Towards a Climate Politics of Active Welcoming
Our imaginary of sustainable community must move beyond defending and nourishing what is already there to embrace what we do not yet have.
My grandmother’s cabin in northern Vermont, where my family used to gather every summer, was a locavore’s paradise. There, we bought our steaks from a nearby, free-range farm and our corn from a roadside stand next to the cornfield. The wider world didn’t seem much to matter during those visits—up until seven years ago we didn’t even have internet. But even then, what was most exciting was always right outside the window: the deep green of the trees, the chipmunk daring ever-closer to the peanuts scattered on the deck, fireflies blinking in the darkness between lightning streaks. The only thing that spoiled it was us, flying in for a week or two from the cities where we earned our vacation.
Yet there was something else connecting that particular acreage to places thousands of miles away. Every summer in a meadow above the house, bobolink birds nested. Their calls, which had the bounce and twang of the old AOL dial-up music, were part of what made that field itself. Then, in August, they flew south—all the way to the grasslands of Argentina or Bolivia, in one of the longest yearly migratory flights of any American songbird. Watching them fly off, I could imagine someone standing in an equally particular field, on the other side of the equator, to welcome the Tordo Charlatanes home. The bobolinks lived a sustainable life that was also a mobile one. They reminded me that natural doesn’t mean every creature must remain in the ecosystems of their birth.
As the climate crisis threatens to displace a growing number of both humans and nonhumans from their original homes, bobolinks and other migratory species show us how to welcome the stranger into environments that can still support diverse life.
A local life is often assumed to be a more sustainable one. We (in temperate climates, at least) must give up eating strawberries in winter and Easy Jetting to white-sand beaches. In exchange, we will live a smaller but more fulfilling life, more deeply connected to the flourishing of whichever ecosystem surrounds us. Some aspects of this vision have been challenged. A 2008 study found that shifting away from high-emitting foods like meat and dairy could make more of a difference in reducing your meal’s carbon footprint than merely eating local. Still, continuing to move people and goods around the globe using fossil fuels is incompatible with meaningful climate action, as transportation is the largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
But it isn’t the movement of people and goods itself that harms the climate—the Silk Road long predates the industrial revolution. Rather, the problem comes when we are compelled to move at the speed of capitalist production. This distinction matters because painting mobility itself as unsustainable in the context of the climate crisis risks victim-blaming, bordering on eco-fascism. Climate-related disasters in places like the Bahamas’ Abacos Islands and Central America’s “dry corridor” are already forcing their inhabitants to seek home elsewhere. So far in the U.S., those seekers have been met with outright denial or forced into twenty-first century concentration camps. If we are to articulate both a just and compelling vision of what a climate conscious future might look like—one that decouples human flourishing from the fantasy of capitalist growth—it must also be one that rejects these cruelties and imagines ways to actively welcome the globally-displaced into the ecosystems that remain capable of sustaining human and non-human communities.
Many ecologically-minded visions of an alternative good life—from permaculture to Transition Towns to the local food movement—have operated on a principle of viral locality, in which ideas (and sometimes their spokespeople) travel from place to place while humans and other life-forms put down deeper roots. There are several reasons why this approach makes sense, both psychologically and practically. In his famous discussion of capitalist alienation, Marx wrote that the wage laborer “feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.” Is it any wonder that we imagine a post-capitalist world as a sort of homecoming?
Capitalism also works according to what Anna Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, calls scalability: “an ability to make projects expand without changing their framing assumptions.” This is the basis of the methods of industrial-agriculture, imposed on ecosystems around the world with no regard to their specificity, that encouraged Dave Holmgren and Bill Mollison to develop permaculture as an alternative. For Tsing, “scalability banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things.” It is also understandable that we would want to resist the homogenization of superstores and monocultures and restore the biological and cultural diversity that historically made our home communities different from everyone else’s.
Finally, in an economic system that feeds us lots of information about the world’s problems but offers us few means of influencing them, local action is one way to take our power back. “[T]he world’s huge challenges (climate change, social inequality, economic decline and so on) feel more manageable if addressed at the local scale,” the Transition Town website reads. Local action also gets around the massive wealth and firepower imbalance between corporations and their state bodyguards and the rest of us. It is a way to, as Andrew Dana Hudson puts it, “figure out what a community needs to be prosperous, peaceful and sustainable in as long a term as you can wrap your head around, and start building whatever piece is most in reach before the absent state notices.”
But what if that state looks the other way on your guerilla gardening project because it is busy building detention centers for immigrant children? At least in the “developed” world, a focus on local transformation risks being a retreat from the fight for global climate justice. By 2080, the south of England could have a climate like the south of France. By 2050, North Africa and the Middle East could see daytime temperatures of 46 degrees Celsius in the summer, even if we limit warming to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. It is possible to organize a community to adapt to the former by, for example, painting houses white and introducing Mediterranean irrigation techniques. But the latter, researchers say, could make it “intolerable” to stay put. In order to both minimize and respond humanely to such displacements, those of us who want a better world must find a way to directly oppose two powerful forces: the corporations who extract and transport the fossil fuels and the governments who build the border walls.
There is, encouragingly, a growing awareness of the link between these two struggles. UK environmental group Reclaim the Power themed its national gathering this summer “Power Beyond Borders” and took direct action against both Britain’s hostile environment immigration policy and its only gas site. In September, Texas immigration non-profit Raices joined the climate strike. Sometimes these struggles can take the form of a defense of a particular community or ecosystem, as, for example, the struggle against the wall along the US-Mexican border, which—as Lynn Wang wrote for this magazine—has brought together environmental, indigenous, and community groups. The border isn’t only enforced at its physical line, and so, for many communities, local action includes standing up to immigration authorities. One particularly inspiring example took place in Tennessee this summer. A man and his son were afraid to leave their van after ICE agents followed them to their driveway. So the man’s neighbors turned up to bring gasoline to keep the van running and food to keep the man and his son as comfortable as possible inside. Eventually, the officers left, and the neighbors formed a human chain so that the father and son could leave the car and enter their home safely in case the agents returned.
But our imaginary sustainable community must move beyond defending and nourishing what is already there to in fact embracing what is not yet. This is partly because a purely local vision risks being co-opted by the far right. The Nazi blood-and-soil ideology targeted the Jews as especially suspect because they were “wandering” and “rootless”, as Peter Staudenmaier pointed out. Contemporary German eco-fascists, Janet Biehl explained, call for a “Europe of Fatherlands” which wants “all cultures to have sovereignty over themselves and their environment.” This is also a sort of viral locality, in which European countries model each other in separating out and returning to their supposed roots. And it is an idea that has already gone viral: eco-fascism connected with anti-immigrant rhetoric cropped up in the manifestos of both the Christchurch and El Paso shooters. It is of course still a fringe ideology, but it could grow more attractive in the Global North as those who can decide it is easier to wall themselves in solar-powered eco-villages. Easier to convert your English seaside town into a Mediterranean-style paradise and forget the people crossing the Channel tunnel, clinging to the undersides of trucks, the exhaust in their face still cooler than the days back home.
To counteract this vision, the left wing of the climate movement should make welcoming the stranger a key principle of its vision. One positive inspiration for such a vision is the community sponsorship of refugees, in which the act that brings a local group together is the act of helping a new person or people to join it. It is easy to imagine how this process could be folded into a green praxis, as new and old community members exchange sustainable gardening techniques and bake each other their favorite meals from the harvest. However, any group wishing to do this is separated from the people they would welcome by state bureaucracy. In the UK, communities who are approved to sponsor refugees will be able to actually increase the numbers admitted to the country, but this is not the case in the U.S., where there is no formal community resettlement program, and the Trump administration has set next year’s refugee cap at 18,000, a historic low.
In this context, it is worth thinking through how ecologically-minded, networked communities could begin moving people as well as ideas. There are already groups who leave out water for migrants crossing the desert or set sail to rescue refugees crossing the Mediterranean. Why not connect with like-minded groups farther from the border or the coast who are willing to clandestinely absorb new arrivals or escort them safely to the next hub? The logistics of such a plan obviously cannot be discussed here, but for those already willing to take direct action against environmental injustice, it’s one worth considering.
Hopefully, it will not come to this. If social movements that champion both climate action and environmental justice can triumph over the forces of denial and reaction in the next few years, then we can legally welcome the displaced while working to swiftly reduce emissions so that as many people as possible will not be forced to leave their homes. Deciding to welcome the displaced is not an excuse for giving up on protecting and fighting for vulnerable communities. Fiji has said they would resettle the population of low-lying Tuvalu, but Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga has so far declined, calling evacuation a last resort. He would rather the world act now on climate so that Tuvaluans can stay living on their island. Losing a beloved home is a heartbreaking experience under any circumstances, and we should respect the wishes of those who choose to adapt and remain.
But that doesn’t mean our ideal future must be one in which everyone who can stays in place. A post-growth world could also be one in which some of us set off north or south or east or west, walking and pitching in as we go, learning new recipes and songs as we travel, and sharing new stories and soil restoration techniques with our hosts.
In fact, imagining such a world is essential for anaesthetizing the environmental movement against eco-fascism’s false conflation between the natural and the stationary. The world, slowed, can be just as connected. Just ask the bobolinks.
Olivia Rosane is a freelance writer, poet, and PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Her academic work looks at depictions of forced displacement in Romantic and contemporary poetry.
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