Storming the Wall. Todd Miller
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of such startling magnitude, there is no legal framework for climate refugees. Not in international law, not in the laws of specific countries. Instead, there is more spending on border reinforcement than ever before in the history of humankind. And as the Donald J. Trump administration takes power in the United States, there is only more of this to come.
Back in Marinduque, Josue showed me the sea-level rise map where a red band—located smack dab in the middle of the Philippine archipelago—circled the heart-shaped island like a noose. Officials project that Balogo, where I watched the man hold his child near the crumbling house, will eventually be swallowed by the sea.
I was only on the island of Marinduque for three days, but it felt like I was there for a lifetime. This is the island from which my grandmother migrated to the United States in the early 20th century. She was only 16 years old when she left. I quickly became enchanted with the island’s verdant green hills and the swaying coconut palms that I had heard about all my life but had never seen in person. Marinduque is the home of the annual Moriones Festival, in which residents re-create the Passion of Christ by dressing up in the garb of biblical-era Romans. As with the rest of the Philippines, you can still see indications of the U.S. occupation that date back to my grandmother’s era. Roadside signs are in English in a place where everybody speaks Tagalog. In the small town of Santa Cruz, where my grandmother is from, a billboard advertises a cream promising “fresher and whiter underarms.” The sign hangs over bustling market stalls where butchers chop meat on wooden slabs and bored fish vendors play poker on a cardboard sheet over the day’s catch. As I walked through the market, I could smell the chicken adobo—my grandmother’s specialty, made with a sauce of vinegar, soy sauce, and a bay leaf—at every corner.
As I looked at the father tenderly holding his child, I knew that one day this boy, if he stays, could easily be one of the millions who will be displaced. It could be the slow, steady advance of the sea. It could be a violent superstorm that assaults his home, his community, and the landscape itself. It could be the impossibility of irrigating the rice fields with the inundation of saltwater that destroys freshwater supplies. It could even be a repeat of the copper mine spill of 1996, when 1.6 million cubic tons of toxic sludge poisoned Marinduque’s river system and reached the small community of this child, oozing onto the beach and boats and palms and houses, killing animals and ruining harvests. Perhaps Balogo got off easy. Six feet of poisonous sludge buried a nearby town, displacing 400 families. With rising seas and surging storms, with skin disease and lead poisoning, my grandmother’s island has become another tragic example of Parenti’s “catastrophic convergence.”
Up to this point I had only thought of Marinduque as a place in my family’s ancestral past. But it wasn’t until I set foot on this beautiful, verdant island of rice fields and jungle that I understood that I was getting an unfiltered glimpse into the future of an escalating crisis, not only for the Philippines, but for the world.
Families like those of the father and child I saw will increasingly move farther inland to the provincial capital Boac, or across the sea to Luzon to the expanding mega-city of Metro Manila. Perhaps they will dare to cross, like so many others, one of the many heavily armed border zones proliferating across the world. Perhaps they will see the walls, the surveillance towers, the razor wire, the armed guards, detention centers, and refugee camps. Indeed, this is what I set out to explore in the pages ahead: an increasingly authoritarian world in which climate change, the displacement of people, and border militarization define the experiences of untold millions in the 21st century.
• • •
Just east of Agua Prieta, in the Mexican state of Sonora, is a section of the U.S. border wall that looks as if a gigantic hand tossed it a quarter mile inland in disgust. The Normandy-style barrier that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses to stop vehicular traffic from crossing the Silver Creek Wash, is now covered with debris. It is covered with cobwebs. It is covered with dirt. The earth is slowly consuming it. Small purple flowers are growing on the metal structure once meant to keep the “unwanted” from entering the United States. It looks like an archaeological ruin destined to be included in a future museum on failed forms of social control.
In 2014, Hurricane Odile unleashed a torrent of rain over the Chiricahua Mountains. Unable to be absorbed by the southern Arizona land parched with drought, barren of vegetation, and overgrazed by cattle, a ferocious river raged through the region. As in many hurricanes of our day and age, the rain poured into Arizona with unprecedented force, and when the deluge arrived at the international divide, it swept a portion of the U.S. border wall deep into Mexico. It was only one small section of the approximately 700 miles of wall along the 2,000-mile border, but it was an indication of how the wall is standing up to the primal forces of our changing climate.
The way the dislocated section of wall was situated, semi-buried, in the bed of the Silver Creek Wash, it was as if we were in the year 2218 and I had discovered a relic from a long-vanished civilization. If it was, it probably wouldn’t take archaeologists too long to piece together the much bigger story: the half-buried piece of metal was just one vestige of a powerful regime that expanded from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean through the late 20th and into the 21st century. Perhaps a confused future archaeologist might think this massive apparatus had been meant to stave off the onslaught of heat waves, dust storms, wildfires, and drought hitting the region. However, such theories would quickly dissipate with the discovery of the guns and stockpiled ammunition, revealing the principal purpose: to keep people out by force.
Just like super-typhoons, rising seas, and heat waves, border build-up and militarization are by-products of climate change. Just as tidal floods will inundate the streets of Miami and the Arctic ice sheets will melt, if nothing changes we will find ourselves living in an increasingly militarized world of surveillance, razor wire, border walls, armed patrols, detention centers, and relocation camps. Such a world already exists, but the militarization will intrude ever more deeply into our everyday lives, our schools, our transportation, our communication, and our sense of citizenship, community, and humanity itself. A future archaeologist will find not only a world deeply altered by the impacts of climate change, but also communities scarred with unprecedented militarization, and not only in the United States but throughout the planet, where more securitized borders divide the Global North and Global South than ever before. As it stands now, border enforcement is not only growing, but is increasingly connected to the displacement caused by a world of fire, wind, rain, and drought. These are among the most powerful dynamics that are reshaping places and the experiences of millions of people in the world today.
In a 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon called An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security, authors Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall assess what they call the “unthinkable.” In a world afflicted with climate cataclysms:
The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency. With diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources, the United States could likely survive shortened growing cycles and harsh weather conditions without catastrophic losses. Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.23
Since this crude Pentagon report was issued in 2003, the United States has more than doubled its number of armed Border Patrol agents. It has added over 650 miles of walls and barriers along the U.S.-Mexico divide, including the section that got swept into Mexico with the surge of storm water from the hurricane. The United States has poured billions into advanced technology, radar systems, drones, and tethered aerostats. Australia, too, has inaugurated a 6,000-strong border force. According to geographer Elisabeth Vallet, there were 16 border fences when the Berlin Wall fell in 1988. Now there are more than 70 across the globe, a number that accelerated after 9/11 and includes Hungary, Greece, Spain, Morocco, Turkey, and India, to name a few, among the countries that have also constructed border walls.
Border security is becoming a “globally sung mantra,” says April Humble, a researcher from the Secretariat of the Earth League, and enforcement regimes are spreading faster and to more places than ever before. The reasons cited for these