Because we seem to be trying to turn a planet that supports life into one that does not, I’m posting a question or topic here every week to see if together we can work out some nuts and bolts of how to survive. The whole linkable list of prior questions/discussions can be found here.
This week’s question is What Will You Do About Climate-Caused Human Migration?
Historically, we tend to act toward human migrations in the following ways
- Walls — Many societies embrace hard borders, from the Great Wall of China to castles with moats, from pueblos with the ladders pulled up to the Texas shipping container wall. These are resource-intensive defensive measures that can be breached, bridged, and bypassed. They look impressive, and are good for tourism, but don’t accomplish much and keep societies from using their energies in more positive ways.
- Conflict/fighting for resources/war — The invasion of the barbarians and the fall of Rome, the retreat of the Celtic peoples and languages as the Angles and Saxons attacked, the destruction of the Amazonian tribal lands by Brazilian miners, the salting of Troy, even the supplantation of Homo erectus by Homo sapiens: all these are examples of migration as a zero sum game with enormous ecosystem consequences and body counts.
- Sharing/merging/adopting/using and enveloping — This is taking in the newcomers, adopting their foods and music and languages and gods into the dominant culture, providing homes and jobs, and forming a new, different whole. Humans have done this up to a certain number, up until the dominant culture feels threatened, and then the walls come up. India has historically been great at adding any and all gods. The Seminole took in escaped slaves. Religious communities seem to be providing the bulk of the refugee aid and resettlement and assistance.
- Die-offs — The desertification of the Sahara destroyed cultures and kingdoms, as have the megadroughts we’ve seen so far. When an entire population has to migrate in a very short period of time, the cultures and cohesion of those populations tend not to survive.
How do these look on a smaller, individual basis?
- Walls become “Good fences make good neighbors” or the guy up the road who is a “Soverign Citizen” who possesses boundry trees coated in cameras and a bad attitude.
- Conflict becomes lawsuits, police calls, dumping garbage on the neighbor’s space, and sidewalk fights.
- Sharing becomes taking down the fences and growing food together.
- And die-offs lead to deserted neighborhoods.
Basically, how we tend to react to migrations is a recap of everything you need to know that you learned in kindergarden, both the good and the bad (for an intelligent species, we are not the most sophisticated of thinkers.)
So how are we, in big groups, reacting to climate migrations so far?
About how you’d expect. We’re amping up border militarization and war, racism and demonization of the other. Sanctuary and aid groups that are getting overwhelmed and are underresourced (and sometimes being targeted), and communities are taking in families and individuals. Human smuggling and murder are seen as solutions.
What can we do as individuals, families, small communities?
In the 1970’s, there was a push to get the Vietnamese who were escaping the country to San Jose. There was already an ex-pat community there and resources, and it made sense. The Vietnamese-American community in San Jose today is large, important, integrated, and essential to the city as a whole.
Having landing places with resources available to help refugees through the trauma and to acclimatize them and the dominant culture to their new realities seems to work best. Individuals need to be a part of this, and need to push their communities toward this. And it seems to work best with smaller numbers of migrants.
So are we ready for massive climate migration?
