The addition of recent examples more thoroughly flesh out the logics we describe, and have shown their extension in even the eighteen months since the original essay was written.
In order to adequately address climate change, a project that develops a politics beyond and against the border imperialism of nation-states is required. While there are robust border abolitionist movements scattered around the world, much like our examples of disaster communism, these spaces are not yet robust and interconnected. Undoubtedly, this is in part due to the power of military and police forces, which we should not underestimate. Yet there is also a disappointing lack of attention to, and investment in, such struggles from the Green Left. For our part, we insist on the necessity of a “no borders” politics to the ecological crisis. Like communism itself, this is both a movement that abolishes the present and a description of a world beyond that present. It is a necessary condition—perhaps the most necessary condition—for a livable world of ecological flourishing.
1. Quoted in Hannah Barnes, “How Many Climate Migrants Will There Be?,” BBC News, September 2, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23899195.
2. Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees: An Emergent Security Issue” (Report for the 13th Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe [OSCE]), May 25, 2005. Available at https://www.osce.org/eea/14851.
3. Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (London and New York: Verso Books, 2016).
4. Giovanni Bettini, “Climate Barbarians at the Gate? A Critique of Apocalyptic Narratives on ‘Climate Refugees,’” Geoforum 45 (2013): 63–72.
5. Thomas L. Friedman, “Trump Is Wasting Our Immigration Crisis,” The New York Times, April 25, 2019, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/trump-immigration-border-wall.html.
6. Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism.
7. Anonymous Contributor, “This Movement Is Not Ours, It’s Everybody’s,” It’s Going Down (blog), July 25, 2018, https://itsgoingdown.org/this-movement-is-not-ours-its-everybodys/.
8. Anonymous Contributor, “Occupation, Revolt, Power: The 1st Month of #OccupyICEPHL,” It’s Going Down (blog), August 14, 2018, https://itsgoingdown.org/occupation-revolt-power-the-1st-month-of-occupyicephl/.
9. Against Borders for Children, “We won! DfE are ending the nationality school census!,” Against Borders for Children (blog), April 10, 2018, schoolsabc.net/2018/04/we-won/.
10. See Docs Not Cops, “#NHS70—No Borders in Healthcare,” Docs Not Cops (blog), July 5, 2018, http://www.docsnotcops.co.uk/nhs70-no-borders-in-healthcare/; Erica Consterdine, “UK to Remain a Hostile Environment for Immigration under Nebulous New Post-Brexit Policy,” The Conversation, December 20, 2018, http://theconversation.com/uk-to-remain-a-hostile-environment-for-immigration-under-nebulous-new-post-brexit-policy-109095.
11. Todd Miller, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017), 47.
12. Maryline Baumard, “Give me your tired, your poor … the Europeans embracing migrants,” The Guardian, August 3, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/europeans-who-welcome-migrants.
13. Adaptation of Gilmore’s definition of racism in Golden Gulag, 246.
14. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London and New York: Verso Books, 2017), 227.
15. Democracy Now! Staff, “Mass Graves of Immigrants Found in Texas, But State Says No Laws Were Broken,” Democracy Now!, July 16, 2015, http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/16/mass_graves_of_immigrants_found_in; Saeed Kamali Dehghan, “Migrant Sea Route to Italy is World’s Most Lethal,” The Guardian, September 10, 2017, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/migrant-death-toll-rises-after-clampdown-on-east-european-borders.
16. Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” 237.
17. China Medel, “Abolitionist Care in the Militarized Borderlands,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 4 (October 1, 2017): 847.
BORDERS
ON CLIMATE/BORDERS/SURVIVAL/CARE/STRUGGLE
TWO MEMBERS OF OUT OF THE WOODS IN CONVERSATION WITH BASE MAGAZINE
First published June 2017
What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place via Skype. We have smoothed over some of the infelicities that result from spontaneous speech to make it easier to read while preserving some of the clunkiness of phrasing to convey the texture of spoken dialogue. Footnotes attend to some of the mistakes made in our arguments here.
It feels particularly fitting that this interview should be the opening piece in this book. Among the digressions and mistakes, this conversation is also full of new ideas, some of which have subsequently become fundamental to our thinking. This is the first time we talk about the false image of a spectacular, singular apocalypse; the first time we define (after Gilmore) ecological crisis as the group-differentiated destruction of the means of survival; the first time we use the term “catastrophic present.” Indeed, a strong theme in this interview is differentiation: that the disasters people experience, the struggles they organize and the futures they struggle for are all differentiated by race, class, gender, and sexuality. Black feminist critiques of universalism and humanism exert a strong influence on the entirety of this interview, but particularly on the sections pertaining to migration and borders. It is fitting that this book begins with a generative conversation, because that is where all our work begins. Conversations amongst ourselves, amidst the work of others, is the ulimate origin of all our thought. That now, on reflection, we can see mistakes and mishaps here, only serves to demonstrate the nature of collective study; that we know differently now to how we knew then. In particular, our ongoing theorizing of ‘ecological crisis’ as something connecting environmental concerns with the violences of borders, prisons and racialization, grows out of some of what we discuss here.
BASE Magazine: In much of your writing, you talk about the relationship between mass migration and climate change. How can climate change be more consciously linked to existing opposition to borders and everyday struggle against the border regime?
Out
