Wildfires are raging across much of the American West, torching over 5 million acres of forest and displacing tens of thousands of people, while hurricanes stack up in the Gulf of Mexico and barrel toward the extensive and vulnerable fossil capitalist infrastructure of the Gulf Coast. We are living through a compound crisis, with multiple, overlapping forms of climate catastrophe battering the country.

These supposed “natural” disasters are driven at bottom by capitalism’s relentless incursions into and exploitation of the environment. The coronavirus pandemic, for example, has its origins in land grabs and deforestation that unleashed previously boxed-in pathogens, triggering new forms of disease. At the time of writing, it is unclear exactly how this year’s savage round of wildfires and hurricanes will reshape the country, although there are strong signs that investors are growing increasingly nervous about vertiginously increasing risk in red-hot real estate markets like California’s. City life is already being dramatically reshaped by the compound crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic.

New York City — the United States’ original pandemic epicenter and still home to some of the highest total per-capita coronavirus deaths — faces an increasingly troubled future. Pundits have begun talking about a “revenge of the suburbs” as people chafe under lockdown in cramped New York City apartment buildings and try to figure out ways to escape to less dense places. A whole genre of literature has emerged speculating on dystopian urban futures in the wake of the pandemic.