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richardwells's review against another edition
5.0
Five stars for importance, must-know info, and timeliness.
In the past month I've read two books on the climate catastrophe: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells (reviewed elsewhere) which charts the course of climate change per degree centigrade that the earth warms - catastrophe after catastrophe, the earth acting as it must; and, Storming the Wall which charts the activity of governments as they respond to the human catastrophes that a climate catastrophe engenders - "guns, guards, and gates."
As the subtitle states, this is a book about human migration caused by climate change, and the role of Homeland Security - a new(ish) multi-billion dollar industry kicked into gear after 9/11, and now focusing on climate refugees. It's the nouveau war on drugs now that the old war on drugs has failed except as a way to criminalize asylum seekers, and beef up Homeland Security's budget. (The largest security marketplace is in San Diego, at an annual expo visited by functionaries legal, and extra-legal. You could equip your private army of border patrol “oath-keepers” by one-stop shopping.)
When people hear "climate refugee," the immediate reaction is that some geography has become unlivable (people mostly think heat, or sea-level rise,) but the truth is that many climate refugees are not fleeing inhospitable weather, but the ecological and economic upheaval, crime and government/police repression that follows on the tail of catastrophe.
Governments, world wide, have responded not by focused, dramatic action to stop greenhouse gas emissions (always have been and still the leading cause of climate change) or by in-country relief, but by a dramatic increase in the militarization of borders. Walls, towers, drones, sophisticated tracking equipment, vehicles, prison camps, and guns lead the way in terms of hardware, while conscience free bureaucrats make and maintain policy, and an increasingly beleaguered border patrol tries to carry policy out. It all amounts to keeping people from moving, and if they do move, stopping them at a border. Still at the beginning of all this upheaval, we think of borders as national, but we can expect the Homeland Security industry to expand definitions as individual states, and smaller municipalities start militarizing their borders - land, sea, and air.
It’s not just happening at the borders. The oil industry, most notably, is spending tons of money on lobbying efforts in order to exploit new land, and hinder the development and use of alternate fuel sources, and elected officials are standing with their hands out to grab a piece of the action. Bought and paid for, they pass laws that favor industry over earth. Meanwhile, governments are becoming more repressive in terms of hampering climate activists, there's even been a marked increase in the assassinations of climate activists - especially in the Philippines which is a definite ground zero governed by Donald Trump's soul mate Rodrigo Duterte.
Both books let us in on the fact we’re fucked in the short run, and precarious in the longer term, and hold out only moderate hope. But it’s good to know what we’re up against, and these books are “tell-all’s” much more important than tracking the day by day follies of the Trump administration.
Important reads – highly recommended.
PS: City Lights published Storming the Wall, and deserves high praise for having done so.
exhausted_hedgewitch's review against another edition
fast-paced
Chapters 2 & 4 particularly insightful
papablues050164's review against another edition
5.0
A lot of people are going to die not just because of the climate disruptions we've caused, but because of the blatant & contradictory hatred infesting U.S. border security. Todd Miller explores the impulses to keep out immigrants and our tendency to treat them as scum. The question that never seems to be asked is why Latinos keep trying to cross the border when its perfectly obvious a lot of people don't want them here; why no one considers that as bad as they're hated here, life in their home country is a hell of a lot worse. At times depressing, there are glimmers of hope in the power of collective action.
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