| STORMING THE WALL Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security Todd Miller San Francisco: City Lights Publishing, September 2017 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-87286-715-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-87286-715-3 | 270pp. | SC | $16.95 | |
The prevalent approach to the problems of climate change and immigration Todd Miller describes in this book is, to condense it into a single word, muscle. That is to say the authorities mobilize their forces, especially police forces, to protect the status quo — and, not incidentally, those in charge of things: the elites. This does not have to involve cruel policies; but it often does, because cruelty appeals to those who cannot see beyond the short term. When it comes to immigration, cruelty to immigrants appears politically expedient to populists who pander to the fearful among their constituents.
"As geographer Joseph Nevins points out in the book Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid, there are many reasons given, in the general broad analysis, why so many people die attempting to enter the United States. 'To state what should be obvious,' Nevins writes, 'if migrants were allowed to freely cross the divide—and, by extension, to reside and work within the United States without fear of arrest and deportation due to immigration status—there would be no migrant deaths.' *
* * "In the climate era, coexisting worlds of luxury living and impoverished desperation will only be magnified and compounded. On one side are not only the super-rich who will want to continue to consume, possess, and waste without limits. There are those of the middle class, too, who populate U.S. suburbs and cities and live unsustainable consumer lifestyles. "On the other side are millions like Ismael, Luis Carlos, and Santos Fernando, deprived of the resources they need for subsistence living in their home communities. In the middle are the militarized border zones that, as Nevins writes, reinforce 'an unjust world order.' " – pages 99-100 |
NOTE: I've edited the passages bordered by red and green slightly. Edited portions are shown in blue.
Miller describes many incidents of the use of muscle in this book. His first chapter takes us to Marinduque in the Philippines, the small island where his grandmother grew up. It was recently devastated by Typhoon Ineng, a minor storm by recent standards. The Aquino government responds not with the requested financial aid1 to allow purchase of new seeds, but with troops who harass the activists trying to rebuild their community. Along America's southern border, a wide zone has been set up within which travel is made arduous by multiple checkpoints, and Hispanics and Native Americans come in for special scrutiny.2 And in Paris, France just prior to COP21 and just after the terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015, Miller himself encounters the unfocused power of this official muscle.3
"In front of me was a line of heavily armored police. They had helmets on. They were banging their shields loudly with their clubs. They were marching slowly but surely toward us. They were pushing us away from the Place de la République in central Paris. Behind the long, impassable line, I saw a coagulation of white police trucks with blue stripes. In the distance, plumes of tear gas wafted around the bronze monument of Marianne, who was holding aloft an olive branch, while simultaneously leaning on a tablet engraved with the words 'Droits de l'homme,' the 'Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen.' Around the monument the piles of flowers and burning candles left by thousands of people in commemoration of the people killed in the attack were being crunched as the police marched forward in the plaza, pushing people out. As they swung their billy clubs into the bodies and bones of the climate justice activists, you could hear the sound of glass and candles crunching under black combat boots. In front of me the police continued to march, banging on their shields. Soon the line of police would charge, sprinting at full speed to where I had just been standing. I ran with a massive jolt of adrenaline.
"A few hours before I ran from the French National Police, I watched NBC take down its tarp in the Place de la République where the climate activists were gathering on the day before the summit. Despite the fact that the climate march was banned by the French government because of the state of emergency, 11,000 people from all corners of the globe filled the plaza, first with shoes and signs, and then with defiance. And even though these activists were going to march, and subsequently clash with police, the day before what people were calling the most important climate conference ever, NBC was packing its cameras and microphones in boxes and heading to the next hot story. The climate justice activists filled the plaza and spilled onto the streets all around, extending up Voltaire to the Bataclan. A group of mourning angels—with wide, white wings—walked solemnly by the cordoned-off Bataclan, where the sidewalks, like those near the other attack sites, were strewn with flowers, some wilted in the rain, with flickering candles and commemorative messages for the 80 people killed at the concert that night. A sign advertising the Eagles of Death Metal still ominously hung over the vintage venue as an eery reminder. Another young man held a sign that said, WE NEED LANDSCAPE. The NBC departure was even more baffling since, on this day, 178 heads of state from around the world were arriving, including President Obama, who would leave a bouquet of flowers in this very spot. The police presence was building up, and you could feel the tension in the cold air.
"Later, the banging of billy clubs against plastic shields was surprisingly loud, jolting, and the rhythm felt increasingly ominous. I was in a random group of people, many of them climate activists, some of whom were taunting the line of cops as we backpedaled. Behind them was a quaint autumn scene; the barren trees leading up to the plaza had shed most of the orange leaves that lay on the street. A grey sky behind the trees made them look like bones. I was with another journalist, David Schwenk. I was there to witness and document a defining political moment, and now multiple issues were converging.
"From behind the police line a cop emerged carrying a bullhorn. He barked several times in a loud metallic voice, "Dispersez-vous." Even I understood that one. I still didn't know what would happen. Then they charged at us hard and fast.
"They charged running at full speed, like runners in a track meet. Journalist or not, I knew I had to run. It didn't matter why any of us were there; our mere presence meant that we were doing something wrong. I turned quickly and blindly, camera in hand, and sprinted away. I never thought I'd find myself on the streets of Paris running away from cops. My mind raced back to the Milipol expo. The very same French National Police that I had watched demonstrate to businesspeople how to take down assailants were now charging at ME.
"As I ran I realized that we had arrived at the true climate summit. The police were in full combat mode, and activists, journalists, whoever gave a shit about the climate was being violently disciplined. In the plaza the authorities brought out their clubs and swung at anyone in their way; and there is footage of police smashing an elderly man directly in the knees, sending him crumpling to the ground. Paris was in a state of exception. The state could do anything. It could assault you and nothing would happen. So I ran.
"It was as if the everyday world of border zones had arrived in Paris. You weren't quite sure what you did wrong, but that didn't matter. [ . . . ] It was a version of a 'constitution-free zone.' It didn't matter if you lost your beloved in a terrible howling hurricane, or in heat so hostile that your world had become uninhabitable. It didn't matter if your crops dried up in a drought. In the security business, all these are 'threat multipliers,' and you are part of the threat. The true climate war is not between people in different communities fighting each other for scarce resources. It is between those in power and the grassroots; between a suicidal status quo and the hope for sustainable transformation.
"Alleen Brown of The Intercept wrote on November 30, 'Paris was supposed to be a launching point for activists to build a more coordinated international movement in the coming months and years against the systems that produce climate change.' Yet, on this day, the launching point was met with walls of police.
"Later it was revealed that we were hardly alone. Solidarity with the protesters in Paris was expressed across the globe. More than 600,000 people in 175 different countries marched around the world to call for a strong climate deal. In Melbourne and in London they numbered 60,000 and 50,000, respectively. Los Angeles, Vancouver, Ottawa, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Manila, to name some of the many places."
– Pages 216-220
Miller also shows us the other kind of muscle: the kind that depends on cooperation rather than coercion; that works with the natural world to build healthier environments. It begins with a new way of thinking.
Professor Zoe Hammer of Prescott College asked a question in her Masters of Social Justice and Human Rights class that made her students laugh. "What if the U.S. Border Patrol were put to work making community gardens?" At first the comment seemed outlandish. I imagined a border landscape of flowers and vegetables instead of barriers and Border Patrol. Never had the idea of two countries being so neighborly seemed so foolish. But there was a deeper undertone to Hammer's question. When you looked at the overall budget, the money and resources allocated to the Border Patrol and its accompanying apparatus, couldn't the money be spent more wisely? Couldn't education, housing, health, or other human services use a boost in resources? And Hammer's comment went even further—was there a way to transform the border walls to something else, recapacitate the labor force performing that one task, and have its members dedicate their time and energy to the creation, production, and reproduction of another task? If you interpret community gardening to mean ecological restoration, and understand that this needs to happen on massive levels, including cross-border areas, to begin to restore degraded landscapes, then the suggestion suddenly doesn't seem ludicrous at all. In fact, it seems like a reasonable, rational possibility with at least enough merit to be seriously debated and discussed. Hammer's point was that it was possible to imagine a new world, to transform the old into something new. Things can no longer stay the same. As writer Betsy Hartmann asks: "Might the challenge of climate change provide an opportunity to rethink the meaning of development and economic growth in ways that promote redistribution of power and wealth while simultaneously protecting the environment?" – pages 227-228 |
Yes. The answer to Betsy Hartmann's question is: Yes.
Liu insisted that the whole nature of the economy needs to be changed from a transactional economy to a trust economy, from the lever of money to the lever of ecological function. According to Liu, our current economy is destabilizing the climate conditions on which all living things depend. Instead of addressing the root problem, border militarization simply reinforces the destabilization by reinforcing the status quo.
It was about a month after I met with Liu that I arrived where we began, at the border barrier that had been ripped from the ground by Hurricane Odile and become covered with cobwebs and flowers, almost like a beautiful work of art. About a quarter mile up the wash known as Silver Creek, on the actual U.S.-Mexico boundary, Homeland Security had erected a new barrier to replace it. Behind the barrier, I could see an idling green-striped Border Patrol vehicle, and inside it an agent seemed to be watching us. I was at the San Bernadino Ranch in Sonora, just east of Aqua Prieta.
For a moment, I realized I had in the same eyeshot both the border barrier (backed by the agent) and the gabions—the galvanized wire cages packed with rocks, embedded 18 feet deep to shape the contours of the streambed and riverbank. The gabions almost looked like intricate stone walls themselves. They were part of an ancient technique of strategically piling rocks to slow down the flow of water across the land. For the region, after years of mechanized farming, cattle production, and now a nasty drought, this once parched and barren landscape could begin to absorb this precious water, replenish the soil with life.
I was looking at two walls. One barrier was meant to keep people out. The other was based on the economy of ecological function that Liu was talking about. Before the gabions were built, rushing water from monsoon storms would take topsoil and leave cutting erosion. Now, there was water year-round.
I was with Juan Manuel Pérez, the foreman of the organization Cuenca Los Ojos (CLO) and in charge of 45,000 acres of restoration projects spread throughout the region. He was dressed in jeans and a white cowboy hat. While the Border Patrol agent eyed us, Pérez gestured to the reviving landscape around him—the native grasses and sprouting desert willows and cottonwoods—that was so remarkable. It was also what was below: a water table that had risen 30 feet in the middle of a brutal 15-year drought that everywhere else was sucking the land dry. All throughout the borderlands and Arizona, after years of hotter weather and less precipitation, the grass had withered, the earth had cracked, and animals had died. Yet, water was recharging even 10 to 15 miles downstream from San Bernadino Ranch into Mexico, to places where people hadn't seen it for decades. From brown to green, from completely dry to lush: to me it seemed like a miracle.
In this microcosm along a remote area of border, it was clear that these two contrasting visions embodied the future struggle that was upon the world. As the Trump administration moved forward with promises of hyper-racialized border building, you could say what I saw that day on this ranch was a tale of two walls: one about restoration, the other about exclusion.
We were in a place where the Rocky Mountains meet the Sierra Madre, where the Chihuahua and Sonoran deserts merge, a place of wondrous biodiversity. This habitat was home to the most species of bees in the world, and the most species of butterflies in North America.
However, due to the drought and degradation, it was an area where, according to most U.S. national security assessments, water shortages and other climate shocks could propel mass migrations of people to the United States from this region, from places like the community of 29 families located approximately 10 miles upstream called 18 de Agosto. When resident Alberto Teran started farming there in 1976, he told me, "We had very little water." They had dug wells in the parched land, but it was difficult to get the water they needed for harvest and animals. Because of this, when the Cuenca Los Ojos (CLO) projects began in the 1990s, 18 de Agosto was dead set against it, thinking, as Teran put it, that the 40,000 trincheras (small rockpile dams) and 50 gabion dams "were going to leave us without water."
Who could blame them for thinking this? Mexico had just entered the NAFTA era; the country's natural resources were put up for sale to the highest bidder, and the Mexican government was cutting subsidies and credit to small farmers like Teran. Add to this the aridity of the changing climate, and you had a classic example of sociologist Christian Parenti's "catastrophic convergence," a fusion of political, economic, and ecological displacement. People—including Teran's four children—started to leave for factory work in the city, or for the United States.
Then the miracles started to happen. A year later, the community began to notice that they had more water, and it was retained for longer periods of time. Water started to appear in places it had never been found before. Teran told me the river began to run year-round again. He told me again the miracle: In the middle of the drought, the water table in the San Bernadino Valley began to rise, while everywhere else water tables were falling.
And the water table, as Pérez told me back at the borderline, "doesn't respect the international boundary." It rose on the United States side as well. On both sides of the border, there was a return of biodiversity, biomass, and accumulation of organic material, the essence of ecological function.
– Pages 228-231
It's called living in harmony with the natural world. It's what Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert and Naomi Klein and Thom Hartmann and so many others have been talking and writing about. This is how it's done. It requires a good deal of patience and a lot of work. But then again, it's much less expensive, and it creates far fewer catastrophic problems. We really should try it some time.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.