Crimes against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating
Jeff Sparrow
Scribe: 2021
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In one of the various striking depictions of violence that appear in Ivo Andric’s 1961 novel The Bridge on the Drina, a shopkeeper called Alihodja is seized and nailed by his ear to the bridge of the book’s title. Andric evokes the horrifying alchemy of group psychology by which the unimaginable—the grotesque infliction of painful, humiliating and pointless injury on an innocent man—becomes inevitable:

Would it be, or would it not be? At first the majority of them thought the affair to be, as indeed it was, senseless, ugly and impossible. But in moments of general excitement, something has to be done, something big and unusual, and that was the only thing to be done.

In Jeff Sparrow’s Crimes against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating we find descriptions of how the senseless, ugly and impossible have come to pass, made to seem inevitable and normalised not through the howls of the mob, or the vanity of a tyrant, but through the workings of capitalism. Sparrow writes with flair and urgency, and his reminder that the global ecological crisis has been created by human hands could hardly be more timely. He reminds us that we can be specific about attribution for the crisis: that ‘the smooth, grim people destroying our planet remain a tiny minority’.

• Tags: David Ritter, Issue 27, Jeff Sparrow