Featured
The New Climate. New(s)letter #18
Ask not what you can do for your country…
Nationalism is a problem. And I don’t just mean the rampant fascist dictatorial kind. I mean all flag-waving exceptionalism and (exclusive) patriotism, borders and all.
Some say that we have a migrant crisis. The ‘we’, here, is doing more heavy lifting that it can bear — because most countries believe this. No matter the colour of our flag, we image ourselves under assault from an imagined ‘other’ who wants to come in and steal our birthright. The other is always greedy, thieving and dishonest; we, by contrast, just want to be allowed to live our lives in peace and prosperity. If the climate — economic or atmospheric — changes and we decide to work in another country, we become ‘ex-pats’, bravely contributing to another country’s taxes and culture; if ‘they’ move to another country, however, they are othered as migrants. Rinse and repeat.
It’s not hard to unpick the hypocrisy. And yet, that hypocrisy is a central tenet of domestic politics globally. Our role as independent writers, then, is to shine a spotlight on this whenever possible.
In Rachid’s Journey: How Our Food System Exploits ‘Illegal’ Migration, investigative photojournalist does just that. Rachid (not his real name) endured a 50 day journey over land and sea from Morocco to Spain, seeking employment as an agricultural labourer. His final destination was Almería, southern Spain, where a vast expanse of greenhouses known as the Sea of Plastic attracts some 100,000 migrants.
Almería’s greenhouses are the salad bowl of Europe, stocking the grocery shelves of the continent. It would be impossible without workers like Rachid. But, nationalism. Rachid and the vast majority of his colleagues start without any legal visas or right to remain. Rather than immediately being issued with them and thanked for their service, they are forced to live in shanty towns made of greenhouse waste, and paid far below minimum wage. This blatant and widespread worker exploitation should be, and is, illegal. But nationalism offers the employers the trump card: it is the workers who are ‘illegal’, and should be dealt with accordingly. But only after they have picked our crops.
Nationalist protectionist policies also harm a country’s own citizens and natural environment. writes in Logging Lies: The Real Agenda Behind ‘Freeing Our Forests’ of President Trump’s executive order expanding timber production to ‘create jobs’. America First, and all that. Yet the US is already the number one timber producing country in the world, producing over . Barely 5% of old-growth forest remains, and yet that is exactly what the executive order targets, expanding domestic lumber production and rolling back environmental protections on national forests. In by Berna, at the Center for Biological Diversity, informs: “Trump’s order will unleash the chainsaws and bulldozers on our beautiful, irreplaceable federal forests. Clearcutting these amazing national treasures will increase fire risk, drive imperilled wildlife to extinction, pollute our rivers and streams, and destroy world-class recreation sites.” The land of the free. Unless you’re an immigrant, or a tree.
Under Nationalism, climate denial is no longer the greatest threat to climate action. Nationalist politicians know full-well that climate change is real and man-made, but plough ahead with the plunder anyway. One man’s tragically melting ice cap is, quite literally, another’s new pioneer to plunder. In ’s excellent Sounds Behind the Climate Silence, she offers a chilling direct quote from US of oil and gas executives in Houston: “The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world”. Re-reading that line gives me goose-bumps, and not the good kind. It’s just a side-effect, a business cost. The rich can just build higher walls; the rest of us be damned. Sarah continues: “The tradeoffs Wright enumerates are between the ‘endless sacrifices’ imposed by ‘quasi-religious’ climate policies and the huge amounts of fossil fuel and other energy required to allow the 7 billion people who don’t have ‘fancy clothes,’ motorized transport, and the ability to ‘fly across the world to attend conferences’ to live as the top 1 billion people do.”
I’ve often read that we can’t buy our way out of the climate crisis; but that statement only holds true if our concern is our species, or at the very least our fellow Americans / [insert your country here]. But if your concern is only the top 1%, then of course you can. They will be fine. They’ll live within concrete walls — albeit with mechanically filtered air, very little greenery and increasingly limited food choices — but they will remain alive and wealthy. Given that mindset, then the choice to burn fossil fuels even faster, scrape the seabed clean of minerals, mine the Arctic, , build vast and an escape pod to Mars… all makes sense. In a Bond villain kinda way.
But my point isn’t to just dump on Trump and his posse of enabling billionaires. The decision to revert to nationalism is happening across the world. That deep sea minerals mining I mentioned isn’t just . Norway beat the US to it as the first country to open its Svalbard up to deep-sea mining despite irreparable harm to oceanic biodiversity. While its neighbour Sweden — long upheld as a liberal, social democratic poster child — has lost that mantle, writes The New Climate writer and Swede, , in Sweden on Trial: Climate Betrayal, Racism and the Silence of Complicity: “despite the popular misconception, research suggests that if everyone in the world lived like Scandinavians — we would need multiple planets to sustain that level of consumption.” Worse than an Ikea shopping habit, however, is the rise of the MAGA (MASA?)-esque Sweden Democrats party (Sverigedemokraterna). Adam writes: “The Sweden Democrats ()… rage that there are ‘too many children named Muhammad.’ As if a name could threaten a nation… The only people who did not ‘immigrate’ to this land are the Sámi, the . The rest of us? Migrants, settlers, descendants of wanderers.” And therein lies the immutable problem with nationalism and nation states. National borders are man-made, not real. And national purity is a fantastical as dragons and goblins. Yet these myths continue to shape our lives.
Whether such nationalist protectionism means a long-term withdrawal into more insular nation states, or rather the beginning of a collapse, remains to be seen. also wrote this month in Time to End US Hegemony?: “What if the real issue in global politics isn’t about choosing between a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ superpower, but about questioning the very idea that any one country should dominate the world? A truly free market cannot exist alongside such dominance.” While considers in Could Tariffs (Accidentally) Accelerate Renewables? that, “America’s climate retreat leaves a huge vacuum — one that can be filled by developing nations with huge energy potential and a desire not to be reliant on anyone else by themselves (and the sun and wind of course).”
We also lost a leader this month who didn't believe in nationalism, but rather the unity of all humankind with a shared responsibility. ’s moving tribute Pope Francis: The Most Radical Climate Leader On Earth Is Gone reminds us that Francis released his encyclical on climate change at a crucial moment prior to the pivotal UN climate summit . It was “the most important document of his papacy and arguably the most important piece of intellectual criticism in our time”, writes Ricky. Crucially it was, “meant for everyone. Not just Catholics. Not just the faithful. Anyone who drinks water. Breathes air. Eats food. In it, Francis didn’t use the climate crisis to sound spiritual, but to expose the rot at the core of how we live, and as a way to interrogate the entire myth of modernity: growth without limit, power without responsibility and consumption without consequence.”
In fact, (don't worry, they are numbered — I didn’t spend an hour counting pontificated paragraphs) of the encyclical, Francis wrote, “International negotiations cannot make significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their national interests above the global common good.” And : “There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever.” These words are already a decade old. It’s about time we all took heed. The Nationalists certainly did.
Tim Smedley, The Editor, The New Climate
