climate migrants by 2050, which Norman Myers put out over a decade ago. This is seen by many as a conservative projection, yet even so, it would mean that by 2050 one in every forty-five people in the world would have been displaced by climate change.1 A report for the International Organization for Migration notes that, “on current trends, the capacity of large parts of the world to provide food, water and shelter for human populations will be compromised by climate change.”2 The framing of this “capacity” as a series of absolute, “natural” limits is of course problematic. “Carrying capacity” is a product of racial heteropatriarchal capital as it works through nature and of nature as it works through racial heteropatriarchal capital. However, climate change will certainly erode people’s capacity to reproduce themselves and in a manner that forces their movement. The majority of climate migrants will be racialized people, and it seems highly unlikely that those states least affected by climate change and/or most able to adapt to it (the white powers of Europe and America), will approach climate migrants any differently to those racialized people already being murdered by their borders or imprisoned in their camps. Climate change is another reason people have to move, but it is not a reason for states to treat moving, racialized people any differently.
Out of the Woods, D: When Black Lives Matter UK shut down London City Airport they were very clear in stating that climate crisis is racist. It disproportionately affects people of color, both because they can’t cross borders with the ease that white people do—for a whole host of reasons—and they’re more likely to live in areas that are worst affected by climate change. Connecting up struggles that might be seen as “single issue” in this sense is really important because, in a sense, they are single issue: climate change and racism reproduce each other.
BASE Magazine: Since it features heavily already, and will likely appear again, could you speak a little more to the nature of the border—its composition and politics?
D: The violence of the border isn’t just at “the border”—schools become borders, hospitals become borders. I broke my knee recently, and I—a white person who speaks English as their first language—was very well looked after at the hospital [in Nottingham, England]. However, a South Asian woman who came in a few minutes after me didn’t fare so well. Her English wasn’t great, she wasn’t able to think clearly because of the pain she was in, and staff were insisting she gave an address—and she didn’t understand what they were saying. Although she did eventually receive care, we know that the NHS will withhold treatment: this is a form of border violence.3 So, struggles that might seem quite distant from ecological issues—hospital workers resisting the imperative to behave in this sort of way, for example—are really important for a transformative ecological politics.
A: I think when it comes to climate change what we’re seeing is the way the border can be used to trap someone within an increasingly catastrophic present. Achille Mbembe has written extensively about necropolitics, of holding people within a situation where their life is defined by their proximity to death.4 The border keeps people in places where they cannot find food or [are] at the mercy of floods. This is coercive, conscious violence orchestrated by states that will persist, both in countries outside Europe and within it. I think we must also emphasize that there’s a globalized institution of antiblackness, and the forms of violence which reproduce it are very much in common. The necropolitical obviously operates against Black people in the United States and the UK, as well as in Libya and the Mediterranean. In terms of the way climate change and natural disasters might interact with this existing necropolitics, it is perhaps important to think of police operations in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. On Danziger Bridge, seven police officers opened fire on a group of Black people attempting to flee the flooded city, killing two of them and seriously injuring four more. That event—Black people being murdered by the state—encapsulates the necropolitical violence of attempting to hold people, and particularly Black people, in a place where life is untenable, and then extinguishing that life as soon as anyone tries to move out of that place. That’s the murderous double bind of anti-Black violence in the policing of crisis.
D: I also think it’s really important that we challenge environmentalism’s history and ongoing complicity with racism (and outright white supremacy)—[in which it argues] for closed borders, population control, and sterilization, for example. We’ve recently had prominent members of the Green Party of England and Wales arguing for reductions in migration in the name of the environment and a “sustainable economy.”5 There was a Paul Kingsnorth essay in The Guardian a couple of months ago that’s abhorrent; it repeats so many of these tropes.6
BASE Magazine: Most of us know very little about climate science, and whilst a great many people work very hard to translate an overwhelming amount of data and fieldwork into accessible writing, the point where trends and patterns meet the daily effects of climate change can feel elusive. Is there more that could be done to orientate the energies of existing struggles and how far into the future should we be looking? To what extent, to take just a single example, should a housing movement engaged in a project to defend access to housing across London take into consideration that it could soon find itself underwater?
D: We often understand climate change as leading to a spectacular future event and this is often understood visually: imaginaries of ruined, flooded, and depopulated cities are really common. But I think this is flawed: it suggests climate change is heading towards a singular “event” that is going to happen rather than something that is already happening, often in less visually perceptible forms. It becomes harder to grow certain crops, for example, and food becomes more expensive. That drives both migration and conflict. Climate change has undoubtedly played a role in the Syrian Civil War.7
So, it’s wrong on an empirical level to figure climate change as this thing that will happen in the future, but I think it’s also unhelpful politically, because that kind of future threat I don’t think works as a sufficiently motivating force to affect things in the present. I think, like you say, it can be disempowering. That parsing of climate change as a spectacular future event affects how we behave politically as well, leading to a kind of fatalism whereby people just accept these things. I actually think they empower a certain white, male, heterosexual subject too: they can project themselves into that catastrophe thinking they can start anew—the sort of “cozy catastrophism” that the novelist John Wyndham was (perhaps a little unfairly) accused of. You know—“Oh well, all the poor people have died, but we can have a jolly nice time with our new community on the Isle of Wight.”
Public mistrust of experts is also a huge problem because the people we usually hear talking about climate change in the media fall into this category. I think a lot of that hostility is entirely understandable, but rather than get rid of “expertise” in favor of a broad cynical fatalism, we need to think how we can expand the category of expertise and popularize it. We need to amplify the voices of those who live and struggle where climate change meets everyday life: migrants who’ve moved because they can’t afford to buy food; people who’ve worked the land and seen how changes in climate affect crop growth. They, too, are experts.
BASE Magazine: If these kind of analyses of disasters rooted in a distant future can instead give rise to a paralysis and fatalism, whereby with a long enough timescale, all activities become regarded as irrelevant and inconsequential, how then can these feelings be combatted or even harnessed?
D: It’s not necessarily the timescale that’s the problem here, or that talking about the future is inherently wrong, but the function of thinking about the future. There is a difference between prediction and extrapolation. Beyond identifying broad trends that are highly likely and factoring them into our thinking as appropriate, I think prediction is really damaging: firstly because we know not to trust it, and secondly because it doesn’t leave room for agency. We all know that past futurologies, optimistic and pessimistic, religious, apocalyptic have all been terrible.
