possibility of a cyborg Earth—which simultaneously does not deny the possibility of an Indigenous nationhood—is the kind of contradiction we have to work through. This working through can’t be didactic; it can’t just be based in speaking, nor just in writing, nor can we just hope that if we fight hard enough it will all sort itself out in the end. I guess what I’m caught up in is some kind of social life where we practice speaking, writing, and fighting as if they had never been separate in the first place. That’s why BASE makes me hopeful; it’s a good place for some regenerative conversation, for some kind of lovingly antagonistic chatter.
1. See our introduction to Section I, “Introduction: Disaster Migration,” for a critique of our use of Myers’ numbers in this interview.
2. Oli Brown, “Migration and Climate Change,” International Organization for Migration Research Series (Geneva: International Organization of Migration, 2008), 17. Available at https://www.iom.cz/files/Migration_and_Climate_Change_-_IOM_Migration_Research_Series_No_31.pdf.
3. The National Health Service is the UK’s public health provider. Famously a “universal” health system feted for providing care on the basis of need rather than ability to pay, the UK government has in recent years developed a range of policies restricting access as part of a “hostile environment” directed at undocumented migrants—including a requirement that people pay upfront for secondary care if they cannot prove their “eligibility” for NHS treatment based on migration status. The group Docs not Cops are challenging this: see page 68 below.
4. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
5. From memory, I (D) had an essay by Rupert Read in mind here. The truth is even more unnerving, because Read had made such arguments as an “expert” to a UK Parliamentary Select Committee. See publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmenergy/writev/consumpt/consumption.pdf.
6. See “Lies of the Land” in Section II of this volume for our response to this essay.
7. This is not entirely clear to us today, as argued by Jan Selby et al., “Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War Revisited,” Political Geography 60 (2017): 232–44. The authors dispute existing evidence of both drought-induced migration and migration-induced conflict.
8. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, eds., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), 3.
9. On the race-erasive, white-feminist universalism of the latter text, particularly in its iteration as a Hulu TV show, see Sophie Lewis: “In Gilead, Atwood’s fictional setting, human sexuation is neatly dimorphic and cisgendered—but that is apparently not what’s meant to be dystopian about it. It’s the ‘surrogacy’.… [As such] The Handmaid’s Tale neatly reproduces a wishful scenario at least as old as feminism itself. Cisgender womanhood, united without regard to class, race or colonialism, can blame all its woes on evil religious fundamentalists with guns.” [Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (London and New York: Verso Books, 2019), 10.]
10. For Moylan, “critical dystopia” names a historically specific genre of science fiction arising around the birth of neoliberalism. We’re prepared to expand the concept to describe our present, however. [Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). For more on the use of “critical dystopia” as a descriptive term for the present, see David M. Bell, Rethinking Utopia: Place, Power, Affect (London: Routledge, 2017), 20–51.
11. The “Prospecting Futures” research conducted by Lisa Garforth, Amy C. Chambers, and Miranda Iossifidis at Newcastle University has been exploring this issue in relation to online science-fiction reading groups (whose texts have included works by Octavia Butler).
12. Silvia Federici, “Preoccupying,” The Occupied Times (blog), October 25, 2014, https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=13482.
13. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 9–89.
14. See especially Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London and New York: Verso Books, 2019).
15. This is a bit of a rhetorical simplification—differentiated vulnerability can also mean rich white people choosing to live in more risky places, displacing those who can longer afford to live there. In many places, urban waterfronts are caught between two trends—the increasing desirability of waterfront properties and the exploding costs of living in evermore floodprone areas. Red Hook, a neighborhood built on a peninsula in the floodplains of Brooklyn, has seen accelerating gentrification in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, despite reports that normal high tides will be flooding its streets by 2080. [See Anna-Sofia Berner, “Red Hook: The Hip New York Enclave Caught Between Gentrification and Climate Change,” The Guardian, September 25, 2018, sec. Environment, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/25/red-hook-climate-change-floodplain-hurricane-sandy-gentrification.]
16. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 2.
17. Automnia, “Ecstasy & Warmth,” The Occupied Times (blog), August 20, 2015, https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14010.
18. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, New York, Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013).
19. See “The Dangers of Reactionary Ecology” in Section II of this book.
20. See Section II (NATURES) in this book.
21. Green and Black Cross are a mutual-aid organization providing legal support for environmental and social protest in the UK.
22. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1986).
23. This is a slight misremembering of the article, which can be found at libcom.org/library/m11-anti-road-aufheben.
BORDERS
REFUGES AND DEATH-WORLDS
First published November 2016
When we first began writing as a collective, we made almost no mention of migration or borders. Such an omission is an indictment, both of our own thinking and practice as a collective, and of the thought and politics we were engaging with. Orthodox and radical environmentalism alike frequently neglect those amongst the most affected by the ecological crisis—the people who are displaced by it. It is clear that our early work reproduced this omission. “Refuges and Death-Worlds” marks our first real attempt to engage with migration
