wind, rain, and drought. These are among the most powerful dynamics that are reshaping places and the experiences of millions of people in the world today.
In a 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon called An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security, authors Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall assess what they call the “unthinkable.” In a world afflicted with climate cataclysms:
The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency. With diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources, the United States could likely survive shortened growing cycles and harsh weather conditions without catastrophic losses. Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.23
Since this crude Pentagon report was issued in 2003, the United States has more than doubled its number of armed Border Patrol agents. It has added over 650 miles of walls and barriers along the U.S.-Mexico divide, including the section that got swept into Mexico with the surge of storm water from the hurricane. The United States has poured billions into advanced technology, radar systems, drones, and tethered aerostats. Australia, too, has inaugurated a 6,000-strong border force. According to geographer Elisabeth Vallet, there were 16 border fences when the Berlin Wall fell in 1988. Now there are more than 70 across the globe, a number that accelerated after 9/11 and includes Hungary, Greece, Spain, Morocco, Turkey, and India, to name a few, among the countries that have also constructed border walls.
Border security is becoming a “globally sung mantra,” says April Humble, a researcher from the Secretariat of the Earth League, and enforcement regimes are spreading faster and to more places than ever before. The reasons cited for these border build-ups are like the tripartite mission of U.S. Customs and Border Protection: stopping terrorists, stopping immigrants, and stopping drugs. However, now there is more to it. As Humble says, this is a “situation of border fortification in a warming world,” a warming world where there is no legal protection for families who are suddenly displaced due to climate. It is a situation, she says, that is “highly toxic.”
This suggests that the theater for future climate battles will be the world’s ever thickening border zones and not, as national security forecasts constantly project, in communities where individuals fight each other for scarce resources. “Battle,” however, is probably an inappropriate term. While one side will deploy well-armed border guards to enforce borderlines (that in almost every occasion were drawn by colonial powers, dividing once unified communities), on the other side will be ever-larger masses of people fleeing from ecological, political, and economic catastrophes.
Thus, one of the most reliable forecasts for our collective future is that vast numbers of people will be on the move, and vast numbers of agents will be trained, armed, and paid to stop them.
“Border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement,” writes author Harsha Walia in the book Undoing Border Imperialism, “and most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupation. Practices of arrest without charge, expulsion, indefinite detention, torture, and killings have become the norm in militarized border zones.”24 Walia’s analysis takes into account the disturbing correspondence between the fact that the world’s biggest polluters—including the United States, which has emitted more metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution than any other country since the Industrial Revolution—are the same countries constructing unprecedented border regimes.
In Storming the Wall, I report from the flashpoints where climate clashes are beginning to play out, and those places where future battles will most likely erupt. I have set out to chronicle the way a massive system of social and economic exclusion militarizes divisions not only between the rich and the poor, but between the environmentally secure and the environmentally exposed.
The pages ahead explore how the idea of fixed and linear borders—and the categories of people borders are supposed to protect against—have changed. Border enforcement zones now claim wider swaths of territory and blend into the very real war being waged against an ever-shifting category of people who are deemed “unwanted.”
At an August 2016 Republican presidential campaign rally in Tucson, Arizona, the crowd erupted into a loud cheer when Mike Pence stated that if elected, the Donald Trump administration would, without a doubt, build a border wall. I was in the process of writing this book when I attended that rally, and it was uncertain who would win. Outside it was baking in downtown Tucson, another day in the hottest year on record. Humankind is now, perhaps for the first time in history, truly the proverbial frog in a steady, but ever-quickening pot of boiling water.
Under the presidency of Trump, “wall” continues to be one of many bigoted code words thrown like red meat to a voracious constituency. While Trump may add sections—even in the form of an imposing cement fortification—to the preexisting border wall, he will not build a contiguous 2,000-mile barrier. What he will do is far worse: militarize the country with more cameras, radar, drones, roving patrols, guns, bullets, and checkpoints clogging every vein and artery that enters the United States, a process that has been going on now for many years that will gear up and go full throttle.
In a February 2017 communiqué titled “The Walls Above, the Cracks Below (And To The Left)” the indigenous Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, wrote that “Borders are no longer just lines drawn on maps and customs checkpoints, but walls of armies and police, of cement and brick, of laws and persecution. In the world above, the hunting of human beings increases and is celebrated with clandestine competitions: whoever expels, incarcerates, confines, and murders the most win.”25 Perhaps there is no better way to describe what is coming the world’s way.
Indeed, as Trump nuked every single mention of climate change from the White House’s website on inauguration day 2017, and then—a few months later—backed out of the Paris climate agreement, it could be understood that, as the Zapatistas surmise, from a U.S. presidential perspective, the crises caused by a rapidly warming world will be addressed with walls, bullets, drones, cops, and cages.
Border zones are increasingly far more expansive than any actual boundary line, such as in the United States, where border enforcement and immigration checkpoints extend 100 miles inland. The international boundary line is “neither the first nor last line of defense” says former Border Patrol chief Mike Fisher. The militarized atmosphere that results from this furthers the feeling that we are living in what the American Civil Liberties Union calls “Constitution-free zones.”26 In these zones, Homeland Security agents persistently stop and interrogate people even during routine and mundane daily events, such as when they are going to the grocery store or to school. In the event of massive upheavals in the United States—with vivid past examples that include the 1936 Bum Blockade set up on the California state borders to stop Dust Bowl victims from crossing into the state, or climate catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina that included Border Patrol agents policing black neighborhoods in New Orleans—a constellation of armed checkpoints can quickly attempt to establish authoritarian domination over a population. After all, as sociologist Timothy Dunn shows quite clearly in the book The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, these border zones operate under a Pentagon doctrine of low-intensity conflict.
But the idea of homeland security is far bigger than this, connecting law enforcement and the military via an increasingly pervasive surveillance grid that serves and connects both. Border enforcement is but one component of many in this homeland security apparatus. As constitutional lawyer John Whitehead says, the United States is ruthlessly building a “standing army on American soil.” With its 240,000 employees and $61 billion annual budget, Whitehead points out, the Department of Homeland Security is militarizing police units, stockpiling ammunition,
