Every few years, my family tries to visit the small, sleepy Greek island town my dad’s side of the family is from.
In recent years, when driving there from the main port, I’ve been gripped with a shocking sight: entire mountain faces without the slightest vegetation – nothing grows there anymore, it’s just scorched earth. Farms, olive groves – destroyed. The blackened bony remains of little abandoned houses, burned to a crisp. Wondering where the family who lived there went to flee, or if they got stuck inside. Wondering if it’ll happen to our town.
Greece has been hit with increasingly devastating forest fires year over year. Fires are pretty much blazing 24/7 in the small country during the summer. Worse – because Greece is composed of a peninsula and a bunch of islands, they’re also now hit with deadly torrential floods every spring.
Of course, we face floods and forest fires all across Canada too. But many parts of Greece are not very developed. The houses are old, brittle and violate basic safety standards, and would certainly not make it through a wildfire or flood.
These islanders, majority of whom have never even stepped foot on a plane, like billions of other poor people, are forced to deal with the fallout of capitalism-induced climate crisis. While billionaires go to space for fun, have well-kept megamansions waiting for them around the world and travel by private jet at every occasion.
My religious grandma tells me she’s worried it’s the apocalypse. She’s been reading the Book of Revelation. But I know the ground is just being paved for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism worldwide. Capitalism has nothing left to offer but a destroyed planet. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
