On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  • • •

  There is an avalanche of evidence that there is no peaceful way, either. The trouble is structural. Fossil fuels, unlike renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar, are not widely distributed but are highly concentrated in very specific locations, and those locations have a bad habit of being in other people’s countries. Particularly that most potent and precious of fossil fuels: oil. This is why the project of Orientalism, of othering Arab and Muslim people, has been the silent partner of our oil dependence from the start—and inextricable, therefore, from the blowback from fossil fuel dependence that is climate change.

  If nations and peoples are regarded as other—exotic, primitive, bloodthirsty, as Said documented in the 1970s—it is far easier to wage wars and stage coups when they get the crazy idea that they should control their own oil in their own interests. In 1953 it was the British-US collaboration to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP). In 2003, exactly fifty years later, it was another UK-US coproduction: the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. The reverberations from both interventions continue to roil our world, as do the reverberations from the successful burning of all that oil. The Middle East is now squeezed in the pincer of violence triggered by the quest for fossil fuels, on the one hand, and the impact of burning those fossil fuels on the other.

  In his book, The Conflict Shoreline, the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has a groundbreaking take on how these forces are intersecting. The main way we’ve understood the border of the desert in the Middle East and North Africa, he explains, is the so-called aridity line, areas where there is on average 7.8 inches (200 millimeters) of rainfall a year, which has been considered the minimum for growing cereal crops on a large scale without irrigation. These meteorological boundaries aren’t fixed: they have fluctuated for various reasons, whether it was Israel’s attempts to “green the desert” pushing them in one direction or cyclical drought expanding the desert in the other. And now, with climate change, intensifying drought can have all kinds of impacts along this line.

  Weizman points out that the Syrian border city of Daraa falls directly on the aridity line. Daraa is where Syria’s deepest drought on record brought huge numbers of displaced farmers in the years leading up to the outbreak of Syria’s civil war, and it’s where the Syrian uprising broke out in 2011. Drought wasn’t the only factor in bringing tensions to a head, of course. But the fact that 1.5 million people were internally displaced in Syria as a result of the drought clearly played a role.

  The connection between water and heat stress and conflict is a recurring, intensifying pattern that spans the aridity line: all along it you see places marked by drought, water scarcity, scorching temperatures, and military conflict—from Libya to Palestine to some of the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.

  And that’s not all.

  Weizman also discovered what he calls an “astounding coincidence.” When you map the targets of Western drone strikes onto the region, you see that “many of these attacks—from South Waziristan through northern Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Iraq, Gaza and Libya—are directly on or close to the 200 mm aridity line.”

  The red line on the map shows the aridity line; the red dots on the map represent some of the areas where strikes have been concentrated. To me, this is the most clarifying attempt yet to visualize the brutal landscape of the climate crisis.

  All this was foreshadowed a decade ago in a US military report published by the Center for Naval Analyses. “The Middle East,” it observed, “has always been associated with two natural resources, oil (because of its abundance) and water (because of its scarcity).” True enough. And now certain patterns have become quite clear: first, Western fighter jets followed that abundance of oil; now Western drones are closely shadowing the lack of water, as drought exacerbates conflict.

  • • •

  Just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought, so boats follow both: boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war and drought. And the same capacity for dehumanizing the other that justified the bombs and drones is now being trained on these migrants, casting their need for security as a threat to ours, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army. Tactics refined on the West Bank and in other occupation zones are now making their way to North America and Europe. In selling his wall on the border with Mexico, Donald Trump likes to say, “Ask Israel, the wall works.” Camps filled with migrants are bulldozed in Calais, France. Thousands of people drown in the Mediterranean every year.III And the Australian government detains survivors of wars and despotic regimes in camps on the remote islands of Nauru and Manus. Conditions are so desperate on Nauru that last month an Iranian migrant died after setting himself on fire to try to draw the world’s attention. Another migrant, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Somalia, set herself on fire a few days later.

  Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister, warns that Australians “cannot be misty-eyed about this” and “have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose.” It’s worth bearing Nauru in mind the next time a columnist in a Murdoch paper declares, as far-right commentator Katie Hopkins did last year, that it’s time for Britain “to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.”IV

  In another bit of symbolism, Nauru is one of the Pacific Islands very vulnerable to sea level rise. Its residents, after seeing their homes turned into prisons for others, will very possibly have to migrate themselves. Tomorrow’s climate refugees have been recruited into service as today’s prison guards.

  We need to understand that what is happening on Nauru, and what is happening to it, are expressions of the same logic. A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy—that we must take care of our own first, that migrants are out to destroy “our way of life”—will be marshaled to rationalize these monstrous decisions. We are making this rationalization already, if only implicitly. Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or are among the thirty-six million who, according to the United Nations, are facing hunger due to drought in southern and East Africa.

  • • •

  This is an emergency, a present emergency, not a future one, but we aren’t acting like it. The Paris Agreement commits to keeping warming below 2°C. It’s a target that is beyond reckless. When it was unveiled in Copenhagen in 2009, many African delegates called it “a death sentence.” The slogan of several low-lying island nations is “1.5 to Stay Alive.” At the last minute, a clause was added to the Paris Agreement that says countries will pursue “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”

  Not only is this nonbinding, but it is a lie: we are making no such efforts. The governments that made this promise are now pushing for more fracking and more mining of the highest-carbon fossil fuels on the planet, actions that are utterly incompatible with capping warming at 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. This is happening because the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries in the world think they are going to be okay, that someone else is going to eat the biggest risks, that even when climate change turns up on their doorstep, they will be taken care of.

  When they’re proven wrong, things get even uglier. We had a vivid glimpse into that future when the floodwaters rose in England in December 2015, inundating sixteen thousand homes. These communities weren’t only dealing with the wettest December on record. They were also coping with the fact that the government has waged a relentless attack on
the public agencies and the local councils that are on the front lines of flood defense. So, understandably, there were many who wanted to change the subject away from that failure. Why, they asked, is Britain spending so much money on refugees and foreign aid when it should be taking care of its own? “Never mind foreign aid,” we read in the Daily Mail. “What about national aid?”

  “Why,” a Telegraph editorial demanded, “should British taxpayers continue to pay for flood defenses abroad when the money is needed here?” I don’t know—maybe because Britain invented the coal-burning steam engine and has been burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale longer than any nation on earth? But I digress. The point is that this could have been a moment to understand that we are all affected by climate change and must take action together and in solidarity with one another. But it wasn’t, because climate change isn’t just about things getting hotter and wetter: under our current economic and political order, it’s about things getting meaner and uglier.

  The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatization, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all. The connections and intersections between them are glaring, and yet so often, resistance to them is highly compartmentalized. The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change; the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. Too many of us fail to make the connection between the guns that take black lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody and the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world.

  Overcoming these disconnections, strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements, is, I would argue, the most pressing task of anyone concerned with social and economic justice. It is the only way to build a counterpower sufficiently robust to win against the forces protecting the highly profitable but increasingly untenable status quo. Climate change acts as an accelerant to many of our social ills (inequality, wars, racism, sexual violence), but it can also be an accelerant for the opposite, for the forces working for economic and social justice and against militarism. Indeed, the climate crisis, by presenting our species with an existential threat and putting us on a firm and unyielding science-based deadline, might just be the catalyst we need to knit together a great many powerful movements bound together by a belief in the inherent worth and value of all people and united by a rejection of the sacrifice zone mentality, whether it applies to peoples or to places.

  We face so many overlapping and intersecting crises that we can’t afford to fix them one at a time. We need integrated solutions, solutions that radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of good, unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and excluded under the current extractive economy.

  Said died the year Iraq was invaded, living to see its libraries and museums looted—and its oil ministry faithfully guarded. Amid these outrages, he found hope in the global antiwar movement and in new forms of grassroots communication opened up by technology; he noted “the existence of alternative communities across the globe, informed by alternative news sources, and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights and libertarian impulses that bind us together in this tiny planet.” Yes, “environmental”— his vision even had a place for tree huggers.

  I was reminded of those words recently while I was reading up on England’s floods. Amid all the scapegoating and finger-pointing, I came across a post by a man called Liam Cox. He was upset by the way some in the media were using the disaster to rev up anti-foreigner sentiment, and he said so:

  I live in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, one of the worst affected areas hit by the floods. It’s shit, everything has gotten really wet. However . . . I’m alive. I’m safe. My family are safe. We don’t live in fear. I’m free. There aren’t bullets flying about. There aren’t bombs going off. I’m not being forced to flee my home and I’m not being shunned by the richest country in the world or criticized by its residents.

  All you morons vomiting your xenophobia . . . about how money should only be spent “on our own” need to look at yourselves closely in the mirror. I request you ask yourselves a very important question . . . Am I a decent and honourable human being? Because home isn’t just the UK, home is everywhere on this planet.

  I think that makes for a very fine last word.

  * * *

  I. This context must be front of mind in the design and rollout of any contemporary Green New Deal. In order to avoid a replication of these colonial patterns, Indigenous knowledge and leadership will have to be embedded from the start, particularly when it comes to the ambitious tree-planting and ecological restoration projects that are badly needed to draw down carbon and provide storm protection on a large scale.

  II. The idea that climate breakdown is not the doing of humanity as a homogenous unit but rather of specific imperial projects received strong historical reinforcement in early 2019. A team of scientists from University College London published a paper in Quaternary Science Reviews that made a persuasive case that the period of global cooling known as the “Little Ice Age,” which took place in the 15-1600s, was partly caused by the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas following European contact. The scientists argue that, with millions dead from disease and slaughter, huge swaths of land that had previously been used for agriculture were reclaimed by wild plants and trees, sequestering carbon and cooling the entire planet. “The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO2 and global surface air temperatures,” the paper states. Prof. Mark Maslin, one of the coauthors, refers to this chillingly as a “genocide-generated drop in CO2.”

  III. In 2016, the year of this lecture, a record 5,143 migrants died in the crossing, according to the International Organization for Migration.

  IV. In recent years, Europe has adopted the Australian model with gusto. In an effort to restrict immigration, the Italian government has lavished the notoriously lawless Libyan Coast Guard with funding, training, logistical support, and equipment—all so that it is able to intercept the migrant boats before they reach European waters. Under this new system, the migrants who live—thousands still drown—are taken by force back to Libya and to what are frequently described as “concentration camps,” places where torture, rape, and other forms of abuse are widespread. Meanwhile, international humanitarian organizations such as Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), which had previously saved thousands of migrants at sea, are facing criminalization and the seizure of their vessels. At the end of 2018, when MSF was forced to cease operations of its rescue ship Aquarius, MSF general director Nelke Manders remarked, “This is a dark day. Not only has Europe failed to provide search-and-rescue capacity, it has also actively sabotaged others’ attempts to save lives. The end of Aquarius means more deaths at sea, and more needless deaths that will go unwitnessed.”

  THE LEAP YEARS: ENDING THE STORY OF ENDLESSNESS

  When you have gone as badly off course as we have, moderate actions don’t lead to moderate outcomes. They lead to dangerously radical ones.

  SEPTEMBER 2016

  LAFONTAINE-BALDWIN LECTURE, TORONTO

  MY DIRTY CANADIAN SECRET—AND PLEASE don’t turf me out of this lovely hall for it—is that I’m actually American. I even brought my passport to prove it. I also have a Canadian one. By law, when I travel into the United States, I have to show the one with the eagle on it. And when I travel back home to Toronto, I show the one with the elaborate coat of arms with lots of British things on it (as well as a smattering of maple leaves that you can’t really make out).

  Let me explain this duality. My parents are both Americans, born in the United States, which at the time gave their kids de fac
to US citizenship. I, on the other hand, was born in Montreal, and I have lived in Canada my entire life—except for a handful of years before I was five. In my twenties and thirties, I was always very clear that my Americanness was a technicality, not an identity. I rarely mentioned it, even to good friends. I checked the “Canada” box on forms and stood in the “Canada” line at the airport. And when I gave speeches and interviews in the United States, I said “your government,” not “our government.” And even though my parents told me I was entitled to one, I never applied for a US passport. I sort of liked not having physical proof of my Americanness.

  So, what changed? In 2011, I was in Washington, DC, at a protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which, if built, would carry tar sands bitumen from Alberta to the Gulf Coast.I The action in Washington included civil disobedience, a decision, by thousands of people over a two-week period, to peacefully trespass in front of the White House and get arrested. No non-Americans were supposed to participate in the civil disobedience part of the action, since getting arrested in the United States can have serious implications for your ability to reenter the country.

  But something happened on that day in Washington: a delegation of Indigenous people from Northern Alberta, whose traditional territory has been badly damaged by oil and gas development, decided to risk the repercussions and get arrested anyway. Impulsively, and without warning my husband, Avi (which he always reminds me of), and I decided to join them.