What The Salem Witch Trials Can Teach Us About Climate Change
Imagine your community is suffering economic hardships, primarily the result of negligence from elites. They have gotten you into several ill-timed wars and have mismanaged the economy.
Worse, an ecological disaster has exacerbated these problems, and many are going hungry as a result.
These crises — again, the development of your elite’s incompetence — cause an influx of immigrants to “pour” into your surrounding community. And suddenly, tensions that were never great to begin with get a whole lot more tumultuous. Leaders can’t seem to agree on anything, and the political apparatus grinds to a halt.
It’s in this moment, when everything is going to shit that some elites start to convince long-term inhabitants to feel that the problem is a marginalized other. A group that is seemingly weak but all-powerful at the same time and must be stopped at any cost.
It might sound like I am talking about the political dysfunction of the current era and the various moral panics against immigrants, queer people, and people of color, but everything I have said can also describe the moral panic that led to the Salem Witch Trials.
A history that sadly is all too relevant in the modern era.
The chaos before the panic
The Salem Witch Trials (1692–93 CE) are one of American history’s most infamous moral panics. By its end, hundreds of people were accused — and 19 were hanged, one pressed by rocks, and at least four died while imprisoned — for the supposed crime of practicing witchcraft and being in league with the devil.
Books have been written about the ups and downs of these trials — and truthfully, there were many contributing factors: petty small-town politics, a narcissistic grifter caught in the middle of a budget debate, a financial crisis, and even climate change (I encourage people to check out the podcast Remarkable Providences if you want to listen to a good recap).
Yet, from my perspective, we have to center these trials on the horrors of colonial life. Early colonists endured many hardships, including harsh weather, smallpox, and, most unmistakably, war. In particular, King William’s War (1688–1697 CE)— sometimes referred to as the First French and Indian War — was a costly military conflict between the British colonists and France’s indigenous allies that not only took place during the trials but also in Southern New England and Maine, very close to Salem’s borders.
Over decades, thousands died in these conflicts, and, more to the point, many of those who lived through them found themselves moving away — some to the Salem region. As Rosie Lesso writes in The Collector:
“Refugees fled from the worst affected areas in New York, Quebec and Nova Scotia into wider communities including Salem. This influx of new people put the small village of Salem under immense strain as the fight for limited resources turned bitter.”
It cannot be understated how the trauma of this war — one the English colonists were at the time losing — would impact the psychology of many of the trial’s participants (and victims). In Susan Balée’s review of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, she writes:
“A modern reader can’t help but think that posttraumatic stress syndrome must have been rampant in towns like Salem, where the survivors of shattered families and communities came to rest and recover. Emotionally, the Bay Colonists must all have been on edge, their knowledge of an ongoing war always on the borders of their consciousness, just as it was on the borders of their settlements.”
Add to this that the region was engulfed in an ice age (i.e., “the little ice age”) that led to crop failures and food shortages and that the racism of colonists had them associate indigenous Americans with the devil, and you might understand (though certainly not condone) the mania that followed.
The war — which was partly kicked off by English Governor Andros’s decision to raid a New France Trading House in Maine — had a destabilizing effect on the entire New England region. Governor Andros was soon removed in 1689 (two years before the trials) due to his incompetence as well as British politics beyond the scope of this article (see the Glorious Revolution), and that left a power vacuum. The Colony Charter was suspended, and it took an entire year — the year the trials occurred — to establish a court rooted in actual laws.
In the meantime, a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer was established, and unlike the more legally grounded court that would be created a year later, this one admitted “spectral evidence” — i.e., the dreams and visions that were the primary evidence for these “trials.”
Some argue the Salem Witch trials were an inversion of traditional power dynamics because women and girls — i.e., people low on the Puritanical hierarchy — were deciding the lives of their fellow citizens, and some powerful men were caught in the crossfire. But overwhelmingly, many of the trial’s victims were at the bottom of that hierarchy, too. About two-thirds of the executed were women. The median age was 59, and several were impoverished, flaunted puritanical norms by having pre-martial sex, or were on the wrong side of petty town politics.
It’s a critique confusing someone’s ability to gain individual power through “reinforcing the system” with “breaking said system.”
The people who ultimately made the decisions to execute their fellow citizens for frankly bullshit reasons were not the accusers but those men on the Court of Oyer and Terminer — many of whom were responsible for the same bad military decisions made during the war. As Balée continues to summarize:
“Norton concludes that because the colony’s leaders were the same men who presided over the witchcraft trials, ‘they attempted to shift the responsibility for their own inadequate defense of the frontier to the demons of the invisible world, and as a result they presided over the deaths of many innocent people.’”
Their citizens were suffering, and rather than focus on the poor leadership that contributed to this state of affairs; they chose to point the finger at an ethereal enemy far removed from the hellish reality they were responsible for.
What does any of this have to do with climate change?
We exist in an entirely distinct political context from 17th-century America (obviously), but there are similarities. We are likewise in the midst of a financial crisis, political dysfunction is our norm, and a series of bad governance decisions (in our case, surrounding climate change and military interventions) has led to a substantial amount of migration.
We don’t often label the hundreds of thousands of people who have moved from desertifying parts of Latin America, the Hurricane-pounded Gulf Coast, or the wild-fire-prone West Coast as “climate change refugees,” but that’s what they effectively are — people who have been forced to move because of the climate.
An often-cited example comes from the city of Paradise, California, where the infamous Camp Fire in 2018 burned the town to the ground, forcing many of its residents to flee to nearby Chico. As Scott Wilson wrote in the New York Times in August of 2019:
“[Chico], the city of 93,000 people grew to 112,000, a 20 percent population spike, in a matter of hours. The vast majority of the Paradise displaced are still here.”
This type of displacement is happening in cities and towns across America. There have been a lot of estimates on how many people will have to move because of climate change — over 1 billion by 2050, according to one estimate — with tens of millions already moving around the world every year. Thousands of people were displaced inside the United States alone in 2023, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
Climate change is forcing millions to move, and just like in Salem, we are seeing a sadly predictable cycle where “moral entrepreneurs” (i.e., elites scapegoating the marginalized to maintain the moral order) redirect frustration over the status quo toward vulnerable people such as migrants.
Returning to the example of Chico, the migration had the immediate consequence of flipping the 5–2 left-wing majority in the city council to a 4–3 right-wing majority in 2020. That conservative majority was used to begin increasing the eviction of homeless residents, many former occupants of Paradise (i.e., climate change refugees). This included the 2022 clearing of the Comanche Creek Greenway encampment, which at the time was the largest encampment of unhoused people in the town (roughly 102 people).
This was a decision that many townsfolk were happy with, as anti-homelessness sentiment was and continues to be quite common. As one resident at the encampment remarked a year before the clearing:
“People are always talking bad about us and I’m just like, ‘They don’t even try to understand or they just think that we’re incapable and like disgusting.’”
This situation has not improved since the Supreme Court overturned a lower court restriction on camping bans. These sweeps will most likely increase, not only in California but throughout the US.
We are seeing a pattern across the country where the specter of “lawlessness” is used to demonize migrants, the homeless, and other marginalized identities — themselves often victims of climate change — who are then scapegoated as the source of all of society’s woes. To the point where a presidential nominee for the 2024 election cycle, Donald Trump, incoherently (and falsely) ranted at a debate about immigrants eating dogs and other pets.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
These kinds of statements are all over conservative media (and even in some right-leaning liberal circles), and they remind me of the accusers at Salem. They feel like visions, imaginary happenings of wrongdoings that moral entrepreneurs can point to as justification for why a certain population must be eliminated. Swap out satan for migrants, and it’s hard to see the difference.
And just like in Salem, this rhetoric is a misdirection to cover up political incompetence. A rise in crime does not correlate with increasing or decreasing police budgets in a given area. Increasing deportations and homeless sweeps do not stop migration that results from financial and climate-based precarity.
The climate is degrading due to negligent policy choices (see Our Leaders’ Solution To Climate Change Is To Pretend Like They Have Solved The Problem) that militarization fails to address, but while removing such scapegoats does nothing to improve our society, to some, it sure feels like it does.
And feelings are what moral panics are all about.
A moral conclusion
I am sure some residents in Salem briefly felt more secure, thinking the devil was being uprooted from their community. Dogmatism is a helluva a drug.
But, like any moral panic, the root cause of their problems was not being addressed. The political incompetence of their leaders had made their community less safe, and rather than address the impacts of a looming war and food shortages, their leaders pushed their community to look inward at an unseen enemy, sacrificing innocent people in the process to keep the narrative alive.
Likewise, it’s worrying that our leaders are primarily concerned with militarizing our cities, towns, and borders — using the specter of law and order to do so— and not doing a damn thing to address the root causes of migration and homelessness.
Instead of solving these problems, the solution seems to be to whip up a panic about them — and that’s something not very different from Salem at all.