Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Climate Debt and Border Abolition



 January 14, 2025
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Image by Josh Hild.

The following is an excerpt from Environmentalism from Below.

The assertion of a right to move is a central element of movements for environmentalism from below. Indeed, border abolition and the defense of refugees and migrants must be regarded as a key element of the climate justice movement. This means, first and foremost, challenging the racist legacy of the environmental movements in core imperial nations. It also entails recognizing the rights of climate change-displaced peoples. Such people are legally invisible at present. This is because the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 recognizes people fleeing political persecution as eligible for refugee status and asylum but says nothing about the rights of those displaced by environmental disasters or the more slow-onset elements of climate change.[1] At present, the system of international law holds that it is unable to identify a perpetrator of the crimes from which climate refugees are fleeing, so it refuses to recognize the status of climate refugee. This must change: climate refugees must be recognized by national and international legal bodies, and must be given support by those who are responsible for the climate crisis.[2]

Migrants and refugees are certainly visible at present, but not in ways that would help garner them rights – let alone in a manner that would abolish the incarceration and deportation regime in core imperial countries the US and EU member states. Migrant activists are rebelling against the oppressive and exploitation conditions in ICE detention facilities within a political context in which public discussion of a migration “crisis” has become virtually ubiquitous. Like the figure of the “mugger” in the 1970s, who for Stuart Hall and the other authors of Policing the Crisis became a symbol of the breakdown of the consensus that had supported the post-1945 Keynesian welfare state, the migrant and refugee today are invoked to articulate a broad set of crises that extend far beyond migration per se. The components of the “crisis” for which the migrant stands in include the offshoring of working class jobs, galloping economic inequality produced by the financialization of capitalism over the last half century, and the increasing cultural cosmopolitanism introduced by the very communication technologies that have helped facilitate a new international division of labor, to name but a few components of the current conjuncture.[3] Immigration has become a “funnel” issue for the far right, since all other issues can and are subsumed within the call to cease and ultimately reverse the arrival of non-white foreigners.[4]

Never mind that the threat of deportation that hangs constantly over the heads of migrants and refugees in wealthy nations like the U.S. and the European Union is a highly convenient tool of the ruling class in these countries. The ever-present threat of expulsion works to disciple immigrant labor, which in turn depresses wages.[5] But while migrant and refugee inclusion within labor markets plays an important function in contemporary capitalism, it is also true that many refugees are not put to work but are kept stalled indefinitely in camps and other transit points. This indefinite suspension of refugee lives also has an economic function since they can be simultaneously included in circuits of value extraction – in the form, for instance, of electronic vouchers for refugees’ services, humanitarian credit cards for refugees, and in the omnipresent surveillance and tracking engaged in by the baleful amalgam of tech companies and the security state.[6] In addition, the threat of detention and deportation goes beyond a narrow economic rational. The detention and deportation regime is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the imperial nation-state, which uses these strategies, in a kind of scaled-up version of the punitive practices of the detainee transfers to which Ernest Francois was subjected, as a political instrument to contain dissent and suppress political movements that challenge imperial policies.[7]

The figure of the migrant/refugee as menacing alien presence also conveniently helps produce an image of a civilized “homeland” surrounded by various failing and anarchic states. In core capitalist nations like the U.S. and member states of the European Union, public discourse has become increasingly suffused by the kind of victim mentality that characterized white settlers in South Africa, who protected themselves during their trek into the African interior by forming their wagons into a fortified circle or “laager.” In the hands of race-baiting public figures like Donald Trump and his many epigones and followers on the Far Right, the figure of the migrant and the refugee – who are effectively collapsed into one – generates an image of the ethnically pure nation as a besieged space beset by people fleeing infernal zones of social breakdown and anarchy. This conveniently elides the role of the U.S. and Europe in the violent invasions, clandestine wars, debt-produced instability, and other colonial and postcolonial atrocities that have destabilized the areas from which most migrants/refugees flee.

While xenophobic rhetoric has been a staple of Right-wing politics ever since the organic crisis of liberal capitalist states in the 1970s, in recent years it has become increasingly linked to an acknowledgement of environmental crisis. In this nascent brand of eco-fascism, Right-wing ideologues are turning away from the climate change denialism of an older generation of reactionaries to argue that the climate crisis is menacing scarce environmental resources. The resulting “Green Nationalism” is predicated on a Malthusian version of the laager doctrine, in which white supremacists argue that immigrants and people of color more broadly should be banned from entry and deported to solve the environmental crisis.[8]

Among the many disturbing examples of this demographic conspiracy theory is the rambling manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the killer of 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant’s screed draws on populist rants such as the Frenchman Renaud Camus’s The Great Replacement, which argues that European elites are seeking to replace white Europeans through mass migration. But Tarrant gives these ideas a chilling eco-fascist spin, arguing that:

The environment is being destroyed by over population, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.[9]

Tarrant’s manifesto builds on the kind of eugenicist thinking that undergirds Garrett Hardin’s infamous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) with its ahistorical and incorrect analysis of commons governance traditions and its eugenicist attacks on the welfare state for encouraging the poor to reproduce. Tarrant’s manifesto, symptomatic of an all-too-widespread genre, lays bare how fascists are seeking to take advantage of the intensifying climate crisis by reviving the vile racist fear-mongering of eugenicists like Hardin.

To call Tarrant’s manifesto a horrific racist distortion would be an understatement. The idea that the core imperial nations are menaced by these migrants and refugees is ludicrous. It is true that the number of refugees and migrants are at an all-time high: in 2022, the number of forcibly displaced people surpassed 100 million for the first time in world history.[10] And climate-induce migration is an increasingly pressing reality. The speedy and severe onset of the climate crisis has led to a dramatic increase in the number of climate-related disasters over the last twenty years. There were, as a result, 32.6 million people displaced from their homes by natural disasters in 2022.[11] But these people were “internally displaced,” in the parlance of the international legal system, meaning that they remained within the countries where they experienced natural disasters severe enough to force them to flee their homes and communities. While they suffered many of the same dangerous circumstances as refugees, simply because they did not cross an international border, they do not have a special status in international law with rights specific to their situation. Although these people were forced from their homes and communities, they did not end up in rich nations. Indeed, of the stark figure of 100 million global refugees and migrants, nearly two thirds (71.1 million) are internally displaced people.[12] In addition, low- and middle-income countries host a full 74% of the world’s refugees and other people who qualify for international protection.[13] Furthermore, of the world’s 32.5 million refugees, 69 percent are harbored in countries neighboring their countries of origin. Only one wealthy country – Germany – is even in the list of the top five countries hosting the largest number of refugees. The weight of the climate crisis is, in other words, falling most heavily and overwhelmingly on those who are least well-resourced to cope with it. These people and places are also least responsible for the climate crisis. As a recent report by the organization CARE explains, “Despite the fact that the poorest 50% of the world’s population is responsible for just 7% of global emissions, developing countries will face 75-80% of the costs of climate change.”[14]

The conditions that produce these forms of displacement are set to get much worse. According to the seminal 2020 paper “The Future of the Human Climate Niche,” by 2070 between one and three billion people are projected to live outside the climate conditions that have sustained human life for 6,000 years.[15] The authors’ analysis shows that in a “business as usual” climate scenario, the mean annual temperature will rise to an unbearable 29°C in the one third of the planet that is currently inhabited. Only about 20 million people currently live in regions where the average temperature exceeds 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29°C), an area mainly near the Sahara Desert that at present constitutes less than 1 percent of the Earth’s land. Yet as the world gets hotter because of global warming in the coming decades, huge swaths of Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia will be in this same temperature range. With warming of 3°C, conditions akin to those in the Sahara today are predicted to envelop 1.2 billion people in India, 485 million in Nigeria, and more than 100 million each in Pakistan, Indonesia, and Sudan. From 2 to 3.5 billion people will consequently find themselves living in climates that are fast becoming uninhabitable. As Professor Marten Scheffer, one of the lead authors of the study put it, “average temperatures over 29°C are unlivable. You’d have to move or adapt. But there are limits to adaptation. If you have enough money and energy, you can use air conditioning and fly in food and then you might be OK. But that is not the case for most people.”[16] In other words, a significant segment of humanity – approximately 30 percent of the world’s population – will have to move or die within the next fifty years, according to Scheffer’s research.

The result will be crises that increasingly ramify across borders – but mainly in regions of the Global South rather than in the core imperial countries. The World Bank’s September 2021 report Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration states that climate change is particularly likely to impact regions already most afflicted by poverty and vulnerability. It predicts that by 2050, countries across sub-Saharan Africa could have as many as 85.7 million internally displaced, East Asia and the Pacific 48.4 million, South Asia 40.5 million (with nearly 20 million in Bangladesh alone), North Africa and the Middle East 19.3 million, Latin America and the Caribbean 17.1 million, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia 5.1 million.

It is no mystery who is responsible for this coming epic human convulsion. The world’s ten largest historic emitters have produced 72 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the world dating back to 1850. Seven countries bear particular responsibility according to United Nations accords as a result of this historic responsibility and because of their wealth and levels of development. They are categorized in UN climate negotiations as Annex 2 countries, and include the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia. Collectively they are responsible for 48% of historic emissions. These countries bear responsibility because they have produced the vast majority of emissions that have created the climate crisis. They developed and grew their economies using fossil fuels, and have the economic capacity to pay for the costs to mitigate and adapt to climate change. These core imperial nations have colonized the atmosphere and must make amends.

There is a strong case to be made for climate reparations, a principle acknowledged even within the UN climate process, which has historically been dominated precisely by the core imperial nations and affiliated corporate agendas. The 1992 UN Framework for Climate Change (UNFCC) recognizes the unjust burden the climate crisis puts on low-income countries through the principle known as Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR, Article 4). The CBDR principle recognizes that each country has a responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the responsibility must be differentiated in accordance with its social and economic conditions because not all countries contributed equally. In other words, the rich polluting countries have a responsibility to both reduce their emissions proportionally more than poorer countries as well as to provide the finance to poor countries so they can leapfrog development based on fossil fuels, build renewable energy economies, and adapt to the impacts of climate change. But the core imperial nations have repeatedly sought to water down the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities. For instance, at the 2010 UN Climate Summit in Doha, the most powerful industrialized countries broke with the commitment to binding emission-reduction targets in favor of the voluntary declarations of intent known as Nationally Determined Contributions. This principle was officially adopted in the Paris Agreement in 2015. Since then, greenhouse gas emissions have continued their vertiginous increase, with only a temporary drop during the global pandemic.

How would a demand for reparations relate to climate refugees? As we saw in the introduction, the Cochabamba Declaration articulated many of the terms that still offer a horizon for global ecological transformation. In addition to insisting that the wealthy nations decolonize the atmosphere by reducing and removing their emissions, that they help poorer nations adapt to the crisis, and that they promote the transfer of green technologies to ensure that poorer nations are able to satisfy the needs of their people without polluting the atmosphere, the Cochabamba Declaration also sets out a framework for Climate Debt as it pertains to climate-induced migration. The activists gathered in Cochabamba argued that there are three specific forms of debt: development, adaptation, and migration debt. The first two are relatively uncontroversial pillars of climate negotiations. As a less familiar demand, the latter form of debt needs unpacking. Migration debt was articulation in the declaration through three central calls:

1. We demand political, economic, social and cultural patterns, in which the right move and displace freely is respected, also a pattern that respects the right not to migrate and not to be displaced by force;

2. We demand the promotion of a human rights treaty for climate migrants, recognized and applicable at a global scale, one of binding character and therefore claimable, so that climatic migrants have the same rights and obligations as the citizens of the country of destination;

3. We demand the creation of an economic fund, funded mainly by the countries in the center of capitalism and huge transnational corporations, that are held main responsible for climate change, destined to meet the needs of both internal and international climatic migrants.[17]

The Cochabamba Declaration thus challenges the juridical invisibility of climate refugees by calling for recognition and protection. Beyond that, though, it also calls for a sweeping transformation in the underlying cultural, economic, and political arrangements that have fostered the refugee interdiction and deportation regime. This is, in essence, a demand for border abolition. Lastly, the declaration insists that core imperial nations and transnational corporations create an economic fund that would help facilitate the internal and international forms of mobility generated by the rich nations’ pollution of the global atmospheric commons.

To what extent have the core imperial countries of the Global North responded to these demands for the reparation of various forms of climate debt, including migration debt? In 2009, at the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, wealthy nations committed to mobilizing $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020 for developing countries. Little justification was given for this relatively paltry sum. But the richest countries have fallen far short of even these inadequate promises every year since 2009. The latest figures produced by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that its member countries provided only around $80 billion in climate finance in 2019, and their 2020 commitments offered only an additional $1.6 billion. Worse still, the nonprofit Oxfam International has tracked these wealthy-nation financial commitments and has noted that up to 80 percent of the finance comes in the form of loans rather than grants. These loans entrench injustice by adding to recipient countries’ already ballooning debt burdens. And this in turn is a massive impediment to the efforts of these countries to adapt adequately to the intensifying climate crisis. Instead of building public schools and libraries that can serve as refuges during hurricane or typhoon season, poor countries are forced to pay off fat-cat bankers based on wealthy nations.

Rather than paying the climate debt they owe to Global South nations, rich countries have spent lavishly on walls, fences, cages, and paramilitary policing. In an important report on the border-security-industrial complex, researchers at the Transnational Institute totaled the average yearly contribution to climate financing from the Annex 2 countries between 2013 and 2018, and compared these totals to their spending on border and immigration enforcement over the same period.[18] The combined annual border and immigration enforcement spending of the Annex 2 countries averages $33.1 billion. This sum is 2.3 times more than their climate financing. According to the TNI report, four of these wealthy countries have border and immigration enforcement budgets that are higher than their climate financing budgets. Canada leads this shameful crew, spending on average 15 times more on border and immigration enforcement than on climate financing. The US, which spends more in absolute terms on border policing than any other nation – $19.6 billion in 2021 – designated only $1.8 billion for climate financing. In other words, it spent nearly eleven times as much on border policing than it did on helping countries cope with the carbon emissions it has had such an outsize role in generating.

Sixty-three border walls have been built between nations over the last fifty years. Yet, as many scholars have documented in recent years, walls are only one element of border fortification. Countries have spent lavishly on militarized border guards, and on increasingly deadly forms of surveillance technology to monitor borders. In addition, borders are no longer located exclusively at the geographical points of contact between nations. The border-security apparatus increasingly penetrates into the cities and rural areas of wealthy nations, and is simultaneously extending outward into surrounding countries, which have been prodded in recent years into providing interdiction services for migrants traversing their territory.

The border-security-industrial complex has boomed over the last few decades. According to researchers at the Transnational Institute, between 2008 and 2020 the federal government in the US issued more than 105,000 contracts worth $55 billion to private companies. Pivotal border profiteering companies that researchers identified include CoreCivic, Deloitte, Elbit Systems, GEO Group, General Atomics, General Dynamics, G4S, IBM, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, and Palantir. These companies provide private detention facilities, surveillance technology, biometric systems, databases, armored transportation and drones, among other technologies of control and punishment.

It may not come as a surprise that many of these companies are key players in the US military-industrial complex. Perhaps more unexpected is the fact many of the leading border policing companies have contracts to provide security for fossil fuel companies. In fact, in many cases the same rich people (or, in the vast majority of cases, rich white men) sit on the boards of fossil fuel and border security companies. The border security industry thus protects the corporations that are destroying the planet, while also detaining and punishing the people who are displaced by the impact of the carbon emissions for which these corporations are responsible.

The border-security-industrial complex is a key institutional form of the global Right wing, one that germinates from and in turn nurtures the noxious ideologies of white supremacy and eco-fascism that are increasingly permeating the public sphere in wealthy nations. Fascism emerges from a capitalist world-system in crisis. Capitalism as a mode of production and a social system requires people to be destructive of the environment. Three destructive aspects of the capitalist system stand out when we consider the question of its ecological foundations: 1) capitalism must expand ceaselessly in order to survive; 2) it inherently tends to degrade the conditions of its own production; and 3) capitalism generates a chaotic and competitive world system, which in turn intensifies its ecological contradictions.[19] As radical geographer David Harvey argues, capital is characterized by a “bad infinity”: the system must expand constantly because it is grounded in profit, or what Marx calls the generation of surplus value.[20] It should be self-evident that an economy and a culture based on three percent compound growth will eventually annihilate the finite planetary ecosystem on which it is based. Movements for environmentalism from below thus inherently work toward the eradication of capitalism.

The movement of people is a form of climate adaptation and deserves support from climate justice movements in the Global North, whether those people ultimately arrive in core imperial nations or not. What would this look like in practical terms? In 2017, Michael Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York, wrote in an opinion piece in which he suggest that, “rather than leaving vast numbers of victims of a warmer world stranded, without any place allowing them in, industrialized countries ought to pledge to take on a share of the displaced population equal to how much each nation has historically contributed to emissions of the greenhouse gases that are causing this crisis.”[21] According to the Climate Equity Calculator, the US is currently the source of 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions; the EU, 18 percent; China, 16 percent; Japan, 4 percent; Canada, 3 percent; and Australia, 2 percent. If climate-related migrants were admitted in the same proportion, for every 100 million the US would take in 30 million, the EU, 18 million, and so on.

Paying climate reparations by giving harbor to climate refugees in this manner is a good concrete demand, a kind of non-reformist reform. But ultimately, the insight that migration is a form of climate adaptation leads inescapably to a demand for the abolition of borders.[22] Nation-state borders emerged out of long histories of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. They are a relatively recent invention, dating back to Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the US and similar legislation in other settler colonies. Today their existence continues to support a global order riven with inequality, injustice, and racist violence. Borders are machines for the production of a violent, colonial, and fascist global order. Razor-wire fences, armed men, surveillance drones, and all the other paraphernalia of the border-security industrial complex do not ultimately stop people, they only make movement more perilous. And borders are not just dangerous for migrants. The growth of a militarized border security apparatus helps reinforce and feed authoritarian populism among segments of the public in core imperial nations, and in other countries to boot. This fascist creep must be stopped.

Borders do not prevent people from moving. As we have seen, large numbers of people are already on the move in response to a climate crisis not of their own making. Given the trajectory of the climate crisis, their numbers are only going to grow. Although there is no global organization of climate refugees, no real equivalent of La Via Campesina’s transnational organizing of peasants, climate refugees are nonetheless a global movement (in both senses of the term). Looking at the struggles of specific people like Cruz Martinez and Ernest Francois, we understand that migrants and refugees are fighting the racist border and deportation regime tenaciously. They are making history by reconfiguring human culture and political organization on a vast, transnational scale. Indeed, climate refugees could be called one of the most consequential movements in the history of humanity. Given the current trajectory of the climate crisis, it seems likely that the vast majority of people will ultimately become climate refugees, although under radically different conditions.

Border abolition must therefore be a core demand of the global climate justice movement. Now more than ever, with the barbaric character of the global capitalist system laid bare by the coronavirus crash, we sorely need new narratives of possible worlds.[23] This is as much an issue of imagination as it is of design since the current crisis is ultimately a product of the capitalist foreclosure of emancipatory possibilities.[24] The climate crisis will surely bear down harder in coming years, and with it the social pressures that underscore the burning need for such alternative visions. As I suggested in the introductory chapter, there is a long history of solidarity between environmental and climate justice movements in Global North nations and similar movements in the Global South. Nowhere will such forms of international solidarity be more important than in the struggle against the border-security-industrial complex. Movements in the Global North are already fighting the border security and deportation regime, not just for the sake of the peoples of the Global South but also for their own sake, for as we have seen fanning fears about climate refugees is a core strategy of fascist movements in the Global North.

In the face of intensifying crises, environmentalism from below holds open the prospect of a future founded not on fear, militarization, and an eco-fascist mindset, but on conviviality, borderless mobility, and global solidarity. The feelings of solidarity that emanate from environmentalism from below surrounded me as I stood surrounded by my friends from New York City-based environmental justice movements at the closing ceremony of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Behind us was a large and extremely vocal contingent of Argentinians from a group called Los Pibes (the kids), waving bright blue banners waving in the early morning sunlight and singing radical songs that sounded like football chants. A procession of Indigenous peoples from across the Americas walked through the crowd surrounded by billowing clouds of incense, performing a ritual to beseech Pachamama or Mother Earth for forgiveness for our desecration of the planet. The ceremony took place on April 22, 2010, Mother Earth Day.

On that day, the 32,000 climate justice activists who had gathered in Cochabamba collectively proclaimed the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. This document recognizes that Earth is an indivisible, living community of interrelated and interdependent beings with inherent rights.[25] It also defines fundamental human responsibilities in relation to other beings and to the community as a whole. The declaration proclaimed our collective determination to replace exploitative values, worldviews, and political, economic, and legal systems that uphold them with those that respect and defend the rights and harmonious co-existence of all beings. This transformed orientation is fundamental to the ongoing fight for a decolonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-patriarchal ecological reconstruction of the world. It is only fitting that this book dedicated to exploring and celebrating movements for environmentalism from below conclude with a reaffirmation of this collective vision of our world transformed.

NOTES

1. “Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law | Oxford Academic.” 

2. I follow De Genova, Garelli, and Tazzioli in mobilizing the term “refugee” as a strategic essentialism that refuses the bureaucratic distinction between undeserving migrants and “genuine” refugees. See Nicholas De Genova, Glenda Garelli, and Martina Tazzioli, “Autonomy of Asylum? The Autonomy of Migration Undoing the Refugee Crisis Script” South Atlantic Quarterly 117:2 (April 2018), 247. 

3. Stuart Hall et. al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), vii. 

4. Michael Hale Williams, The Impact of the Radical Right-Wing Parties in West European Democracies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 60-61. 

5. See Sunaina Maira, “Radical Deportation” in Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds., The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 295-328. 

6. De Genova, Garelli, and Tazzioli, “Autonomy of Asylum?” 253. 

7. Sunaina Maira, “Radical Deportation,” 302. 

8. Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (New York: Verso, 2021), 133-180. 

9. Quoted in Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel, p. 151. 

10. UNHCR, “A Record 100 Million Forcibly Displaced Worldwide,” https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/05/1118772 

11. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 

12. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Displacement Data,” www.internal-displacement.org/database/displacement-data 

13. UNHRC, “Figures at a Glance,” www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-are/figures-glance 

14. CARE, “Developed Nations Hugely Exaggerate Climate Adaptation Finance for Global South,” https://www.care-international.org/news/developed-nations-hugely-exaggerate-climate-adaptation-finance-global-south 

15. Chi Xu et al., “Future of the Human Climate Niche,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020), www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910114117 

16. Quoted in Jonathan Watts, “One Billion People Will Live in Insufferable Heat Within 50 Years – Study,” The Guardian (5 May 2020). 

17. Cochabamba Declaration. 

18. Todd Miller, with Nick Buxton and Mark Akkerman, Global Climate Wall: How the World’s Wealthiest Nations Prioritise Borders Over Climate Action (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Transnational Institute, 2021). 

19. For a more extensive exposition of these three ecological contradictions, see my book Extinction: A Radical History (O/R Books, 2016) and Joel Koven, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World (Zed, 2007). 

20. David Harvey, “Why Marx’s Capital Still Matters,” Jacobin (12 July 2018). 

21. Michael Gerrard, “America is the Worst Polluter in the History of the World. We Ought to Let Climate Change Refugees Resettle Here.” Common Dreams (Jun 26, 2015), https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/26/america-worst-polluter-history-world-we-should-let-climate-change-refugees-resettle 

22. For a fully fleshed out defense of border abolition, see Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha, Against Borders: The Case for Abolition (New York: Verso, 2022). 

23. George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2017). 

24. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009). 

25. Cormac Cullinan, “The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth: An Overview” in The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (San Francisco, CA: Global Exchange, 2011), 10. 

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