Moving People, Changing Nature. Migrations, Climate Change, and the Environment in the Modern

World

Marco ArmieroSenior Researcher/CNR Italy

Marie Curie Researcher/ICTA Spain

Aims • Show the

methodological opportunities offered by EH for political ecology research

• Connect the understanding of present with the study of the past

• Stimulate research in EH

Visions and Previsions

How many people will be affected by climate change by 2050?

Forecasts vary from 25 million to 1 billion people.

The most widely cited estimates of the number of people expected to migrate as a result of climate change - 200 million individuals by 2050 – is based on predictions of sea-level rise

Source: London Futures, exhibition Museum of London

FEAR!Numbers and visions conspire in building a

threatening narrative: • 1990 - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 1990:20) warned that “the greatest single impact of climate change could be on human migration”

• 2007 - the UN Security Council identified climate change-induced migration as an issue of international security

• 2010 - Pentagon included climate change among the security threats identified in the Quadrennial Defense Review

The scientific basis are

• Security studies• Natural sciences

Decolonizing the migration and the environment studies

What could a humanistic approach add to this vision?

• Discourse analysis• Life stories, ethnographical dimension• The political • Overcoming reductionism and the search for the ultimate cause(D. Worster’s Dust Bowl, 1979)

Dust Bowl

More than 40 million hectares of land

The Black Thursday or the Dirty Thirty?

• Worster proposes an ecological tale about the Great Depression

• It is not a separate plot, but it is the same story

• Dust Bowl and Great Depression revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America (Worster, 5)

Capitalism as a culture

• Nature must be seen as capital• Humans have right even an

obligation to use this capital for constant self-advancement

• The social order should encourage this continual increase of personal wealth

The Joads

Between the 1930 and 1935 the rural population of the Great Plains decreased less than 3%; but from 1935 and 1937 34% of population leftOnly from Oklahoma more than 300,000 people left between 1935 and 1940300,000 poor people entered in California in the second half of 1930s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_ehYkr0NhU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arRmz4kUisE

Beyond Climate Change

• The ‘locust paradigm’ (and the greening of the anti immigration discourse)

• Ethnic cultures and nature• Polluting bodies/polluted bodies

(the infectious immigrant vs. the contaminated immigrants)

• “Toward wild life the Italian laborer is a human mongoose. Give him power to act, and he will quickly exterminate every wild thing that wears feathers or hair” (US naturalist William Temple Hornaday, 1900)

Italians’ hunting party, Library, University of New Mexico

Immigrants’ hostility towards nature?

California was a paradise then (in the 1900s). (…) Sonoma County was pretty because of agriculture, vineyards were all over; there was nothing but vineyards and plums. The plums were in very minor quantity, but the vineyards were all over (Perelli Minetti interview: 82).

Nouveau Medoc Vineyard and Wine Cellars (1890?) Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA

Current rhetoric linking immigrants and lack in environmental concerns

• How Immigration Hastens Destruction of the Environment

• Immigrants’ Trials destroying wilderness in the Arizona Parks

• ‘While Canada is often criticized for the environmental consequences of its oil sands development, the impact on the environment of our immigration intake is significantly greater’

Seeing nature through other eyes

• The squirrel stew

•Chickens in the backyards

• The wild next door

Are these old stories from the past?

Two projects from the ICTA, UAB

Urban gardening and immigrant traditions in Terrassa, Catalonia

(Mar Grau Satorras)

What a wasteful world. Illegal immigrants and waste recycling in Barcelona (Marta García Sierra) 

Through their bodies “Not only have humans mixed their labor with nature to create hybrid landscapes; nature – already a mixture of human and nonhuman elements – has intermixed with human bodies, without anyone’s consent or control, and often without anyone’s knowledge (Linda Nash: 209).

Immigrants being inspected at Ellis Island circa 1910. Photo by Underwood & Underwood.

Immigrant germs • the 1832 cholera epidemic

was attributed to the Irish; • Chinese were the scapegoat

for several outbreaks in San Francisco, from 1870s smallpox to 1900 plague;

• in 1907 Italians were blamed for a polio epidemic and in 1915 for the typhoid infection in Philadelphia;

• for long time tuberculosis was defined as a Hebrew disease

La domenica del Corriere’s Archive

Immigration and EJ

• Foreign-born and non-English-speaking populations in the United States are much more likely to live next to toxic waste sites than the average native-born resident (Hunter 2000)

• In the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and France foreign workers have a rate of occupational injuries that is about twice as high as that of native workers (Bollini and Siem, 1995)

• In Massachusetts the children of immigrants have the blood lead level twice as high as US born children (Geltmanet et al. 2001)

• In the U.S. 300,000 farmworkers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year (Hansen 2010)

Resources

Environment and Migration Group of Research http://migrationenvironment.webnode.comWorldwide

Laboratório de Imigração, Migração e História Ambiental http://www.labimha.ufsc.br/Brazil

Espacio de estudios migratorios http://www.espaciodeestudiosmigratorios.orgLatin America

Climate Change and Migration: Knowledge, Law and Policy, and TheoryEurope Canada, India

Climate Change, Hydro-Conflicts and Human Security http://www.clico.org/ EC 7th Framework ProgrammeEurope

Thank you

Marco ArmieroICTA UAB, Spain

CNR, Italy marco.armiero@tin.it

• ‘The American people expect the military to plan for the worst. It's that sort of mindset, I think, that has convinced the vast majority of military leaders that climate change is a real threat and that the military plays an important role in confronting it’ (Retired Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, president of the American Security Project)

• In 2008 the National Intelligence Council (NIC) completed a new classified assessment that explored how climate change could threaten U.S. security in the next 20 years by causing mass movements of refugees