What great fires, floods, and plagues all have in common is mass movement. And what a successful and sustained mass movement requires is a wide open field for its advance, or in other words, an environment which serves to fuel and encourage it as it moves. This is a movement that not only requires the directional transfer of a large amount of energy, but also the general conditions needed for the transfer to take place. In this case, these phenomena are the products of systems and systematic action.
There are systems embedded in the general environment which are acting on the general environment in universal and systematized ways, generating broad forces of transformation that are acting simultaneously. These are systems built to affect a certain constant low level of material perturbations, implied in the perpetual cycles of industrialized production and consumption.
Further, effects of these perturbations are allowed to accumulate and accelerate. Short term fixes, which don't fundamentally threaten the systems in place, such as the improvement of living habitation, are used to address low level effects of accumulating greenhouse gases, such as heat and climate changes, but which end by producing more of the said gases through various avenues of energy consumption.
So, in the U.S. West, the increasing heat and drought are drying out the forests. Dehydrated trees have trouble fending off insects, and are more susceptible to disease, and for various other reasons die off, or have large sections of dead material, which either hang there or slough off or break off in the wind and snow. Living trees are full of water, and so dead trees dry out and become tinder. We're talking about a vast oversimplification here, because there are numerous land management and resource extraction processes to take stock of as well, and the incredibly complex environmental transformations set in motion by those processes.
For example, the same over-energetic and over-agitated human populations which through their ever-growing industrial activities are setting more carbon free, have simultaneously also covered increasing amounts of land with developments of varying natures, penetrated single family housing and the movement of transportation deeper into forested land, extended power infrastructure every which way that is then neglected through political economic processes, over-zealously suppressed natural fire cycles, and so on.
And in the East, the accumulation of moisture set free by greater heat and energy, and the increasing velocity of the movement of that moisture thanks to increasing ambient temperatures and water temperatures lends to a greater preponderance of flooding and severe wind events. Loosened sediments set free by industrial activity and ecological destruction readily move with the movement of flood waters and accumulate along obstructions put in place by industrial activity and the land and the soil are transformed, and ecosystems are destroyed, and then rinse and repeat.
A plague on the other hand - and different plagues are a little different and behave a little differently - might at first appear as a different category of force altogether, but in the end it is set loose by the same systematic forces. Because what a plague requires is both the compressing together of a multitude of living things - so that it can continue to jump and sustain itself - and the far and wide movement of those living things, so as to further spread to every corner of the earth. What better vectors are available than the gargantuan industrial flows, which take up the living multitudes, attempting to blend them all together in to a monolithic paste, and then spread that paste to every corner of the earth?
Now, there is too much material and energy in motion, and it is moving too fast for most living systems to cope, and the industrial system is gasping in panic, belching out those elemental polluting materials leading to greater accumulation and greater movement. The endgame here, the approach of some sort of equilibrium, which contrary to what neoliberal economists will preach, is itself fleeting, is a scenario in which the growing waves of energy set in motion begin to chew into the regular functioning of industry itself.
