We’ve been over this before . . .
I have found Ten Bears in our comments section from time to time. I also followed the link to his blog “Homeless on the High Desert” and read a few of his posts. In “We’ve been over this before . . . ,” Ten Bears makes the point of migrants, people leaving their homeland to find better land in which to live will continue to go to other lands to live. They will go for food, water, safety, etc.
Much of their leaving or all of it is due to pollution created by the heavily industrialized nations. One of which is the United States. There is still time to turn this around, stop the damage we have created and maybe reverse some of it.
It is only then will people remain in their native lands.
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Commenter and blogger Ten Bears @ Homeless on the High Desert: “We’ve been over this before . . .” | Homeless on the High Desert (wordpress.com)
Cobbled together from several posts with links deliberately disabled for a growing rarer everyday comment elsewhere . . .
Weather, “climate”, the atmosphere, the thin layer of potentially toxic gases we live in that envelopes the only ball of rock we know of we can live on, does not recognize the boundaries of “nation/states”. Ask the Neanderthal.
It is beginning: I have harped on this for years, it’s the climate not conflict that’s driving the migration.
We’re not going to stop the migration. It can’t be stopped.
We’re not going to stop millions or tens of millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions, of people determined to leave someplace that has become uninhabitable by just saying “no”. That is without a doubt the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. A part of the world is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and the people are leaving. We’ll not stop it. We can’t stop it.
It can’t be stopped.
And it is playing out equally on both sides of the planet ~ When we look to the middle east and beyond the wars over oil and religious insanity we find drought. Mega-drought, rapid desertification, and the outright theft of one nation/state’s water by her neighbor to the south ~ Israel, stealing Syrian water. And famine.
That population is fleeing north. It can’t be stopped. It won’t be stopped.
So too on our side of the pond, something I’ve been pointing to for several years but only recently catching the attention of the mainstream with the advent of drumpf uck’s ooga-booga caravan of Central American refugees fleeing not just crime and violence but drought. Mega-drought, rapid desertification and famine. That population is fleeing north.
It can’t be stopped. It won’t be stopped.
You can’t stop the migration. Weather, “climate”, the atmosphere, the thin layer of potentially toxic gases we live in that envelopes the only ball of rock we know of we can live on, does not recognize the boundaries of “nation/states”.
I’m not sure I buy this. You can blame climate change, but migration has been around for a long time. The reasons change with the times. In the 20th century, it was popular to blame colonialism or regime change. In the 19th century, political unrest and famine. In the 18th century, religious persecution and economic opportunity.
Climate change can definitely drive migration. The Mongols migrated across Central Asia and China fueled an improved climate for horses, and the Vikings headed south, west and into the Mediterranean in response to local cooling. Still, it is hard to argue that all those Cubans in the 1960s were leaving their home island for the US in response to climate change and not regime change.
Also, it is actually possible to slow or stop migration. It happens all the time. Try getting a Swiss work permit. It was even harder in the 1930s. The desire to migrate may be there, but the fact is that most people are going to be left behind. If India or Iran become too hot or too dry, there are still going to be tens of millions of people stuck there even if tens of millions are welcomed elsewhere.
Thank you Run. It’s like thinking in geological time: it is a scale most cannot grasp.
Ten Bears
This week’s Crooks and Liars’ Mikes Roundup also picked up one of your posts from your site. I am sure you will experience a surge of readers. It is always good to have other blogs who are thriving and we can support each other.
Kaleberg
hard for me to understand your point. of course there are other reasons for migration. ten bears is saying climate is the big one today. he may be on to something. we may need to change the way we think about this.
i think he is right. but i also think that resisting migration is also a fact of life. be great if we can stop climate change and other man related destruction of life support systems. but in the meanwhile one people with limited resources are not going to welcome newcomers. in the past US have been wrong about the limited resources…oh, they were limited all right, just not the ones the people believed were limited : “jobs” vs the ultimate limitation of ability to support population at a standard of living higher than that of rats.
people are also phylogenetically afraid of the “other” however much we liberals think we are above all that, push us just a little and we all of a sudden find out just how much we hate the “other” even if at first we manage not to hate the designated “other” of our domestic enemies.
Cob,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/09/21/what-led-haitian-nationals-migrating-u-s-southern-border/8419170002/
DEL RIO, TEXAS — Thousands of Haitian immigrants encamped at Del Rio, Texas, after entering the U.S. through the Rio Grande are awaiting either deportation from U.S. authorities or deciding to stay put and seek asylum.
But how did these Haitian migrants make their way to Texas instead of entering from Florida — a state that’s closer to the Caribbean nation?
Many of those migrants, experts say, were likely already in Central America, as powerful natural disasters and an often-dysfunctional government prompted a steady flow of out-migration for more than a decade.
But now, with economic opportunities drying up in Latin America as the pandemic continues, Haitian migrants are seeking asylum in the U.S.
“The end goal is always the United States,” said Eduardo Gamarra, professor of political science at the Florida International University. “And the pattern is one that wasn’t really begun by the Haitians, it was begun by the Cubans. They’re the ones who set this trail.”
2010 earthquake spurs migration
A devastating earthquake in 2010 earthquake displaced more than 1.5 million people from the island nation. Afterwards, many Haitians left their homeland for South and Central America.
“Brazil was facing a labor shortage because they were building stadiums for the World Cup and the Olympics,” said Mark Schuller, a professor at Northern Illinois University and president of the Haitian Studies Association…
People used to travel to make a living such as nomads and reavers, e.g., Cossacks and Vikings, or better fishing and fruit gathering such as Polynesians. The industrial revolution substituted jobs for subsistence living. So then people traveled to find a job. The Club of Rome figured that globalization would solve our immigration problem, but labor cost arbitrage in industrial production requires more of hosting nations than mere desperation of its people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
The Limits to Growth (LTG) is a 1972 report[1] on the exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation.[2] Commissioned by the Club of Rome, the findings of the study were first presented at international gatherings in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1971.[1]: 186 The report’s authors are Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, representing a team of 17 researchers.[1]: 8
The report concludes that, without substantial changes in resource consumption, “the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity”. Although its methods and premises were heavily challenged on its publication, subsequent work to validate its forecasts continue to confirm that insufficient changes have been made since 1972 to significantly alter their nature.
Since its publication, some 30 million copies of the book in 30 languages have been purchased.[3] It continues to generate debate and has been the subject of several subsequent publications.[4]
Beyond the Limits and The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update were published in 1992 and 2004 respectively,[5][6] and in 2012, a 40-year forecast from Jørgen Randers, one of the book’s original authors, was published as 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years...[7]
@run,
Great post. What is going to destroy humanity is resource wars. People who bleat “there have always been migrations” are just like the people who bleat “the climate has changed throughout earth’s history.” Sophistry.
What is different today is the internet. People whose lives are being destroyed by climate change know what the rest of us have and are willing to fight us for it if we don’t compromise.
Unless there are major advances in carbon capture on a global scale in the next decade, humanity faces an existential threat. I tremble for our children and grandchildren.
carbon capture and storage is being promoted by fossil fuel interests so they can keep dumping their waste into our atmosphere…the physics of CCS doesn’t work and never can; liquids and solids average 1000 times more dense than the equivalent gas…if you burn a liter of gasoline, you have 1000 liters of carbon dioxide; you can never get that 1000 liters of CO2 back into a bottle as cheaply as it was to burn the gasoline…likewise, each cubic yard of coal we’ve burnt produced around 1000 cubic yards of carbon dioxide; there is no place on earth we could ever store all the carbon dioxide we’ve produced by burning fossil fuels…
Joel
unless we learn to live using less energy we face more than an existential threat. we face extinction. “carbon capture” is just another technological fantasy that helps us believe we can save outselves without cost or inconvenience or even thinking about it.
I wasn’t talking about Cuba in the 60’s, I’m talking about Guatemala right now.
All I am saying ~ we need to pay a little more attention to this. Short of the demise of the Neanderthal, this is unprecedented. It’s so big we can’t conceive of it. I’ve done posts, I’ve reposted others’, posted YouTube videos of anticipated internal migrations, where people are gonna’ go when Florida, New York City and San Diego wash away, when Phoenix and LA blow away, but no one is addressing what will be done with the external migrations. Projections have but for the mountainous regions the equatorial and mid-latitudes uninhabitable by mid-century, those people are going to go somewhere. There’s no stopping it. Projections have Nebraska the southern edge of habitability, think Phoenix, by the end of the century. Those people are going to go somewhere. There’s no stopping it.
All this talk about spending all this money ~ 3.5 trillion with a t ~ to fix things, but will that “fixed” infrastructure accommodate what’s coming? I often close blog-posts with the tagline “We have to stop doing what we’re doing, it isn’t working.” Too much longer and that choice will be made for us. And it ain’t gonna’ be purty …
Not Death, Destroyer of Worlds … planet lice
@Ten,
Internal migrations will be a huge problem, and will create conflicts that will likely result in violence. But the bigger picture is resource wars between the have and have-not nations. It is too late for conservation. It is too-late for abandoning fossil fuels. It is too late for tree-planting.
The only theoretical answer is global scale carbon capture. And that must happen within the next decade to avoid human catastrophe.
Yep, too late to start anything that might lead to sustainable climate/ecosystems. We must count on Science to save us with Big Industrial Technology. Nothing else can save us. Meanwhile, keep on driving.
Oh, wait, you said “theoretical” answer.
Carbon capture is a pipedream, but you are otherwise right, it’s too late.
Ten Bears.
Between you and me, I think it is too late too.
But it is dangerous and probably immoral to accept that. We need to do what we can, not just give up and party to the apocalypse. Or leave it to Big Science to transport us all to Mars where we can start over, I hear there is plenty of petroleum on the moons of Saturn.
Carbon capture is a fools pipe dream. Why not put a lot of SO2 in the atmosphere and block out all that sunlight. What could go wrong with that?
I agree, we’re not Lucky Men (or women), we don’t get to just lay down and die.
re: “the only theoretical answer is global scale carbon capture“
do you have any idea what those words imply? with atmospheric CO2 now at 417 parts per million, i’ve figured there to be around 1530196993990000 cubic meters of the stuff out there….
so if you’re advocating carbon capture as part of the big infrastructure bill, you better make sure they include funding for a big enough airtight bottle to hold all of that CO2 for as long as you think the planet will remain viable…
Ron
I think I remember reading that Club of Rome promised a year 2000 drop dead date. And when that date passed, the enemies used that as a club to discredit them.
Like all those weird Christians who believe from time to time that the Second Coming will be on Friday, July 10, 1963, I still believe in the Coming Destruction…just a problem in translating the exact day and date.
Actually, I think the Club got the date right. We are already dead, just don’t know it yet.
I think we can count on the have nations beating the have not nations. Always have. They do it by using more resources.
But I did have trouble seeing the distinctioin between “conflicts that will result in violence” and “resource wars.” Maybe the resource wars will be low intensity guerrilla wars, and not just “bombing them back into the stone age.”
Sometimes “sneaking across the border” works. It is how Texas was created.
Well, hell, it’s how America was created. The Indians had the resources. The Americans came in took them away. After all, we knew how to make better use of them.
Migrants are not going to take away the resources. They do not have the guns.
True