From Pole to Equator, the Specter of Violence Looms
New climate realities are also expected to alter military conflicts among nations. One of the most troubling potential flashpoints could be the fast-melting Arctic, which, thanks to all that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, will soon be wide open for fishing, resource extraction, and other activities. In fact, the United States and Russia haven't even let the Arctic Sea finish its thaw before starting to militarize it. As Devin Speak of NPR reports,
"While indigenous communities have long thrived in communion with the land there, nation states haven't had much presence in the northern latitudes because it hasn't been ripe for exploitation. Until sea ice began rapidly receding, oil, gas, shipping, and minerals were all under frigid lock and key. But with dwindling sea ice, tapping the region's resources is becoming more feasible. And in conjunction with the economic opportunities, nations are eyeing big military spending. Russia has already ramped up its military presence and the United States is playing catch-up."
As an armed standoff in cold polar waters heats up, increased attention is being paid to climate-induced mass migration as another likely conflict trigger. After all, forecasts now suggest that if greenhouse-gas emissions aren't reduced deeply and quickly, the climatic zones safe for humans to live in will shrink dramatically. The worst of it will happen in tropical South America and Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, parts of China, and the U.S. Sun Belt. By 2050, two to three billion people are likely to either be living in or fleeing regions that have become increasingly hostile to human existence and, by 2090, it could be three to six billion of us, or a quarter to a third of humanity. Desired destinations will include the northern United States and southern Canada, Russia, Central Asia, Korea, Japan, northern China, and northern Europe.
Consider for a moment the torrent of hate and cruelty we've seen in the past decade along borders between the United States and Mexico, Southeast and South Asia, and Europe and Africa. Now, imagine a 10- to 20-fold increase in long-distance migration rates and the anti-immigrant hate, violence, and even international conflict that could grip the globe in the decades to come. As a preview, just consider the fact that Republican governors in 14 states have already deployed National Guard troops to the border with Mexico for no good reason whatsoever.
In his Guardian column, Monbiot explains succinctly how climate disruption and anti-immigrant bias reinforce each other: "Round the cycle turns," he writes. "As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programs are shut down, heating accelerates, and more people are driven from their homes. If we don't break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times." It may already be the most important story, whether we realize it or not.
Climate change is likely to exacerbate violence within countries as well, simply by discombobulating us as individuals. A 2015 analysis of 57 nations found that "each degree Celsius increase in annual temperatures is associated with a nearly 6% average increase in homicides." More recently, a review of research worldwide found that climate disruption can undermine peace by interfering with people's mental or physiological functioning and by threatening our quality of life.
Increasingly extreme heat will also push waves of human displacement within national borders, further fanning the flames of domestic conflict. An analysis by Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica found that, as the Earth's atmosphere warms, almost half of the U.S. population "will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe." Expect many millions of us to move from the Sunbelt to, perhaps, the Great Lakes region and from rural to urban areas.
Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University and a modeler of climate migration interviewed by Lustgarten, predicts some especially hard times for Atlanta. It's the largest metropolitan area in the Southeast, a region in which, climate models suggest, droughts and wildfires will become far more common and severe as the decades pass. He projects that hundreds of thousands of local climate refugees will migrate from outlying areas into an urban area already experiencing overburdened water systems and a shaky infrastructure, along with the highest income inequality among large U.S. cities. All of that, writes Lustgarten, could make the future Atlanta "a virtual tinderbox for social conflict."
Such conflict could well include the kind of state violence and oppression that's increasingly unleashed on people and groups who are determined to protest against the systems that create climate chaos, environmental devastation, and injustice. Indeed, in Atlanta, that violence is already a reality. This winter and spring, city police shot and killed an activist and arrested 40 more for nonviolently occupying the city's largest urban forest. They were part of a broad effort by people in low-income neighborhoods bordering the forest, environmental organizations, and racial-justice groups to head off the construction of a tactical-training center for the Atlanta police department that would occupy and devastate 85 of that woodland's 150 acres. The coalition aims to prevent deforestation, preserve the quality of life for nearby neighborhoods, and halt the expenditure of $90 million on a facility that would hone the skills of cops who have demonstrated their willingness to kill unarmed Black people.
And mind you, those forest defenders were charged not with trespassing but with violating Georgia's domestic terrorism law, which carries a sentence of at least five years in prison. When arrested, they were held in a jail that, reported Piper French of Bolts, "is notorious for squalid conditions and allegations of mistreatment by staff." The defendants, who had committed no acts of violence, let alone "terrorism," were denied bail on flimsy grounds, including accusations of merely "wearing black, having a jail support number scrawled on their arm, and having mud on their shoes," according to French. And the basis for denying bail thanks to wearing black clothing and having on muddy shoes? That domestic terrorism law provides for something called "vicarious liability." (In plain English, you could call it guilt by association.)
Nor did the repression stop there. Following a SWAT team's recent raid on a southeast Atlanta home, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested three board members of an Atlanta nonprofit that was arranging legal support for those forest defenders. They were charged with money laundering and charity fraud, stretching the already dubious concept of vicarious liability even further. Writing for Jacobin, Abe Asher notes that "the intensity of the threats protesters in Atlanta are facing is reminiscent of the risks climate defenders routinely face in the Global South, where both activists and journalists are routinely jailed and killed in their defense of land and water. Of the 401 human rights defenders killed last year, nearly half were killed defending the climate."
Violence on the Ground (and Below It)
Some of America's domestic policies aimed at curbing climate change could also become increasingly responsible for conflict in the Global South. If, for instance, the wealthier North continues to pursue technology-heavy "green growth" climate policies, the south could suffer yet more from the inherent violence of resource extraction. The need for increasing amounts of the minerals and metals essential to building renewable energy systems and vast fleets of electric vehicles -- including lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and rare earths -- is attracting much media attention these days.
Worse yet, in the future, they are likely to become the focus of "green resource wars." And the mining of such ores isn't the only extractive activity that raises the threat of conflict. To take one example, if the world's nations pursue climate-mitigation policies that depend heavily on biofuels, the ensuing fuel plantations could end up occupying a staggering quarter to a third of the world's croplands, almost certainly displacing some essential food crops to less productive areas. And count on this: communities throughout the global south are not going to stand back and allow such potentially wholesale losses without protest.
Selina Gallo-Cruz is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University. She recently published a paper, "Peace Studies and the Limits to Growth," in which she laid out the ways the widespread violence and injustice implicit in the global North's quest for growth -- green or otherwise -- has affected other communities around the world.
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