Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World
Klein writes: "Unless we radically lower emissions and lower them fast,
large parts of the Middle East will likely 'experience temperature levels
that are intolerable to humans' by the end of this century. And that's about
as blunt as climate scientists get. Yet environmental issues in the region
still tend to be treated as afterthoughts, or luxury causes. The reason is
not ignorance, or indifference. It's just bandwidth."
Floods in the Gaza Strip. (photo: AFP)
Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World
By Naomi Klein, The London Review of Books
02 June 16
Edward Said was no tree-hugger. Descended from traders, artisans and
professionals, he once described himself as ‘an extreme case of an urban
Palestinian whose relationship to the land is basically metaphorical’.[*] In
After the Last Sky, his meditation on the photographs of Jean Mohr, he
explored the most intimate aspects of Palestinian lives, from hospitality to
sports to home décor. The tiniest detail – the placing of a picture frame,
the defiant posture of a child – provoked a torrent of insight from Said.
Yet when confronted with images of Palestinian farmers – tending their
flocks, working the fields – the specificity suddenly evaporated. Which
crops were being cultivated? What was the state of the soil? The
availability of water? Nothing was forthcoming. ‘I continue to perceive a
population of poor, suffering, occasionally colourful peasants, unchanging
and collective,’ Said confessed. This perception was ‘mythic’, he
acknowledged – yet it remained.
If farming was another world for Said, those who devoted their lives to
matters like air and water pollution appear to have inhabited another
planet. Speaking to his colleague Rob Nixon, he once described
environmentalism as ‘the indulgence of spoiled tree-huggers who lack a
proper cause’. But the environmental challenges of the Middle East are
impossible to ignore for anyone immersed, as Said was, in its geopolitics.
This is a region intensely vulnerable to heat and water stress, to sea-level
rise and to desertification. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change
predicts that, unless we radically lower emissions and lower them fast,
large parts of the Middle East will likely ‘experience temperature levels
that are intolerable to humans’ by the end of this century. And that’s about
as blunt as climate scientists get. Yet environmental issues in the region
still tend to be treated as afterthoughts, or luxury causes. The reason is
not ignorance, or indifference. It’s just bandwidth. Climate change is a
grave threat but the most frightening impacts are in the medium term. And in
the short term, there are always far more pressing threats to contend with:
military occupation, air assault, systemic discrimination, embargo. Nothing
can compete with that – nor should it attempt to try.
There are other reasons why environmentalism might have looked like a
bourgeois playground to Said. The Israeli state has long coated its
nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist
‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically,
have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation.
It’s not only the countless olive and pistachio trees that have been
uprooted to make way for settlements and Israeli-only roads. It’s also the
sprawling pine and eucalyptus forests that have been planted over those
orchards, as well as over Palestinian villages, most notoriously by the
Jewish National Fund, which, under its slogan ‘Turning the Desert Green’,
boasts of having planted 250 million trees in Israel since 1901, many of
them non-native to the region. In publicity materials, the JNF bills itself
as just another green NGO, concerned with forest and water management, parks
and recreation. It also happens to be the largest private landowner in the
state of Israel, and despite a number of complicated legal challenges, it
still refuses to lease or sell land to non-Jews.
I grew up in a Jewish community where every occasion – births and deaths,
Mother’s Day, bar mitzvahs – was marked with the proud purchase of a JNF
tree in the person’s honour. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to
understand that those feel-good faraway conifers, certificates for which
papered the walls of my Montreal elementary school, were not benign – not
just something to plant and later hug. In fact these trees are among the
most glaring symbols of Israel’s system of official discrimination – the one
that must be dismantled if peaceful co-existence is to become possible.
The JNF is an extreme and recent example of what some call ‘green
colonialism’. But the phenomenon is hardly new, nor is it unique to Israel.
There is a long and painful history in the Americas of beautiful pieces of
wilderness being turned into conservation parks – and then that designation
being used to prevent Indigenous people from accessing their ancestral
territories to hunt and fish, or simply to live. It has happened again and
again. A contemporary version of this phenomenon is the carbon offset.
Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most
aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organisations. A
forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its
traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a
whole new class of ‘green’ human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous
people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when
they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree-huggers should be
seen in this context.
And there is more. In the last year of Said’s life, Israel’s so-called
‘separation barrier’ was going up, seizing huge swathes of the West Bank,
cutting Palestinian workers off from their jobs, farmers from their fields,
patients from hospitals – and brutally dividing families. There was no
shortage of reasons to oppose the wall on human rights grounds. Yet at the
time, some of the loudest dissenting voices among Israeli Jews were not
focused on any of that. Yehudit Naot, Israel’s then environment minister,
was more worried about a report informing her that ‘The separation fence …
is harmful to the landscape, the flora and fauna, the ecological corridors
and the drainage of the creeks.’ ‘I certainly don’t want to stop or delay
the building of the fence,’ she said, but ‘I am disturbed by the
environmental damage involved.’ As the Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti
later observed, Naot’s ‘ministry and the National Parks Protection Authority
mounted diligent rescue efforts to save an affected reserve of irises by
moving it to an alternative reserve. They’ve also created tiny passages
[through the wall] for animals.’
Perhaps this puts the cynicism about the green movement in context. People
do tend to get cynical when their lives are treated as less important than
flowers and reptiles. And yet there is so much of Said’s intellectual legacy
that both illuminates and clarifies the underlying causes of the global
ecological crisis, so much that points to ways we might respond that are far
more inclusive than current campaign models: ways that don’t ask suffering
people to shelve their concerns about war, poverty and systemic racism and
first ‘save the world’ – but instead demonstrate how all these crises are
interconnected, and how the solutions could be too. In short, Said may have
had no time for tree-huggers, but tree-huggers must urgently make time for
Said – and for a great many other anti-imperialist, postcolonial thinkers –
because without that knowledge, there is no way to understand how we ended
up in this dangerous place, or to grasp the transformations required to get
us out. So what follows are some thoughts – by no means complete – about
what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world.
*
He was and remains among our most achingly eloquent theorists of exile and
homesickness – but Said’s homesickness, he always made clear, was for a home
that had been so radically altered that it no longer really existed. His
position was complex: he fiercely defended the right to return, but never
claimed that home was fixed. What mattered was the principle of respect for
all human rights equally and the need for restorative justice to inform our
actions and policies. This perspective is deeply relevant in our time of
eroding coastlines, of nations disappearing beneath rising seas, of the
coral reefs that sustain entire cultures being bleached white, of a balmy
Arctic. This is because the state of longing for a radically altered
homeland – a home that may not even exist any longer – is something that is
being rapidly, and tragically, globalised. In March, two major peer-reviewed
studies warned that sea-level rise could happen significantly faster than
previously believed. One of the authors of the first study was James Hansen
– perhaps the most respected climate scientist in the world. He warned that,
on our current emissions trajectory, we face the ‘loss of all coastal
cities, most of the world’s large cities and all their history’ – and not in
thousands of years from now but as soon as this century. If we don’t demand
radical change we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a
home that no longer exists.
Said helps us imagine what that might look like as well. He helped to
popularise the Arabic word sumud (‘to stay put, to hold on’): that steadfast
refusal to leave one’s land despite the most desperate eviction attempts and
even when surrounded by continuous danger. It’s a word most associated with
places like Hebron and Gaza, but it could be applied equally today to
residents of coastal Louisiana who have raised their homes up on stilts so
that they don’t have to evacuate, or to Pacific Islanders whose slogan is
‘We are not drowning. We are fighting.’ In countries like the Marshall
Islands and Fiji and Tuvalu, they know that so much sea-level rise is
inevitable that their countries likely have no future. But they refuse just
to concern themselves with the logistics of relocation, and wouldn’t even if
there were safer countries willing to open their borders – a very big if,
since climate refugees aren’t currently recognised under international law.
Instead they are actively resisting: blockading Australian coal ships with
traditional outrigger canoes, disrupting international climate negotiations
with their inconvenient presence, demanding far more aggressive climate
action. If there is anything worth celebrating in the Paris Agreement signed
in April – and sadly, there isn’t enough – it has come about because of this
kind of principled action: climate sumud.
But this only scratches of the surface of what we can learn from reading
Said in a warming world. He was, of course, a giant in the study of
‘othering’ – what is described in Orientalism as ‘disregarding,
essentialising, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or
geographical region’. And once the other has been firmly established, the
ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft,
occupation, invasion. Because the whole point of othering is that the other
doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the
distinction. What does this have to do with climate change? Perhaps
everything.
We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still
refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time
when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades,
since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate
negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied
with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have
been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only
latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the
potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the
less powerful. These tools – of ranking the relative value of humans – are
what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they
are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.
*
Fossil fuels aren’t the sole driver of climate change – there is industrial
agriculture, and deforestation – but they are the biggest. And the thing
about fossil fuels is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that they
require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies can be
sacrificed to work in the coal mines, people whose lands and water can be
sacrificed to open-pit mining and oil spills. As recently as the 1970s,
scientists advising the US government openly referred to certain parts of
the country being designated ‘national sacrifice areas’. Think of the
mountains of Appalachia, blasted off for coal mining – because so-called
‘mountain top removal’ coal mining is cheaper than digging holes
underground. There must be theories of othering to justify sacrificing an
entire geography – theories about the people who lived there being so poor
and backward that their lives and culture don’t deserve protection. After
all, if you are a ‘hillbilly’, who cares about your hills? Turning all that
coal into electricity required another layer of othering too: this time for
the urban neighbourhoods next door to the power plants and refineries. In
North America, these are overwhelmingly communities of colour, black and
Latino, forced to carry the toxic burden of our collective addiction to
fossil fuels, with markedly higher rates of respiratory illnesses and
cancers. It was in fights against this kind of ‘environmental racism’ that
the climate justice movement was born.
Fossil fuel sacrifice zones dot the globe. Take the Niger Delta, poisoned
with an Exxon Valdez-worth of spilled oil every year, a process Ken
Saro-Wiwa, before he was murdered by his government, called ‘ecological
genocide’. The executions of community leaders, he said, were ‘all for
Shell’. In my country, Canada, the decision to dig up the Alberta tar sands
– a particularly heavy form of oil – has required the shredding of treaties
with First Nations, treaties signed with the British Crown that guaranteed
Indigenous peoples the right to continue to hunt, fish and live
traditionally on their ancestral lands. It required it because these rights
are meaningless when the land is desecrated, when the rivers are polluted
and the moose and fish are riddled with tumours. And it gets worse: Fort
McMurray – the town at the centre of the tar sands boom, where many of the
workers live and where much of the money is spent – is currently in an
infernal blaze. It’s that hot and that dry. And this has something to do
with what is being mined there.
Even without such dramatic events, this kind of resource extraction is a
form of violence, because it does so much damage to the land and water that
it brings about the end of a way of life, a death of cultures that are
inseparable from the land. Severing Indigenous people’s connection to their
culture used to be state policy in Canada – imposed through the forcible
removal of Indigenous children from their families to boarding schools where
their language and cultural practices were banned, and where physical and
sexual abuse were rampant. A recent truth and reconciliation report called
it ‘cultural genocide’. The trauma associated with these layers of forced
separation – from land, from culture, from family – is directly linked to
the epidemic of despair ravaging so many First Nations communities today. On
a single Saturday night in April, in the community of Attawapiskat –
population 2000 – 11 people tried to take their own lives. Meanwhile,
DeBeers runs a diamond mine on the community’s traditional territory; like
all extractive projects, it had promised hope and opportunity. ‘Why don’t
the people just leave?’, the politicians and pundits ask. But many do. And
that departure is linked, in part, to the thousands of Indigenous women in
Canada who have been murdered or gone missing, often in big cities. Press
reports rarely make the connection between violence against women and
violence against the land – often to extract fossil fuels – but it exists.
Every new government comes to power promising a new era of respect for
Indigenous rights. They don’t deliver, because Indigenous rights, as defined
by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People,
include the right to refuse extractive projects – even when those projects
fuel national economic growth. And that’s a problem because growth is our
religion, our way of life. So even Canada’s hunky and charming new prime
minister is bound and determined to build new tar sands pipelines, against
the express wishes of Indigenous communities who don’t want to risk their
water, or participate in the further destabilising of the climate.
Fossil fuels require sacrifice zones: they always have. And you can’t have a
system built on sacrificial places and sacrificial people unless
intellectual theories that justify their sacrifice exist and persist: from
Manifest Destiny to Terra Nullius to Orientalism, from backward hillbillies
to backward Indians. We often hear climate change blamed on ‘human nature’,
on the inherent greed and short-sightedness of our species. Or we are told
we have altered the earth so much and on such a planetary scale that we are
now living in the Anthropocene – the age of humans. These ways of explaining
our current circumstances have a very specific, if unspoken meaning: that
humans are a single type, that human nature can be essentialised to the
traits that created this crisis. In this way, the systems that certain
humans created, and other humans powerfully resisted, are completely let off
the hook. Capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy – those sorts of system.
Diagnoses like this erase the very existence of human systems that organised
life differently: systems that insist that humans must think seven
generations in the future; must be not only good citizens but also good
ancestors; must take no more than they need and give back to the land in
order to protect and augment the cycles of regeneration. These systems
existed and still exist, but they are erased every time we say that the
climate crisis is a crisis of ‘human nature’ and that we are living in the
‘age of man’. And they come under very real attack when megaprojects are
built, like the Gualcarque hydroelectric dams in Honduras, a project which,
among other things, took the life of the land defender Berta Cáceres, who
was assassinated in March.
*
Some people insist that it doesn’t have to be this bad. We can clean up
resource extraction, we don’t need to do it the way it’s been done in
Honduras and the Niger Delta and the Alberta tar sands. Except that we are
running out of cheap and easy ways to get at fossil fuels, which is why we
have seen the rise of fracking and tar sands extraction in the first place.
This, in turn, is starting to challenge the original Faustian pact of the
industrial age: that the heaviest risks would be outsourced, offloaded, onto
the other – the periphery abroad and inside our own nations. It’s something
that is becoming less and less possible. Fracking is threatening some of the
most picturesque parts of Britain as the sacrifice zone expands, swallowing
up all kinds of places that imagined themselves safe. So this isn’t just
about gasping at how ugly the tar sands are. It’s about acknowledging that
there is no clean, safe, non-toxic way to run an economy powered by fossil
fuels. There never was.
There is an avalanche of evidence that there is no peaceful way either. The
trouble is structural. Fossil fuels, unlike renewable forms of energy such
as wind and solar, are not widely distributed but highly concentrated in
very specific locations, and those locations have a bad habit of being in
other people’s countries. Particularly that most potent and precious of
fossil fuels: oil. This is why the project of Orientalism, of othering Arab
and Muslim people, has been the silent partner of our oil dependence from
the start – and inextricable, therefore, from the blowback that is climate
change. If nations and peoples are regarded as other – exotic, primitive,
bloodthirsty, as Said documented in the 1970s – it is far easier to wage
wars and stage coups when they get the crazy idea that they should control
their own oil in their own interests. In 1953 it was the British-US
collaboration to overthrow the democratically elected government of Muhammad
Mossadegh after he nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). In
2003, exactly fifty years later, it was another UK-US co-production – the
illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. The reverberations from each
intervention continue to jolt our world, as do the reverberations from the
successful burning of all that oil. The Middle East is now squeezed in the
pincer of violence caused by fossil fuels, on the one hand, and the impact
of burning those fossil fuels on the other.
In his latest book, The Conflict Shoreline, the Israeli architect Eyal
Weizman has a groundbreaking take on how these forces are intersecting.[†]
The main way we’ve understood the border of the desert in the Middle East
and North Africa, he explains, is the so-called ‘aridity line’, areas where
there is on average 200 millimetres of rainfall a year, which has been
considered the minimum for growing cereal crops on a large scale without
irrigation. These meteorological boundaries aren’t fixed: they have
fluctuated for various reasons, whether it was Israel’s attempts to ‘green
the desert’ pushing them in one direction or cyclical drought expanding the
desert in the other. And now, with climate change, intensifying drought can
have all kinds of impacts along this line. Weizman points out that the
Syrian border city of Daraa falls directly on the aridity line. Daraa is
where Syria’s deepest drought on record brought huge numbers of displaced
farmers in the years leading up to the outbreak of Syria’s civil war, and
it’s where the Syrian uprising broke out in 2011. Drought wasn’t the only
factor in bringing tensions to a head. But the fact that 1.5 million people
were internally displaced in Syria as a result of the drought clearly played
a role. The connection between water and heat stress and conflict is a
recurring, intensifying pattern all along the aridity line: all along it you
see places marked by drought, water scarcity, scorching temperatures and
military conflict – from Libya to Palestine, to some of the bloodiest
battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But Weizman also discovered what he calls an ‘astounding coincidence’. When
you map the targets of Western drone strikes onto the region, you see that
‘many of these attacks – from South Waziristan through northern Yemen,
Somalia, Mali, Iraq, Gaza and Libya – are directly on or close to the 200 mm
aridity line.’ The red dots on the map above represent some of the areas
where strikes have been concentrated. To me this is the most striking
attempt yet to visualise the brutal landscape of the climate crisis. All
this was foreshadowed a decade ago in a US military report. ‘The Middle
East,’ it observed, ‘has always been associated with two natural resources,
oil (because of its abundance) and water (because of its scarcity).’ True
enough. And now certain patterns have become quite clear: first, Western
fighter jets followed that abundance of oil; now, Western drones are closely
shadowing the lack of water, as drought exacerbates conflict.
*
Just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought, so boats follow both:
boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war
and drought. And the same capacity for dehumanising the other that justified
the bombs and drones is now being trained on these migrants, casting their
need for security as a threat to ours, their desperate flight as some sort
of invading army. Tactics refined on the West Bank and in other occupation
zones are now making their way to North America and Europe. In selling his
wall on the border with Mexico, Donald Trump likes to say: ‘Ask Israel, the
wall works.’ Camps are bulldozed in Calais, thousands of people drown in the
Mediterranean, and the Australian government detains survivors of wars and
despotic regimes in camps on the remote islands of Nauru and Manus.
Conditions are so desperate on Nauru that last month an Iranian migrant died
after setting himself on fire to try to draw the world’s attention. Another
migrant – a 21-year-old woman from Somalia – set herself on fire a few days
later. Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister, warns that Australians ‘cannot
be misty-eyed about this’ and ‘have to be very clear and determined in our
national purpose’. It’s worth bearing Nauru in mind the next time a
columnist in a Murdoch paper declares, as Katie Hopkins did last year, that
it’s time for Britain ‘to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force
migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.’ In another bit of
symbolism Nauru is one of the Pacific Islands very vulnerable to sea-level
rise. Its residents, after seeing their homes turned into prisons for
others, will very possibly have to migrate themselves. Tomorrow’s climate
refugees have been recruited into service as today’s prison guards.
We need to understand that what is happening on Nauru, and what is happening
to it, are expressions of the same logic. A culture that places so little
value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings
disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres,
will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live
disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that
happens, theories of human hierarchy – that we must take care of our own
first – will be marshalled to rationalise these monstrous decisions. We are
making this rationalisation already, if only implicitly. Although climate
change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the
short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and
worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during
Hurricane Katrina or whether they are among the 36 million who according to
the UN are facing hunger due to drought in Southern and East Africa.
*
This is an emergency, a present emergency, not a future one, but we aren’t
acting like it. The Paris Agreement commits to keeping warming below 2°c.
It’s a target that is beyond reckless. When it was unveiled in Copenhagen in
2009, the African delegates called it ‘a death sentence’. The slogan of
several low-lying island nations is ‘1.5 to stay alive’. At the last minute,
a clause was added to the Paris Agreement that says countries will pursue
‘efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°c’. Not only is this
non-binding but it is a lie: we are making no such efforts. The governments
that made this promise are now pushing for more fracking and more tar sands
development – which are utterly incompatible with 2°c, let alone 1.5°c. This
is happening because the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries in
the world think they are going to be OK, that someone else is going to eat
the biggest risks, that even when climate change turns up on their doorstep,
they will be taken care of.
When they’re wrong things get even uglier. We had a vivid glimpse into that
future when the floodwaters rose in England last December and January,
inundating 16,000 homes. These communities weren’t only dealing with the
wettest December on record. They were also coping with the fact that the
government has waged a relentless attack on the public agencies, and the
local councils, that are on the front lines of flood defence. So
understandably, there were many who wanted to change the subject away from
that failure. Why, they asked, is Britain spending so much money on refugees
and foreign aid when it should be taking care of its own? ‘Never mind
foreign aid,’ we read in the Daily Mail. ‘What about national aid?’ ‘Why,’ a
Telegraph editorial demanded, ‘should British taxpayers continue to pay for
flood defences abroad when the money is needed here?’ I don’t know – maybe
because Britain invented the coal-burning steam engine and has been burning
fossil fuels on an industrial scale longer than any nation on Earth? But I
digress. The point is that this could have been a moment to understand that
we are all affected by climate change, and must take action together and in
solidarity with one another. It wasn’t, because climate change isn’t just
about things getting hotter and wetter: under our current economic and
political model, it’s about things getting meaner and uglier.
The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to
confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must
be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and
militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them
all. The connections and intersections between them are glaring, and yet so
often resistance to them is highly compartmentalised. The anti-austerity
people rarely talk about climate change, the climate change people rarely
talk about war or occupation. We rarely make the connection between the guns
that take black lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody and
the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and
in precarious boats around the world.
Overcoming these disconnections – strengthening the threads tying together
our various issues and movements – is, I would argue, the most pressing task
of anyone concerned with social and economic justice. It is the only way to
build a counterpower sufficiently robust to win against the forces
protecting the highly profitable but increasingly untenable status quo.
Climate change acts as an accelerant to many of our social ills –
inequality, wars, racism – but it can also be an accelerant for the
opposite, for the forces working for economic and social justice and against
militarism. Indeed the climate crisis – by presenting our species with an
existential threat and putting us on a firm and unyielding science-based
deadline – might just be the catalyst we need to knit together a great many
powerful movements, bound together by a belief in the inherent worth and
value of all people and united by a rejection of the sacrifice zone
mentality, whether it applies to peoples or places. We face so many
overlapping and intersecting crises that we can’t afford to fix them one at
a time. We need integrated solutions, solutions that radically bring down
emissions, while creating huge numbers of good, unionised jobs and
delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and
excluded under the current extractive economy.
Said died the year Iraq was invaded, living to see its libraries and museums
looted, its oil ministry faithfully guarded. Amid these outrages, he found
hope in the global anti-war movement, as well as in new forms of grassroots
communication opened up by technology; he noted ‘the existence of
alternative communities across the globe, informed by alternative news
sources, and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights and libertarian
impulses that bind us together in this tiny planet’. His vision even had a
place for tree-huggers. I was reminded of those words recently while I was
reading up on England’s floods. Amid all the scapegoating and
finger-pointing, I came across a post by a man called Liam Cox. He was upset
by the way some in the media were using the disaster to rev up
anti-foreigner sentiment, and he said so:
I live in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, one of the worst affected areas hit by
the floods. It’s shit, everything has gotten really wet. However … I’m
alive. I’m safe. My family are safe. We don’t live in fear. I’m free. There
aren’t bullets flying about. There aren’t bombs going off. I’m not being
forced to flee my home and I’m not being shunned by the richest country in
the world or criticised by its residents.
All you morons vomiting your xenophobia … about how money should only be
spent ‘on our own’ need to look at yourselves closely in the mirror. I
request you ask yourselves a very important question … Am I a decent and
honourable human being? Because home isn’t just the UK, home is everywhere
on this planet.
I think that makes for a very fine last word.