Hello
fellow slow farmers!
So sorry
for just getting this up, this weekend was something else!
I wanted
to guide us into focusing on climate change and its effect on agriculture, with
particular focus in the Pacific. I will also put other connected discussions
together so we can all discuss together the complexities of issues and their
interconnectedness.
I wanted
to first start off with a small introduction to the Pacific Island Nations and
my connection to them. As a Samoan-American, I take deeply my connection to the
Pacific. Many of my ancestors made offerings to a great blue expanse and ventured
in search of land and home. Today, Pacific Island folks are present across so
many of the islands of the great vasa (ocean). Much of the Pacific, like much
of the continental land in the world, was cut up and sectioned off for colonial
rules from almost worlds away. When many of these nations became independent,
they formally took pieces of the ocean because the colonial border regime
remained in place. Here’s a map to get a visualization of the current borders
of Pacific Nations:
In light
of that sovereignty that Pacific Nations received post-colonial rule, there are
many conflicting oppositions to that sovereignty. One that is most related is
to agriculture. While the Pacific only contributes to a tiny fraction of global
polluting, it is receiving a disproportionate impact from that global climate
changes approaching. The Pacific, as a global sink, is actually one of the
biggest sights to see our transforming world. Here is an article of
multi-institutional research that outlines some of the changing views of
climate research and that lies at an important place of having to acknowledge
complexity in the global climate change narrative: http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2016/november/global-warming-hiatus/.
In
building on the scientific understanding of our current moment and future
trajectories, please also read just the introduction to this long UN report on
the impacts to Pacific Nations to get a good overview of the multidimensional
issue(s):
http://www.fao.org/climatechange/17003-02529d2a5afee62cce0e70d2d38e1e273.pdf
Growing
alongside much of the realities of climate change is rhetoric and
epistemological reworking. Many times, narrative can be deployed to attempt to
make action happen however the way that it is then responded to can constantly
recreate the initial understandings. For the Pacific Nations, the deployment of
‘climate refugee’ and ‘climate-induced migration’ as a way to prepare
for/imagine the future of Pacific folks is both dangerous and misconstrued.
Take some time to read this article in critique of the term ‘climate refugee’
and it’s deployment:
(This
was also a resource accessible through the library, so if this link doesn’t
work, here is the title of the piece “Climate Barbarians at the Gate? A
critique of apocalyptic narratives on 'climate refugees'”)
After
seeing some of the intersections of stories, what are some initial thoughts?
Were you initially aware of some of these realities and stories? Do you think
there are ways to reframe the rhetoric about ‘climate refugee’? Are there new
ways of reframing so that ‘climate refugee’ is an obsolete marker? Who do we
center in international policy making and who has the authority to make such
decisions? What complexities do we need to think about socially when
undertaking environmental policy suggestions?
Can’t
wait to see you all in class and have discussions!
There seems to be a core-periphery dynamic between richer and poorer countries in the world, where richer countries extract resources and labor from the poorer countries, giving little in exchange. Climate change seems to me yet another iteration in a long unbroken chain of injustices. Symptoms of climate change are projected to hit developing countries the hardest, countries that have had a minor role in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and material waste. For the Polynesian countries described in the articles, relocation is beginning to seem more like a question of "when" not "if". Recent years have shown that the debate over refugees is highly contentious. I hope that the direct role heavily polluted countries have played in climate migration can be a focal point through which debate on this subject proceeds.
ReplyDeleteI feel like climate change is always discussed as something impending and happening in the future, but I think it is important to realize that it is already here and its effects are very real for some. In reading about the effects of climate change on the Pacific Nations, where not only land is being destroyed but food insecurity is increasing due to the destruction of agricultural land, this fact is very evident. My feelings on this are very similar to Brad's, as this is yet again another circumstance in which those that are already oppressed face the consequences of the actions of those who oppress them in the first place without facing any kind of responsibility.
ReplyDeleteWhen reading about the use of the word "climate refugee," as the article you posted considered the use of this term when the effects of climate change start effecting human mobility and migration, it seems to employ the same trend of decentering the oppressed and most effected populations of a crisis, and instead focusing on how "dominant" cultures react to it. I have never before heard of this term, but I think it's use is detrimental to the people it is supposedly representing, as it frames those who need to migrate or relocate due to effects of climate change as a problem, which only reinforces and reproduces xenophobia. Therefore, considering who usually has the most say in international politics, the use of the term "climate refugee" will most likely only lead to stricter migration policies, which will displace those in areas that are most effected by climate change disasters, even though those most affected by these disasters are the people who contribute least to it.
One theme that struck me in the UN report (I read the whole first chapter, which was really interesting) was how shifting from subsistence-type farming to relying on food imports has made PICs' food supplies more vulnerable. I feel like this move has parallels across the globe, where through one form of coercion or another, people's ability to feed themselves directly from the land has been disrupted. When I think about the sort of adaptability and resilience needed to adjust our agriculture to climate change, I think that probably subsistence-type farmers have knowledge and creativity necessary to make such shifts since they usually have a deep knowledge of how plants and animals respond to changes and they themselves have had to develop tenacity and some serious problem-solving skills just in the course of daily life. If you haven't already picked up on this on my farm, nothing really ever goes entirely as planned. Equipment rarely runs without a breakdown of some sort. New pests and diseases show up every season. There is no "phoning it in" with small-scale farming. You have to be always alert, observing, and responding to your environment. Which is also what we need to be doing to figure out how to survive climate change.
ReplyDeleteI think there is a loose connection to my thought above and the Climate Barbarians article and it is about framing narratives. The words "subsistence farmer" have a narrative attached to it. When I hear that phrase I think of someone poor, exhausted, scraping by and who doesn't have a lot of options in life. This person might be "rescued" from the vicissitudes of farming through some form of capitalism by which they might earn enough money to not have to farm anymore. Through this narrative, working directly with the earth for sustenance is framed as undesirable, something to transcend, rather than a beautiful and holy relationship.
Regarding the apocalyptic narratives around climate change and migration, the authors of this article make sense to me in a number of ways. For one thing, I think that frequently we still talk about climate change as something that is going to cause us problems "someday". When we think in terms of apocalypse, we can fail to notice the effects of climate change that are occurring right now, especially if those effects don't seem to be dramatically affecting our daily lives. Which allows us to continue to live as if climate change isn't happening. And I agree that the framing of victimization rarely leads to action that is actually empowering.
The question about re-framing is a great one and I don't know if I have an immediate answer. I would love to see the people who are most impacted by climate change be centered in policy making--how do we make that happen? I think maybe by listening to them, hearing their stories, and letting those multi-layered narratives guide movements toward policy.
I had also never heard the term 'climate refugee' before, and though I suspected that rising sea levels and increasingly inconsistent weather might force people living on islands or coastal areas to move farther inland, I had no idea that agriculture was so affected. I feel as though the ocean in general is treated as a buffer for many anthropogenic activities; its carbon sequestering ability has been used as a justification for increased air pollution, apparently taking up one third of the carbon emitted by humans as of 2001 (http://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sea-carb-bish.html); trash produced on mainlands travels to shores and only really seems to be a stimulus for cleaning up if the people living on the shore are wealthy/have resources to do it themselves or there are lots of tourists (I saw this personally in the south of Thailand, where islands where indigenous communities lived were completely discounted unless they were major sites of tourism). I notice that huge changes to the ocean, such as the potential stopping of the Global Conveyer Belt, are even framed in terms of their effects on Europe and other 'Western' countries (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/currents/06conveyor3.html), while clearly everyone on earth would be affected by such an event. At the same time, the framework that the Climate Barbarians article discusses places those most affected by climate change as a problem, rather than as disproportionately affected by actions that they did not initiate or even support. These articles were very interesting to me, especially because I do think that this is a neglected area of environmental science and I was shocked at how little I had heard about this topic.
ReplyDeleteIt disturbs me that larger, richer countries that create pollution and are the greatest contributors to climate change are often the least affected by the drastic changes and the least likely to recognize the problem and call for reform. I have always known this was the case, but it's even more real and disturbing when you read statistics about the changing water conditions and even the worlds top leading scientists aren't able to determine what is going and what possible solutions there may be. If there is going to be no accountability about their contributions to climate change, large countries need to be willing to accommodate the people that are bound to be displaced by forced migration due to climate change. These articles were really interesting to me because I think it kind of proves how inaccessible information about this topic is. I'd like to consider myself well-educated and well-read, so I can only imagine how hard it would be to find articles such as these/be able to understand them if you may not have the privilege of higher education. I found some of the themes over my head because, although I care a lot about climate change, I am not super "sciencey" and haven't heard much directly about this topic.
ReplyDeleteBefore reading your post I was unaware of the "climate refugee" term, but I have been aware of the many problems that come with victim politics. We all saw this especially during the 2016 presidential campaigns, for both the right and the left.
ReplyDeleteI had trouble accessing the exact article in your post, but I found another on the subject that discusses why the United Nations resists the "climate refugee" category. It cites "the perils of constructing political arguments based on discourses of
victimhood."
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/35521113/2009-McNamaraGibson-ClimateRefugees.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1526330608&Signature=rqOBS%2Fna1qPz5EvcsSopHEXXc%2FQ%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DWe_do_not_want_to_leave_our_land_Pacific.pdf
It bring up great points, and this issue can be extended to most areas of politics. When it comes to addressing and dismantling any form of oppression, social justice work must keep what we learn from the problems with the term in mind. What I took away is that it is problematic to categorize a marginalized population in a way that depicts them as helpless people to be controlled for their own good.
Climate change is one issues that I, like so many in our society, prefer to avoid. It is difficult to face the consequences of our ignorance and apathy towards it--when our entire livelihood is at stake. It is also psychologically overwhelming when someone receives information such as climate change that seems vastly outside their locus of control. Thus, it is easy to brush off threats of environmental change when they are framed as non-immediate threats/apocalyptic narratives that prophesize a slowly emerging dystopian future (that ironically will affect those main perpetrators of it last). I knew that people are forced to flee due to environmental change, but I did not know of the term "climate refugee," and I did not know that these people often are still not offered the same legal protection as refugees. I'm not sure how to reframe the rhetoric about the "climate refugee," but I was struck by the last line of the "Climate Barbarians at the Gate?" article: "Can one thus be confident that dramatizing C–M with images of desperate hordes of ‘climate refugees’ will have any effect in saving them from sufferings?" This line brings up another way that oppressors often have/utilize/maintain their control over the oppressed: via representation.
ReplyDeleteClimate change is a frustrating topic. The full effects of climate change on the societies and structures humans have built are unknown, but growing. To survive we are going to have be smart and adapt to the quickly changing environment, luckily homo sapiens ability to adapt has kept our species alive. However, perhaps the societies and structures we've put in place are going to be our downfall. Politics, ruling powers, and greed for more don't really lend themselves to collaboration for quick changes and adaptability.
ReplyDeleteCombining indigenous knowledge of the land and how ecosystems work with modern technology could be the silver bullet that people need to survive through climate change.
In Thailand I lived with islanders who had seen significant changes with the ocean they used to fish abundantly out of. Now there are hardly any fish and ecosystems (such as Mangroves and coral reefs) are quickly dying or dead. They are left trying to find new means of living, and some resort to tourism, or have to go to the city to work for money. They used to be able to be self-sufficient, feeding themselves from the sea, however, with the declining health of the sea they have to buy more food, which means finding a way to make money.