Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
6. Quoted in Emilee Gilpin, “Urgency in Climate Change Advocacy is Backfiring, Says Citizen Potawatomi Nation Scientist,” National Observer, February 15, 2019, https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/15/features/urgency-climate-change-advocacy-backfiring-says-citizen-potawatomi-nation.
7. Mary Annaïse Heglar, “Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat,” Medium (blog), February 18, 2019, https://medium.com/s/story/sorry-yall-but-climate-change-ain-t-the-first-existential-threat-b3c999267aa0. We would add Indigenous people here too. See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).
8. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin, 2010), 35.
9. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time,” in The Documenta 14 Reader, eds. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (München, London, New York: Prestel, 2017), 92.
10. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 246.
11. “Disaster, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53561. [Accessed June 2, 2019.]
12. Neil Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster,” Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, June 11, 2006, https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-natural-disaster/.
13. Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster.”
14. Clyde Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans, eds. Laura Pulido and Jordan T. Camp (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017), xxiv.
15. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1976), 563.
16. George Caffentzis, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse,” Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992, eds. Midnight Notes Collective (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1992), 215–72.
17. On the relation between the “organic composition of capital” and the production of “surplus populations,” see the extraordinary analysis by Marx in Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 25, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” Marx was not particularly hopeful about the political potential of surplus populations. By contrast, following Frantz Fanon and others, we see those populations rendered surplus by capital to be indispensable to any revolutionary movement today.
18. Cissy Zhou, “Man vs Machine: China’s Workforce, Starting to Feel the Strain from Threat of Robotic Automation,” South China Morning Post, February 14, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2185993/man-vs-machine-chinas-workforce-starting-feel-strain-threat.
19. Paul Mozur, “China Scrutinizes 2 Apple Suppliers in Pollution Probe,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2013, sec. Business, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323420604578648002283373528.
20. Mozur, “China Scrutinizes 2 Apple Suppliers.”
21. Georgina Gustin, “Florida’s Migrant Farm Workers Struggle After Hurricane Damaged Homes, Crops,” InsideClimate News, October 17, 2017, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16102017/hurricanes-florida-agriculture-migrant-farm-workers-jobs-crop-loss.
22. Che Gossett, “Blackness, Animality, and the Unsovereign,” Verso Books (blog), September 8, 2015, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2228-che-gossett-blackness-animality-and-the-unsovereign.
23. Ben Doherty, “A Short History of Nauru, Australia’s Dumping Ground for Refugees,” The Guardian, August 9, 2016, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/10/a-short-history-of-nauru-australias-dumping-ground-for-refugees.
24. Anja Kanngieser, “Climate Change: Nauru’s Life on the Frontlines,” The Conversation, October 21, 2018, http://theconversation.com/climate-change-naurus-life-on-the-frontlines-105219.
25. EJOLT, “Phosphate Mining on Nauru,” Environmental Justice Atlas, accessed April 25, 2019, https://ejatlas.org/conflict/phosphate-mining-on-nauru.
26. Doherty, “A Short History of Nauru, Australia’s Dumping Ground for Refugees.”
27. “Protests Escalate on Nauru,” Refugee Action Coalition (blog), April 6, 2016, http://www.refugeeaction.org.au/?p=4859.
28. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
29. Josie Michelle, “Against the New Vitalism,” New Socialist (blog), March 10, 2019, https://newsocialist.org.uk/against-the-new-vitalism/.
30. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
31. See William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018); Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland: AK Press, 2013).
BORDERS
INTRODUCTION
DISASTER MIGRATION
As the ecological crisis accelerates and its effects are exacerbated, people are driven to leave their current places of residence in search of somewhere else. While images of the inhabitants of small-island states forced to abandon coral atolls dominate the popular imagination of climate-induced migration, the reality is more complex. Ecological crisis is not limited to climate change, and environmental factors are often insufficient explanations for migration. In many cases it is only when higher temperatures, rising waters or increased pollution are compounded by issues such as hunger, poverty, a poor quality built environment or warfare that migration becomes a necessity. These issues are, of course, all inter-related with our changing environment, but also have long histories through colonial capitalism’s disposessions and enclosures. It is this imbrication of environmental and (ongoing) factors that we refer to as ‘ecological crisis.’ Most people who move do so within their own countries. In the cold language of international law they are “Internally Displaced