replenishment or care. In all of these cases, capitalism has encouraged and exploited distinctions between nature and the human to justify not paying its true social costs and thus distance itself from its own self-destructive unsustainability.
What is essential to see is how this lack of care for non-human nature in particular has, in effect, created new natures that have enabled wildfires in the most literal sense. In Maui, part of what fueled the Lahana Fire was an invasive species of grass brought to the islands by nineteenth-century cattle ranchers, who prized the plant for its toleration of drought. The scale of the blazes was enabled by the fact that those combustible grasses had been allowed to take over sprawling corporate sugarcane and pineapple farms that had been left idle or abandoned due to competition with foreign markets. In the Canadian wildfires of 2023, it was tree farms, planted by corporate logging companies to fill the gashes they had left in the landscape, that burned as much as the so-called wilderness. The trees had been planted as monocultures of highly combustible Black Spruce spaced as little as six feet apart, unprotected by more fire-resistant species typically interspersed with that species in the wild. Most were planted as “carbon offsets,” a market-based approach to continued corporate ecocide that has proven to be worthless.
These disasters weren’t natural, in other words. In both cases, what burned was not some sort of primitive nature raging out of control so much as nature mediated through and through by capital. The imperative of endless accumulation had led corporations to take what they wanted from the landscape without giving back in the form of adequate replenishment and repair. They created wildfires by creating landscapes conducive to them, formed in the image of their own irrepressible wildness.
Of course, there are also more straightforward ways that capitalism’s neglect in the interest of profit has led to uncontrollable infernos. For years, the capital-soaked Los Angeles real estate lobby has recklessly pushed to expand housing into the highest-risk areas for wildfires. It has simply been more profitable, it has said, to build in an undeveloped suburban tinderbox than to do so in less fire-prone areas. Other forms of corporate malfeasance have only compounded this risk. In 2017, sixteen California wildfires were caused by faulty electrical infrastructure owned by investor-owned utility PG&E. In 2018, equipment failure on a faulty PG&E transmission tower caused the devastating Camp Fire, which leveled the town of Paradise and killed over 80 people. In 2019, downed PG&E power lines sparked the Kincade Fire in Sonoma County. And two years later, the Dixie Fire—also caused by PG&E—became the second largest wildfire in California history. In all of these cases, ratepayer money that might have gone towards better maintaining and fireproofing this infrastructure surely went to the pockets of shareholders instead.
But ultimately, this catalogue of capitalism’s wildness must lead us back to where we started: to global warming itself. With or without the help of metaphors, we will never understand this existential threat to the global working class and humanity in general without accepting that human-caused climate change is an entirely predictable feature, not a bug, of a system that is incentivized by its structural compulsions to disavow its own wildness and refuse to pay its true social costs. To paraphrase Moore, treat the atmosphere as a rent-free dumping ground for long enough and the bill will eventually come due.
Yet just because capitalism disavows its own wildness doesn’t mean we have to. And why would we? We know that capitalism is wild because we have seen 16 trillion in wealth evaporate nearly overnight in the 2008 financial crisis. We have seen the destruction of entire midwestern towns and millions of personal livelihoods due to manufacturing overcapacity and deindustrialization. And we have seen millions more consigned by capital to structural unemployment, incarceration, or a lifetime of indebtedness as a solution for managing surplus populations amid its late-stage transformations. Capitalism would maintain that these, too, are “natural disasters,” albeit of a different kind—natural as in normal, mandated by the market gods, willed by the fickle graces of the hidden hand. But as with wildfires, they aren’t natural disasters so much as examples of capitalism’s disastrous nature. They are the predictable results of a system that writes off the suffering of hundreds of millions of people as so many externalities, so many naturales, so much expendable fuel for a fire that rages only for the sake of its own continuation. If the wildfire is an object lesson in anything, it is this: blind exponential growth that is inseparable from social and ecological devastation. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we will understand the real reason the world burns.