immanence

Gaia Vince’s Guardian article “The Century of Climate Migration: Why We Need to Plan for the Great Upheaval,” adapted from her forthcoming book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World, is a very good overview of the coming age of mass migrations. It’s also more or less what I’ve been arguing in my writing on climate change, migration, and “climate Pre-TSD” (pre-traumatic stress disorder).

It’s useful to have so much of the big picture assembled in a single, open-access newspaper article:

The coming migration will involve the world’s poorest fleeing deadly heatwaves and failed crops. It will also include the educated, the middle class, people who can no longer live where they planned because it’s impossible to get a mortgage or property insurance; because employment has moved elsewhere… [. . .]

In 2020, refugees around the world exceeded 100 million, tripling since 2010, and half were children. . . . In addition to these, 350 million people are undocumented worldwide, an astonishing 22 million in the US alone . . . Today, the 50 million climate-displaced people already outnumber those fleeing political persecution.

And so on.

The main question about the age of migrations to come, in Vince’s view, is whether we will rise to the challenge of managing the process. There are many reasons to doubt that we will, but she outlines how we could — not by accentuating skin-deep distinctions between people (she points out the artificiality of homogeneous nation-states) and militarizing existing borders, but by developing the bureaucracy for inclusiveness. And while that doesn’t sound like a very appealing strategy in today’s political climate, that’s all the more reason to discuss and prepare for it.

She writes:

A democracy with a mandate of official inclusiveness from its people is generally more stable – but it needs underpinning by a complex bureaucracy. Nations have navigated this in various ways, for example, devolving power to local communities, giving them voice and agency over their own affairs within the nation state (as is the case in Canada, or Switzerland’s cantons). By embracing multiple groups, languages and cultures as equally legitimate, a country like Tanzania can function as a national mosaic of at least 100 different ethnic groups and languages. In Singapore, which has consciously pursued an integrated multi-ethnic population, at least one-fifth of marriages are interracial. Unjust hierarchies between groups make this harder, particularly when imposed on a majority by a minority.

One point of difference with my own thinking is that I continue to think that a relationship to land — what I’m hesitantly considering a process of “reindigenization,” based on Indigenous proposals for indigenization but extended into a more complex and globally variable process of social reconstruction – will be central to the “ecologization” any solution will require. This is what I think Bruno Latour means with his concept of becoming “earthbound.” There’s a lot to be determined in the “boundedness,” or the unbinding and rebounding, such a process will entail, such as who will be admitted into the negotiation, who will determine the outcome, and to what ends. The politics of boundaries and boundedness are, needless to say, a crucial feature of the politics of any possible future.

Vince counters this idea of “belonging to land” when she writes,

At least as challenging, though, will be the task of overcoming the idea that we belong to a particular land and that it belongs to us. We will need to assimilate into globally diverse societies, living in new, polar cities. We will need to be ready to move again when necessary. With every degree of temperature increase, roughly 1 billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. [emphasis added]

The latter is certainly true, but a sense of ontological relatedness and kinship with land has been with humans since our beginnings, and the loss of that – violent, in the cases of colonized and indigenous peoples – is very much a part of the traumas that underlie our present state.

Vince writes:

The question for humanity becomes: what does a sustainable world look like? We will need to develop an entirely new way of feeding, fuelling and maintaining our lifestyles, while also reducing atmospheric carbon levels. We will need to live in denser concentrations in fewer cities, while reducing the associated risks of crowded populations, including power outages, sanitation problems, overheating, pollution and infectious disease.

Yes, that. And much more.