Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnnyB
Climate change brought on mostly by the industrialized nations wreaks havoc globally with suffering mostly accrued in poorer, less industrialized nations that have larger populations and less wealth or resources to deal with changes. When people from these places that are directly suffering the consequences of disaster wrought via the activities of industrialized nations seek to find refuge in places with better resources, they're identified as threats or criminals and further persecuted and their suffering is made that much more intense. Meanwhile, in the industrialized nations people are upset about having to accept reductions in quality of life that are not insubstantial, but are really nothing in comparison to those suffered by the vast majority of the world's population. Those with resources continue to fight over or club together for the accumulation of more resources, at the further expense of those without resources, all the while celebrating their own societal superiority as self-evident in their higher standard of living and relative absence of suffering. Rather than make substantial sacrifices in quality of life, industrialized nations regard the problems of populations displaced by climate emergencies as tragic but intractable problems that at best can only be contained. Most of the world's people suffer. Their governments, now in disarray, are exploited by those nations with relative stability and power in order to extract more valuable resources from them to further fuel the needs and wants of the richer and more stable nations.
I'm not sure if that's a description of a dystopian future, or the present.
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Good post.
I really, really, Really don't like the framing of climate refugees as "illegal immigrants". That's the kind of talk that fascist ideologues will no doubt use in the coming years when more and more of the world's territory becomes uninhabitable. It's not hard to look at the rise of right wing nationalism in Europe as a backlash to the Syrian refugee crisis and then extrapolate that to a much larger scale when imagining just how many people will be displaced by sea level rise and rising temperatures.