Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Tell you what — let’s convene a Blue Ribbon commission to make recommendations about what to plan on doing when the tsunami gets here. All in favor say aye.
Pity for a nanosecond the unfortunate Donald Trump, who has just been run over by migration, something that is spreading across the world like a vast tsunami, threatening to overwash entire countries. It doesn’t really matter that, because he neither reads nor thinks, he has no clue what it was that just flattened him like a possum on an Alabama Interstate (“Why a Rogue President Was Forced to Back Down on Family Separation,” — The New Yorker); because few people in the world, including some very smart people, seem to know what to do about it.
Spoiler alert: It’s too late to do anything about it. Children are going to be crying at the borders for a very long time.
Some may know where this vast, unstoppable flow of humanity is starting, and what is starting it, but no one — I say again, no one — has a clue how to deal with it. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — who no one doubts is superior to Donald Trump in intellect, education and experience, by orders of magnitude, is on the verge of seeing her government brought down because she thought she should welcome migration and deal with it in a nice way. The result was an inundation that has shaken Germany to its foundations.
Greece, Spain, Italy, Turkey, England — virtually all the countries of Europe have been similarly afflicted, both by the influx of immigrants and by the ugly, nationalistic, racist movements that have infected their politics as a result. Some have built camps for the migrants and walls on their borders; some have used their navies or coast guards to rescue desperate waterborne migrants, others to prevent their pitiable rafts from touching their shores and becoming a national liability.
It’s easy to stand off at a distance and pronounce moral judgments about responses. But if you’re standing on the border of your country facing a tsunami of desperate people, neat moral distinctions become less clear. Because you are facing the conundrum of the lifeboat: if you are in a lifeboat (from the Titanic, for example) that can safely carry 12 people, but will swamp and sink with 20 people aboard, what do you on the lifeboat say to the 20th person in the sea who wants to come aboard? What is the morally correct answer? Failing that, what is the answer that will satisfy both you, on the boat, and the person in the sea, and those watching on television from the comfort of their homes?
Virtually every country in Europe is struggling — unsuccessfully — with the overloaded-lifeboat conundrum, as a human tide rolls out of North Africa, across the Mediterranean Sea and into Europe. These people are from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and it is widely said that they are fleeing war, and poverty, and crime, and oppression. What is not well understood is that they are, basically, climate refugees, whose homelands have been stressed by desertification, drought and heat to the point of being uninhabitable. If you take them in, their needs may swamp your lifeboats. And there is no such thing as sending them back, because there’s no there, there.
While climate change has reached the intensity of a perfect storm in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and other hot spots of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, it is still a gathering storm in Central and South America, where Amazon River basin droughts, disappearing freshwater glaciers and more frequent hurricanes are dialing up the desperation that fuels rebellion, war — and migration.
Of course it was once the case that people crept over the border to get jobs and luxuriate in the supposed freedoms and blessings of life in America. Those attractions started going up in smoke in the crash of 2009, and were pretty much fully incinerated by the election of Trump in 2016.
Anyone who thinks that the rising tide of humanity now starting to overlap the southern U.S. border consists of gang members and would-be domestic workers must be named Trump. Anyone who thinks that someone named Trump — or anyone like or unlike him — can solve this problem is just not paying attention.
Once a tsunami has been launched by titanic forces, and you find yourself in its path, you do not solve the problem. You either get to high ground, or you die. And in this case, nobody knows where the high ground is.
[Also see, from three years ago, “Coming Soon To Us All: A Choice Worse than Sophie’s.”]
About 160,000 years ago the Clever Primate (homo sapien) began expanding beyond his equatorial homeland to exploit the virgin north country. I mean, what with population pressures, depleting savannah fauna and the like, what’s a fella to do?…you get the picture.
Except for a few southerly migratory aberrations – mostly colonial in nature – and occasional periods of relative population intransience, the northward trek has carried on through the ages…I see no reason why it would abate now.
All organic beings are parasites. Richard Heinberg likens the growth of human population to the growth of yeast in sugar solution. The yeast multiplies and multiplies, consuming all the available resources (the sugar) and polluting its own environment with alcohol which is poisonous to it. To start with, the little yeast civilization thinks things are pretty sweet. Enough sugar for all, comfortable environs, excellent conditions. Then they hit their peak population and the environment they’ve polluted kills them off. Heinberg argues that we’re destined to do the same (sleeter).
True, creatures as well as plants tend to migrate to virgin territory. However, there is an important difference: for the most part, these life forms adapt to environmental challenges through the process of Natural Selection. This takes time – time to evolve, and, more importantly, time for the host ecology to adjust.
Not so with humans. Human can invade quickly and in large numbers. No need to wait for evolution (though this process does take place over time). Humans adjust through the use of artifice and invention. Their impact can be immediate and shocking – consider, for example, the aftermath of the Asian invasion of the Americas; within a few short millennia virtually all species of American mega-fauna had been obliterated by the tool-wielding interlopers. A similar eco-catastrophe took place in Australia eons ago…With humans it’s different!
Tom, correct! Very few are willing or capable of joining the dots on this one. This was always going to happen it is now just increasing, day by day by day. Hardly anybody of any intellectual persuasion has had the mental acuity to understand this, I guess that really shows how they failed to understand the problem, how it would multiply and its inevitable consequences in the first place. People in power, government and corporate continue to be unable to understand that the upheaval now beginning to bubble up is not a political problem nor a financial problem but they continue to use the only mindset they have to any problem, we will use political power (or raw militarised violence) or pretend that financial chicanery will deal with it.
While we all love to travel, we hate to move, loose our connections with family and place and our stuff, so you when your out of reliable hope (for the weather and climate you knew, for food, shelter, reliable harvests, peace, honest government and safety) you move to survive because that is what we have always done, get out and get going. Trouble is now everywhere is taken and the best bits are owned by some seriously dangerous tribes. If your life is all you have left to loose having a go at anything else is but a minor gamble.
[“These people are from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and it is widely said that they are fleeing war, and poverty, and crime, and oppression.What is not well understood is that they are, basically, climate refugees, whose homelands have been stressed by desertification, drought and heat to the point of being uninhabitable. If you take them in, their needs may swamp your lifeboats.”]
By and large they are fleeing overshoot, consequences of which, often exacerbated by unenlightened despotism… and yes, very probably, “If you take them in, their needs may swamp your lifeboats” because our own unenlightened moronic puppets believe Malthus was wrong and will giggle like a 5 year old hearing ‘pee pee’ words to anyone unearthing the issue.
They’ll then endeavor to strike their calm-head-of-state pose and utter a variation of the following sentence:
[“I think Malthusian alarm-ism has been with us for a long time … blah blah blah …and that it’s a proven [!!!] fact that with today’s technology …blah blah blah… we might encounter a few challenges ….blah blah blah … but with the tolerance I know our country is capable of blah blah blah our corporate owners and managers will enjoy a little surge in production as much as the bottom half earners will enjoy prolonging the wage stagnation and God willing, appreciable decline, because you know, … freedom”]
Ok, maybe not the last part … but you get the drift…
Yes it is a real conundrum. The only solution I can think of (and it would be a real challenge) is reverse migration. That is, using mass migration to invade another country, say Mexico. What would happen if millions of illegal Americans showed up there and started to create lives? It would be interesting to say the least.
In any case Mr. Lewis, your essays are always powerful and well written.
And there are still idiots around who insist that the whole farce that is modern industrial ‘civilization’ is still doing well and will never collapse.
If in history (the elites of) the West had not gone around messing up the world’s geopolitical landscape and compelling everyone else to follow a way of life that burns fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow, the whole sorry mess described in the article above might not have come to pass. Of course, there’s probably not much point in saying this anymore — the milk’s already spilt (sigh).
It will be good to see the ‘Masters of the Universe’, the One-Percenters (make it Point-One-Percenters), the Bilderbergers etc finally get their comeuppance.
We are deep into human overshoot and as you say, there is no solution. We can react well or badly but the good reactions all involve sharing the remaining resources more equitably. So far the rich of the world, both individually and internationally, have not been willing to live more like the poor, the very suggestion is unspeakable. Unless we decide to live on less, doors will be beaten down, individually and internationally.
Hi Tom and everyone,
I agree with almost everything you said, but I have a nagging suspicion that Mrs. Merkerl´s motives and response were not what they were sold and propagandized as, but rather quite calculated and opportunistic. Germany, like any other western industrialized nation, is struggling to achieve even modest rates of growth:
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/74644/umfrage/prognose-zur-entwicklung-des-bip-in-deutschland/
Letting in more than a million people when your country´s population is 80 million is an increase of nearly 1.5 %; they all need to be fed, clothed and housed and it probably goes a long way helping GDP to increase, even though Germany´s GDP depends a lot on exports. In addition Germany´s economy needs cheap labour to keep those exports ´competitive´ (by now, wages here are among the lowest within the EU).
If you´ve watched how our head of state got rid of her political opponents over the years, you know that this lady is not about being nice.
greetings
Frank from Germany
Although there is much to dislike and disagree with American militarism, the one shining light of late has been erudite and sober analysis. Without referencing specifics, there have been a few global and regional threat analysis conducted by branches of the U.S. defense, (ahem, oxymoron), and intelligence. Number one on the list is climate change impacts as Tom has outlined in this post.
Check one atta-boy for the Americans. Given the current U.S.-Canadian relations that’s saying a lot. However, I do feel a certain amount of vindication for returning to Canada from the U.S. a few years back. Migration and climate change were not the top of the list of motivations, but the regional benefits justifications still apply.
As I used to say in The Oil Drum, when the ‘Merikans start trying to cross our Canadian border as illegal immigrants we won’t make them pick lettuce. It’s a big place up here. Winters mostly suck, or six months of bad sledding depending on your point of view. But we will survive.
There was a study done over ten years ago, one of the architect/urban planners was a founding member of the Vancouver Peak Oil Executive:
https://globalnews.ca/news/1750950/scientist-predicts-mass-exodus-of-climate-change-refugees-to-pacific-northwest/
Whether the waves of the immigration tsunami physically lap up on our shore remains to be seen. We will certainly be impacted financially.
Migration is evolutionary. It’s just a matter of time before Americans migrate across their northern border. You won’t be welcomed. I don’t worry about it because I know that it can’t be stopped here or anywhere. It does not matter how much technology, walls or bullets (energy) they eventually use they will never stop them all. It’s a predicament and one that will only spawn more pain and tragedy. There will be a tipping point where even the loudest, die hard progressives (most of them are, deluded, full of shit and silent on Yemeni & Palestinian children being starved and killed with plenty of American assistance) will go quiet on the immigrants. When they realize their own privilege, then existence, is being threatened. It can’t be avoided even if the US wasen’t broke beyond the pale.
This guy, Giles Slade, is way to hopey. When have the humans ever been noble and compassionate, other than isolated incidences, during Overshoot-decline-collapse?
Giles Slade – American Exodus
“Published on May 21, 2014
Giles Slade discusses his book American Exodus — Climate Change and the Coming Flight for Survival. Some scientists predict the sea will rise one and a half metres before 2100, but rapidly melting polar ice caps could make the real increase much higher. In the coming century, intensifying storms will batter our coasts, and droughts and extreme heat events will be annual threats. All this will occur as population grows, and declining water resources make growing food ever more challenging. What will happen when the United States cannot provide food or fresh water for the overheated, overcrowded cities where 80 per cent of Americans currently live? The good news is that this overall decline of habitability in the mid-latitudes will be matched by increases in the carrying capacity of sparsely populated lands above the 49th parallel. This phenomenon suggests that waves of environmental refugees will travel north as southern conditions worsen. Our northern lands are our Noah’s Ark – a vital refuge in the time of mankind’s greatest need.
American Exodus argues that we are entering a long period of global turmoil which will be characterized by human migration on an unprecedented scale. It is a frighteningly believable survey of our immediate future, but it ends on a note of hope: we may yet survive the coming century of climatic change if we act now to safeguard our shelter of last resort.”
https://youtu.be/mmb1nFdRS8Q?t=145
“Migration is evolutionary” – precisely my point! And it applies to all life forms. The hosts never see it coming; have no natural defenses against the intrusion.
What, pray tell, were the Native Americans (well, not actually ‘native’ – they migrated to this land mass from Asia a mere 13,000 years ago) thinking when they allowed a handful of Europeans to establish a few measly costal villages? And what the hell were the Germans thinking when they opened their borders to the Middle Eastern horde?…’Gee whiz, there are only a few of them; they can’t harm us’, or ‘My gosh they’re cute; let’s be nice guys and welcome them’, or better yet ‘Maybe we can put them to work – I’ll bet they come cheap’.
Remember, “diversity is nature’s key to killing and eating your ass.”
Apneaman, although I have been in the loop about the expected migration north for over 10 years, to hear it said as you quoted gives me pause. “Our northern lands are our Noah’s Ark”; above the 49th parallel. Despite the illusion presented by typical U.S. weather forecasts of a vast void of land above the 49th, there happens to be a whole other country up there. They may not be so amenable to the Noah’s Ark host duty.
To illustrate the general lack of knowledge I can use my accent situation while living in Florida. From time to time people would ask where my accent is from, “Wisconsin?”, they would guess. “No, a little farther north”. I would reply. Nearly every time I got head scratching bewilderment as they tried to figure out what was farther north than Wisconsin or Minnesota. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
You want to come north, its gonna cost ya. Put your money down now and avoid the rush.
Re: Greg Knepp, wow that attitude makes Mr. He who not be named (aka Guy Mcpherson) version for the future of TOTAL human extinction much more appealing. In fact, this is exactly what breeds misanthropy. Speaking of breeding, does this article sheds light on the overpopulation conundrum Mr.Lewis? Is this what overshoot of a species look like?
McPherson, Nietsche, Hobbes, Shopenhauer, Ecclesiastes, Gilgamesh, back, back, back…The foreknowledge of humankind’s self-ruin is the most ancient of truths.
Albert Bates piece today
Sargon and the Sea Peoples /b>
“You can’t just knock down forests and dig long irrigation ditches and expect Nature to let you off scott-free, however. The plowing opened the soil to the sun and killed the rich microbial life built by those erstwhile forests. Irrigation made the fields salted and addicted. Major lakes silted. Without the trees and their fungal network, the weather changed. It stopped raining.
After a mere 130 years of prosperity, the Akkadian empire collapsed abruptly in 4170 BCE. There was general abandonment of agriculture, dramatic influxes of refugees, and widespread famine. The same calamity befell much of the rest of the region. Poorer tribes flocked to wealthy Akkad seeking help.
Faced with the rising tide of hungry people, Sargon’s successor thought a good solution would be a 112-mile-long wall, roughly the distance by patrol car between Brownsville TX and Rio Grande City, which Akkadians dubbed the “Repeller of the Amorites.”
http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2018/06/sargon-and-seapeoples.html
History only appears to repeat itself. It’s human nature, the best and worst of it, that repeats itself and always under the same sort of circumstances.
The humans are not in control of anything, but by default suffer the illusion-delusion that they are.
The Maximum Power Principle (MPP) drives the bus.
With all due respect for some of the above posts, it is both simplistic and unduly pessimistic to blame ‘human nature’ for the current mess we face. I’m sure Mr Lewis would agree. There have been premodern civilizations in history that have been able to last thousands of years — without overtaxing their resource base and without building far-flung empires. Surely there must have been something they did right which we could have done, too (except we didn’t, of course).
Why are you ‘sure Mr Lewis would agree’? List these civilizations(links) that have been able to last thousands of years — without overtaxing their resource base and without building far-flung empires’. Where are they now? Why did they die? They are fantasy. You are just making shit up and even if there were some where is the logic in claiming that because one did it then all can and forever? That’s like claiming because some obese people have managed permanent weight loss ( 1-2%) all obese people can or all addicts can live addiction free because some have.
As a life long student of history, especially ancient and prehistory, I can tell you that all civilizations and humans prior have overshot. I already provided a few examples in the Bates link.
One of the big differences between successful ancient civilizations and moderns is that the ancients knew that all their social gains/improvement in quality of life for more citizens and the civilization itself were impermanent. Far wiser than over privileged arrogant moderns with their religious like belief in eternal and permanent progress.
You think you are beyond biology and physics (it all physics actually) and thus will remain frustrated and blaming and judging through your ideological lens until you are done.
Everywhere the humans have migrated to, death and environmental destruction have followed. Once humans evolved behavioral modernity their self inflicted doom was sealed. Not their fault.
Humans responsible for demise of gigantic ancient mammals
Early humans were the dominant cause of the extinction of a variety of species of giant beasts, new research has revealed.
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_465673_en.html
“The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals
“The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind
All that being said, people can still fight for better conditions, but they need to be realistic. I do not like my culture, nor most of the people in it, so I have found what serves me best has been disengaging myself from it as much as I can. Maximum non participation at every level. This is also known as collapse now and avoid the rush. I live almost 2/3rds below my modest means (about 1/2 below the Canadian poverty level of $24K a year) and I am the healthiest ever (at 51 and was sick and in pain for two decades with multiple chronic conditions) and also as content as one can be trapped in an insane growth culture where few are satisfied and want more even while the hundreds of consequences are making them sick, miserable, angry and will destroy civilizational and likely extinct them before this century is out. If my fellow privileged world citizens cut 1/4th of their equivalent of what I did, we would not be anywhere near as in bad of shape as we are now, but they don’t want to. They probably just lack the right information and moral fiber eh? Hate their kids? Nihilists? Evil?
Methinks not.
I’m sure there’s no need to resort to personal insults. And I never said any civilization that lasted thousands of years has lasted until today (a couple have, though — China and India). You want a list? China. India. (Ancient) Egypt. The natives of North America.
China and India were both reasonably prosperous at the time the white man was knocking at their door. If they had overtaxed their resource bases there should have been widespread famine already in those places by that time, except there wasn’t and the two civilizations were still doing fine. (They weren’t perfect, as in being paradises on earth, but could any human culture ever be?)
It is always easier on one’s pride and conscience not to pin the blame on what one’s culture has led to but on ‘human nature’, as John Gray has done. (Interesting that when it comes to the good things one’s culture has produced, the West insists instead that it alone could have come up with them.) But reality speaks differently. True, humanity as a whole may not have been particularly nice to Nature, but it’s still undeniable that modern industrial ‘civilization’ holds the record for being nasty to Nature by several orders of magnitude. (It’s like comparing a street thug to Stalin.) Not to mention threatening now to plunge several billion of us into an Olduvai Gorge after a mere couple hundred years — quite possibly including you, me, your loved ones, and mine. Which premodern civilization has ever been guilty of such a thing, I ask you?
And don’t tell me that the rest of the world shouldn’t and wouldn’t have industrialized if industrialization were such a bad thing and they knew it. All too often they simply had no choice. An agrarian culture like China for example could never defend herself against the depredations of the West without modern weapons. And to acquire these you need to industrialize. Had all that not been the case, I can assure you the Chinese would never have taken this sorry path in history.
To be sure, I did allow that the West itself would not have taken this sorry path either had it not been for an elite that stood to gain from the pursuit of this path more than everyone else. The Luddites were there for a reason, I’m sure. We of today call this elite the ‘one-percenters’. Why aren’t they changing the whole godforsaken system for everyone’s sake? Because they still stand to gain from it, that’s why.
My two cents. Take or leave them. (Not that much can be done anymore at this juncture…)
One more little thing:
“That’s like claiming because some obese people have managed permanent weight loss (1-2%) all obese people can or all addicts can live addiction free because some have.”
Can I lift Mt Everest with my bare hands?
No, I can’t. It’s just not a possibility.
But can I lift that pencil on my desk with my bare hands?
Yes, I can. It’s just a matter of whether I want to.
Same with obesity and addiction issues. It’s just a matter of whether one wants to do it, not whether one can. If others have been able to do it, I surely can, too. (We shall leave out the possibility that those others were mutants or special freaks of nature.)
Yo, Mr. Lewis – “Camp of Saints”. A novel from years back. Worth a look. Lew