Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods

      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 of the Woods, A: One place to start would be the estimate of 200 million 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,