I was beginning to study the links between the refugee situation and the effects of Global Warming and came across this article by Ellie Mae O'Hagan in theguardian: Mass migration is no ‘crisis’: it’s the new normal as the climate changes.
My coauthor and I talk about paradigm shifts in our book from the perspective of what is necessary for humanity to come to grips with what we have done to the planet.
According to O'Hagan :
The migration we are witnessing is not a state of exception: it is the beginning of a new paradigm – and how we choose to respond to it reflects on who we fundamentally are as a society. We must deal with the victims of this permanent crisis in a compassionate way, not just for their humanity but for our own.
If you are following these events at all you know that we are already way behind in generating the necessary cognitive adjustments to them. Read on below and I'll share more of her insights.
O'Hagan is very sharp in catching the importance of how all this is being framed and why:
I’ve been interested in the way the migrant crisis is being debated in politics and the media. It’s that word – crisis – that is particularly striking. It suggests that what we’re seeing in across Europe is an aberration, a temporary disaster to be “solved” by politicians. Even the sight of ramshackle tents in Calais suggests a phenomenon that could be cleared away at any given moment.
In The Concept of the Political, the philosopher Carl Schmitt argued that, when presented with crisis, liberal democracies will put aside constitutional niceties in order to survive. The public consents to its government violating liberal values because crisis is a state of exception, which requires desperate measures.
Perhaps that explains why there has been so little uproar over supposedly civilised societies using terminology like “marauding” and “swarms”, and making policy decisions that result in hundreds of people drowning in the Mediterranean or languishing in detention centres. These things, we think, don’t reflect who we are as people. They are just necessary responses to this current crisis.
Things are coming to pass far more quickly than most of us anticipated. The ravages of the disruptions climate change is already bringing are but the tip of the iceberg (bad pun intended).
When terms like Environmental migrant become a common idea we are into a paradigm shift for certain.
Environmental migrant refers to people who are forced to migrate from or flee their home region due to sudden or long-term changes to their local environment which compromise their well being or secure livelihood, such changes are held to include increased droughts, desertification, sea level rise, and disruption of seasonal weather patterns such as monsoons. Environmental migrants may flee to or migrate to another country or they may migrate internally within their own country. However, the term 'environmental migrant' is used somewhat interchangeably with a range of similar terms, such as 'environmental refugee', 'climate refugee', 'climate migrant', although the distinction between these terms is contested. Despite problems in formulating a uniform and clear-cut definition of 'environmental migration', such a concept has increased as an issue of concern in the 2000s as policy-makers, environmental and social scientists attempt to conceptualise the potential societal effects of climate change and general environmental degradation.
Anyone following political debate in this country will likely be surprised by these ideas. We are already having ugly fights about "immigrants" when they are really refugees. We certainly are not ready for these hard realities. The effect of our unpreparedness intellectually is probably even more disturbing than our unpreparedness in material ways.
The 2016 election has the potential of becoming a big distraction from our human duties. The time to try to begin to catch up with the real world is now. We are not going to do it and the result will be horrible.