EXTRACT: The Long Heat

This extract takes us from the fields of western France, as activists battle against the building of a mégabassine, an enormous reservoir intended to tackle the threat that climate change poses to French agriculture, to a blistering history of “muscular adaptationism.” This is an ideology that says: “these extreme weather events are now a fact of life, but they can be managed if powerful enough technologies are put in place—dykes, water bombers, mégabassines.”

On 25 March 2023, we woke up in a tent camp turned marshland after a night of incessant heavy rain, like the proverbial music festival in which revellers melt into the mud. But the many thousands camping on this site had not (only) come to make merry. As the morning bells rang, we lined up in three columns and marched out of the camp in solemn order. A sense of foreboding prevailed. The police had encircled the camp with flying checkpoints, making the trip there a protracted game of hide and seek; but now they were nowhere to be seen. The general expectation was that they were gearing up for a major battle. So were the activists, in their own manner: in the ‘blue finger’ where we marched, many covered their faces with balaclavas and gas masks, donned helmets and carried wooden shields painted in blue; between the ubiquitous blue overalls and the low leaden skies, the scene moved through shades of aquamarine. A brass band gave rhythm to hundreds of muddy boots. Someone beat a drum and played a sombre flute, as if the crowds were marching through the fields to confront the defenders of a feudal castle; and indeed, as soon as we approached the target, a new hue of bluish grey entered the spectrum—clouds of tear gas—accompanied by the staccato whistles and bursts of grenades.

During the decade before this battle, as the lands of Europe warmed by between 1.5°C and 2.5°C—one degree faster than the global average—the French countryside began to wither in the heat. Crops shrivelled for lack of water. Farmers did not have enough to sustain irrigation. Fields turned a barren yellow, while fires stalked the remaining forests. The curve shot up in the early 2020s, with the combined drought and heatwave of the summer of 2022 setting a new record for the continent; in France, January and February 2023—the winter months just before the battle—saw thirty-two consecutive days without rain. The long-term viability of agriculture in the west and south of the country appeared to be in question. What could be done to save it? French authorities imported a model first tried out in Spain: the construction of enormous water reservoirs, to be known as mégabassines. Craters covering more than a dozen hectares, with plastic sheathing as floor, they would each hold as much water as nearly 300 Olympic pools. But it would not be captured from rainfall. The water would, rather, be pumped through pipes, from the ground and streams and their run-off in the fields. By extracting it in wintertime—so the reasoning went—and storing it in the open tanks for the crucial spring and summer months, farmers would be guaranteed access to this ever more precious liquid: a technology for adapting to hotter and drier times. By the time of the battle, there might have been some fifty mégabassines in operation or various stages of development, and more were coming.

They attracted the ire of a broad segment of critics. Even if undertaken in winter—a season itself increasingly arid—the pumping of water would leave the surrounding lands high and dry. Small farmers unconnected to the mégabassines would have even less to survive on, as would the various species inhabiting the catchment areas. Centralising all of that water in giant ponds was not a recipe for thrift. Under the ever-warmer sun, more of it would evaporate; instead of percolating through the ground and replenishing the aquifers, it would be collected at the surface, where it would be most directly exposed to the heat. And the spigots were reserved for some farmers only. The mégabassines were designed for the largest agribusiness companies and their corn fields in particular, the products from which would largely be exported, as fodder for livestock as far afield as in China. This was not an agricultural model for exiting the climate crisis. It would take France and the rest of the agro-industrial world deeper into it, while wasting water, excluding the less fortunate from its use, desiccating lands and threatening the vestiges of rural biodiversity. If this were a technology promoted as adaptation, it had to be smashed.

Or so thought a growing coalition of farmers, trade-unionists, conservationists, autonomists, climate activists, scientists, parliamentarians of the left and others, many of whom marched under the umbrella name of Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or the Uprisings of the Earth (a cause and a milieu captured in Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, another fine exemplar of environmental fiction). During the 2010s, the beacon of radical environmentalism in France was the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a vast tract of land occupied by militants originally bent on stopping a planned airport. They succeeded, spectacularly. The airport was scrapped and the ZAD remained: a local victory in the struggle for mitigation of the classic kind. Out of the ZAD emerged the core of Les Soulèvements de la Terre in late 2021 to push the climate movement in Europe onto novel terrain. For the first time, it took aim at a project advertised as adaptation. In October 2022, nearly 7,000 people swarmed through the fields of Sainte-Soline in the west of the country, towards the construction site for one detested mégabassine. As some militants held off the police in pitched battles, others stormed the site and spent two days tearing apart pipes and fences in a revelry of sabotage. Half a year later, they were back, at least three times as many.

But this time, the police had built a fortress around the reservoir of Sainte-Soline. Some 3,000 cops from the gendarmerie and other units stood guard, their cars and vans and four-wheelers forming rings of steel. The most heavily armed cops were positioned around the embankments, their commanders on top of them. When the tip of the ‘pink finger’ arrived—carrying a huge wooden figure of the bustard, a totemic pheasant species threatened by the mégabassines—it was showered in tear gas. These were not the militants prepared for confrontation. The latter arrived with the blue finger, and then the field in front of the reservoir was transformed into a battlefield proper: contingents covered with shields charged against the police lines with stones, fireworks, Molotov cocktails. Before long, the first van was on fire, a thick, oily coil of smoke curling into the air. Four more police vehicles would be set ablaze. A few individuals managed to breach the cordon and briefly enter the site before being repelled. From their ramparts, the police rained down weapons of various kinds—tear gas grenades, stun grenades, sting ball grenades, flash balls—with little discrimination, in amounts reaching above 5,000 projectiles fired in less than two hours.

Demonstrators began to fall around us. One screamed from a bloody wound in the back of the leg. Another seemed to have an eye shot out. Paramedics tried to attend to the injured, while crowds behind the frontlines watched in a daze or tried to keep dancing to the nervous techno beats from a sound system. Two demonstrators were hit so badly that they hovered between life and death, one awakening from coma a full month after a grenade entered his head; a further 200 were wounded—faces disfigured, hearing lost, shrapnel in calves—as well as, more lightly, some 50 policemen. After two hours of ferocious fighting, the crowds, traumatised by the scale of the violence meted out to them, began to drift back towards the camp. Some minor pipes connected to the reservoir were sabotaged along the way. By all accounts, it was the most intense confrontation involving an environmental movement in the global North to that date.

‘The Battle of Sainte- Soline’, as the events became known, announced the struggle against a particular kind of adaptation: when resources that become increasingly scarce in a warming world are centralised under the domain of private property, those who lose out will be worse off than before. From their perspective, the arrangement will represent a ‘maladaptation’—exacerbating the problem, not ameliorating it. Eventually they might fight back. Indeed, cases of spontaneous resistance against adaptive projects had begun to pile up on all six continents by the early 2020s, mostly in the form of refusals to follow orders to relocate from declared climate disaster zones. Les Soulèvements de la Terre took such defiance to a higher level of organised militancy, in the heart of the global North.

It paid off. In December 2024, a court in Bordeaux declared the mégabassine in Sainte-Soline ‘illegal’. Because it risked destroying the habitat of the endangered bustard, the reservoir—already filled with water—could be legally used the following summer, but never again. Three other unfinished constructions in the vicinity had their permits suspended. The battle of Sainte-Soline seemed to have been won by the movement; but the same court validated a dozen other mégabassines, ignoring scientific research on how poorly they treated the matter of water in an ever hotter, drier countryside. By the time of this writing, it was not clear whether the ruling represented a half-victory for Les Soulèvements de la Terre and its allies, or something bigger or smaller. But it was eminently clear that, with its repeated exercises in mass militancy, this had become the most vibrant and successful environmental movement in the global North; and that the front around the mégabassines remained fluid and open.

More generally, the battle of Sainte-Soline heralded a logic of climate politics when it’s too late. Once the dominant classes have failed to contain global warming, because they cannot bring themselves to phase out fossil fuels, they will need to do something else to keep their order in place and maintain a semblance of normality. The causes of the warming run rampant, but something has to be done to rein in the process and its symptoms: some technology must be rolled out for getting things under control. When this happens, there is a multiplication of secondary fronts beyond that of mitigation. Novel technologies designed and deployed by the dominant classes elicit their own discontent. It does not have to take the form of violent confrontation—local riots, global wars—which rather mark the pis aller. But all of the main technologies for managing overshoot give rise to new rounds of antagonism. In this sense, Sainte-Soline was a portal into the overshoot conjuncture. Precisely because it is too late for climate politics, there will be so much more of it.

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When the message of the warming underway was first picked up in the 1970s and ’80s, a common response was stoic acceptance: we will learn to live with it. Organic intellectuals of the US bourgeoisie advocated adaptation as the natural solution. In The Great Adaptation—a fitting twist on Karl Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation—Romain Felli has chronicled the history of how scientists, economists and other credentialled experts loyal to the prevailing order embraced the knowledge of anthropogenic global warming as the foretelling of a fate. Although the combustion of fossil fuels was identified as its source, closing it down was a nonstarter: it would cost the economy a fortune and require bureaucracies to rule by fiat. As when any species encounters changes in its environment, adaptation would be the smoother, more flexible option. Half a century before the overshoot conjuncture, the warming was here accepted as preordained.

And adaptation was a matter of technology. In a piece representative for the moment, printed in Nature in 1991, influential US climate scientist Jesse Ausubel made the case for adaptive tech—much to be preferred over attempts to ‘slow down the greenhouse express’. The first examples he gave were ‘cisterns and dams to store water’ in, followed by ‘tractors to speed rapid harvests, and new crop cultivars to reduce susceptibility to drought’. He then veered off into a grand theory of technological development and modernity as such. Humans consistently invent things to make climate matter less and less: food preservatives, refrigerators, air conditioning have allowed them to set their preferences regardless of how warm or cold it might be; windshield wipers enable them to see in the rain. Modernity is a project for ‘climate-proofing’ society. We can now fly to whatever weather we happen to like, enter shopping malls with perfectly optimised temperatures, erect oil platforms on the highest seas, extract rubber from petrochemicals rather than from plants subject to drought and flood. Ever since the shift to steam power, society has been bidding a long farewell to climate: while water mills and sailing ships were hostage to weather conditions, coal set humanity free. Successful adjustment to warming is not a matter of breaking with fossil fuels. It follows from staying on top of their waves and surfing into a future even more dissociated from climate—there will be fully enclosed indoor cities, desalination plants, pipes for collecting freshwater and transferring it to places in need. 

Adaptation, in this moment, was forthrightly conceived as a substitute for mitigation. Instead of getting off fossil fuels, humans should equip themselves with technologies for living with their attendant heat; indeed, for someone like Ausubel, the quest was for more of the gifts coming from those same fuels. But as climate science and politics matured in the 1990s, the equation was inverted. In the year after Ausubel’s essay, at the Rio summit, the United Nations composed its Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundational document of every Conference of the Parties or COP held since then. It did mention the need for adaptation, in passing. But this pursuit was subordinated to that of stopping CO2 concentrations from rising. The world committed itself to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’—to halt the greenhouse gas express, in Ausubel’s terms; a ranking of priorities opposite to his. The signing countries—rich ones in particular—were enjoined to mitigate the problem at its source by limiting their emissions. The negotiations that followed proceeded from this core premise. Mitigation stayed in focus, from Rio to Kyoto and Copenhagen; in a charitable reading, all the way to Paris. Adaptation remained an auxiliary, although, towards the end of this period, more and more voices were raised on its behalf. The world, they argued, urgently needed to cut emissions, but there was already damage in the pipeline. People also needed cushions. Mitigation and adaption were not substitutes for each other: both were called for, and each could, in the best case, facilitate the other. Contrary to the original substitutionism of people like Schneider and Ausubel, the COPs and the IPCC reports of the first two decades of the twenty-first century laid down the ideal of a combination.

In the early 2020s, however, the equation changed again, as the heat began to bite deeper into people’s lives. Mitigation stood revealed as an epochal failure thus far. There had been no limit to emissions, only a secular rise. In late 2022, the Economist pronounced the ambition to cap the warming at 1.5°C dead in the water; ‘no matter what, the world now faces more floods, droughts, storms and wildfires.’ Adaptation must be put front and centre. ‘Fortunately,’ the magazine continued, ‘a lot of adaptation is affordable. It can be as simple as providing farmers with hardier strains of crops and getting cyclone warnings to people in harm’s way.’ When the disasters struck, top leaders of state apparatuses adopted much the same rhetoric. 

In September 2023, the deadliest American wildfires in a century burned through Hawaii, and the Wall Street Journal—known for having voiced climate denial longer than most; not known for advocating a phase-out of fossil fuels—had a solution on offer: ‘Better tech could save lives in a world of bigger, faster, more devastating fires.’ More precisely, ‘a wide array of new technologies are being tested and deployed that can alert authorities minutes after a fire starts. These include tower- mounted cameras that use artificial intelligence to identify smoke, and sensors that are installed just above the forest floor, sniffing out fires using a kind of electronic nose.’ The Journal spoke to startups working on advanced satellites and other devices to be ‘stitched into comprehensive "fire intelligence networks”’. If only the tech would set off the sirens in time, the burning world could be brought under control.

We may call this species of ideology muscular adaptationism. It says: these extreme weather events are now a fact of life, but they can be managed if only powerful enough technologies are put in place—dykes, water bombers, electronic noses, mégabassines. If the nation gets its act together and reinforces its disaster preparedness in a more or less military fashion and patriotic vein, life will go on. The forces of nature, the beasts can be beaten back. What muscular adaptationism does not say—and this silence defines the ideology—is: ‘Wake up folks, if we don’t rid ourselves of fossil fuels, we’re going to have more and more of these disasters until we can’t live any longer.’ Symptoms are to be combatted, not causes and drivers.

The folly at work here is the belief that it is possible to adapt to a world careening towards 2°C and 3°C and even more degrees of warming. It is a truism that it becomes harder to live with the heat the more of it there is. Adaptation to half a degree is fairly feasible—to six or twelve times as much, far less so. One survey found that the effectiveness of any given adaptation measure— storing water, improving irrigation, protecting against floods, shifting planting dates—will decline by an average of 70 per cent for every degree; but this is a guesstimate, and the fall is not likely to be linear. There could be sudden breakdowns in buffering capacity. Indeed, muscular adaptationism began to take hold just as the world approached tipping points in the climate system, beyond which, as we shall soon see, adaptation loses its meaning. And the ideology had the function of speeding up that approach, because it let fossil fuels off the hook. Where mitigation should have been, it insinuated the illusion that one could proof society against a collapsing climate: quench ever-worsening fires with more water bombers or smarter electronic noses; dam up ever-growing shortages and excesses of water behind walls. But one cannot pull oneself up by technological bootstraps forever. Unmitigated warming will sooner or later overtop the defences, and muscular adaptationism paradoxically brought this breaking point closer, by redirecting attention to ‘better tech’. Such tech did not need to have any material existence at the moment of disaster. It was not clear that Germany actually overhauled building rules, or that France expanded its fleet of water bombers, or that ‘fire intelligence networks’ were within reach: it was the promise of future delivery that did ideological work in the heat of the moment. Substitution had become real, even if the technical solutions had not.

The process that started to spin in the early 2020s has been felicitously called a ‘doom loop’. ‘The consequences of the crisis and the failure to address it draw focus and resources from tackling its causes, leading to higher temperatures and ecological loss, which then create more severe consequences, diverting even more attention and resources, and so on.’ By championing adaptation instead of mitigation between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, bourgeois intellectuals adumbrated this loop; it then became a practical proposition in the 2020s, when the refusal of the dominant classes to close down the sources of the heat began to take more serious effect. All signs were, at that moment in time, that the loop would keep revolving.

The Long Heat is out on 7 October. Pre-order a copy from Verso now.