examine not just the booming homeland security business that serves border enforcement, but also its many components that can be used in a variety of ways, including crowd control, biometric ID readings, and surveillance. According to economic reports, the national security industry will mushroom into a $546 billion market by 2022. As it stands right now, accelerating climate destabilization goes hand in hand with accelerating militarization and border enforcement.
Among the many things that go underreported but should be common knowledge, is the torrent of resources gushing into the global security apparatus and its industries, while only a trickle is marshaled to deter and prevent the human activities that cause global warming and climate change. As Ben Hayes says in the book The Secure and the Dispossessed, the “fundamental problem with ‘security’: at its core is the essentially repressive goal of making things stay the same—no matter how unjust they may be.”27 As Hayes writes, the very same institutions that issue warnings about the security implications of climate upheavals are “spying on perfectly legitimate and democratic activity to make sure that it doesn’t get in the way of business as usual.”28
This is why the image of a border barrier, semi-consumed by Mother Earth and covered with small purple flowers, is so important, for it is a testament that the course we are currently on is not the only option. In today’s climate era—some are calling it the Anthropocene—there are millions of people who are opting for sustainable lifestyles and practices, opting to organize against climate change, against militarization, and against the suicidal business-as-usual scenario. There are environmental activists who have risked—and even lost—their lives to raise awareness about the urgency of the current ecological crisis, and to champion sustainable, just, and cooperative living.
As the world becomes more environmentally, politically, and economically volatile, and more and more walls go up, increasing numbers of ordinary people are coming forward to extend solidarity across borders of nationality, race, and class. Against all odds, hope, optimism, and solidarity drive great change. I was surprised and inspired multiple times while researching and writing this small volume by the many people who have launched political, social, and economic projects at a grassroots level, often making connections between people on opposite sides of militarized borders.
One such cross-border project was happening where I stood just east of Agua Prieta. An organization known as Cuenca Los Ojos was using ancient water-harvesting techniques to restore diverse plant life, flowing ponds and creeks, and animal life in ecosystems shared by the United States and Mexico. Around where that discarded border barrier lay were galvanized wire cages, called gabions, on the banks and beds of the wash. The gabions were filled with rocks and went as deep as 18 feet into the ground. At first glance, they had the striking appearance of intricate stone walls. But instead of keeping people out, they were built to be sponges shaped to the contour of the riverbank, slowing the water and replenishing the soil with life, miraculously recharging the water table in a place stricken with a 16-year drought.
Another border wall, indeed, is possible.
It is in these sorts of acts of hands-on “imagination,” in the term of the most preeminent nature writers in the United States, Barry Lopez, that hope is germinating. “Our hope,” he states, “is in each other. . . . We must find ways to break down barriers between ourselves and a reawakened sense of power to do good in the world.”29
As challenging as these times may be, despite the walls, the guns, and all the corruption, a reawakened sense of life, connection, and power is deepening and spreading. The little purple flowers continue to bloom. There are many ways to storm the wall.
TWO
SUSTAINABLE NATIONAL SECURITY: CLIMATE ADAPTATION FOR THE RICH AND POWERFUL
The grave danger is to disown our neighbors. When we do so, we deny their humanity and our own humanity without realizing it . . .
—Pope Francis
In late April 2015, when Kevin Watson of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spoke at the Defense, National Security, and Climate Change conference in Washington, D.C., he told the story of a climate refugee in a way that I had never heard before: from the perspective of the climate-security business.
The panel that Watson spoke on was titled “Geopolitics, Natural Resource Implications & Extreme Events.” Next to him sat two other panelists, Paul Wagner, an ecologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and John Englander, an independent consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton, the same top-tier security company that Edward Snowden was working for as a cover for his employment by the National Security Agency. Just before Watson arrived at the podium, Englander had told the audience of a hundred or so conference participants, all sitting at round tables with white tablecloths, “We are about to have catastrophic coastline change. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”
To illustrate his own presentation, Watson projected images of the space shuttle and an F-35, a single-seat all-weather fighter aircraft manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a four-star sponsor of the conference. “All are dependent on special engineering alloys,” he said. Watson then highlighted the elements needed to make the alloys: chrome, columbium, and titanium that were extracted from mines in South Africa, the Congo, and Zambia. Watson said that the reason he was highlighting Africa was that it’s one area of the world expected to experience “significant climate change effects into the next century.”
Watson then projected images from the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One image showed Africa divided into five parts: West Africa, Central Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, with bullet points indicating potential climate hazards and disasters in each place. Desertification and droughts dominated many of the regions where the elements required for the alloys were mined. There would be severe impacts on water, on agriculture. “So all of these are going to stress the continent, stress the population,” he said.
Then Watson connected the climate crisis with migration. He said, “If these stressing factors result in increased migration, it will just increase the potential for instability and conflict” both inside and outside of the continent. This could impact the ability maintain local labor conditions necessary to move the elements “critical to the alloys we need to support the system.” In one sentence, Watson effectively insinuated how climate-driven migration crises directly threaten powerful U.S. military-corporate business interests.
To prove his point and underscore that it was already happening, he said: “All you have to do is look at the news every day and you see tragedies associated with illegal migration out of the African Mediterranean, boats full of refugees that are sinking and so forth.”
As Watson spoke, news was still breaking about a rickety three-story boat that had capsized off the Libyan coast while carrying more than 850 people. There were only 28 survivors, one of them a 20-year-old man from Gambia named Ibrahim Mbalo who made a death-defying escape from the sinking ship. As should be anticipated, the predictions for climate disruption in Mbalo’s home country are dire, a place of increasing windstorms, floods, droughts, and sea-level rise that could inundate 8 percent of its land area.1
Watson was speaking during what was to become the deadliest month of 2015, in a year that would register 3,771 known immigration-related deaths in the Mediterranean Sea alone. This was also the year when the extent of people on the move, and the danger and tragedy of their situation, finally dawned on the world. This was the year when the image of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy found face down on a Turkish beach after crossing the Aegean Sea, was widely circulated. At one point 2,000 people per day were attempting the voyage on rubber dinghies. According to the International Organization on Migration, there were more
