Capitalism and Climate Refugees

Disclaimer: This is a middle of the night, droopy-eyed, lack-of-sleep-but-mind-is-racing, rant.  May or may not be cohesive.  Read at your own risk.  ;-)

I haven't seen the The Lorax movie, yet.  But I really want to.  I'm itching to go!  The Lorax is a loveable figment that warns of the dangers of industrialization.

The blemish of this story is currently the premise for this blog:  The Lorax begs and begs and begs the Once-ler not to cut down the Truffula trees.  But the Once-ler, driven by its own dreams of profit maximization and providing fake plastic thneeds for all, doesn't listen.  The result: the Once-ler sells tons of "thneeds" which no one actually needs to survive, destroys the forest until there are no truffula trees left and the Lorax, despite his best intentions peacefully protesting the Once-lers actions, ultimately fails. What can we learn from the story of the Lorax?

The Once-ler was rewarded with capital for destroying an ecosystem to make stuff that people don't need, whole destroying the stuff they do, and the Lorax's words were not enough to stop him and save the ecosystem.

In the economy's status quo, you will not make money if you're main objective is not to make money.  The system the economy is based on rewards people who care about money.  It does not inherently reward people who are working for the greater good or for the good of their communities and neighbors.  Hosting a neighborhood clean-up and recycling program, running a sustainable, organic farm to provide healthy, wholesome food, educating young or under-privileged women and working towards reproductive justice will earn you close to nil financially.  You will be rewarded, however, with rich friendships, and an investment in your neighborhoods collective future.

It is not the system, which values profit maximization over everything else, that is the reason you are not "successful" in finding work in the current economy.  You are made to believe it is because your "skills" are not up-to-date, or because you are not looking in the right places, or because you don't hold the highest degrees in order to do the work that you want (Ahem... academic inflation).  Then you take a step back, and the people who are the most successful in the current economy, aren't really people at all.

Corporate behemoths are overfed by an economic system that rewards over-eating (a.k.a. capitalist-driven exploitation).  Corporations with CEOs that sit on each other's boards are deciding the fate of the world at the expense of the world and everything it supports.

Then there is another problem with money.  It has gotten to a point where you need money to be validated as a human being.  Or rather, one needs money to afford basic functions that everyone should have a right to.

Think about this: you need money to sleep.  You may be thinking, "huh?," but hear me out:  If you sleep on the sidewalk or in a park, you are trespassing and can be asked to move or leave.  As highlighted by the Occupy movement: even if it is a public park, open to all, it is still "owned" property... which leads to trespassing.  But where do you go if you have no money to afford a roof over your head and property of your own.  Homeless shelters can become over-crowded and may be forced to turn people away.  So we, as a society, have come to a point when there are times that you are not allowed to sleep unless you have money.  We have stripped that right away.

Homelessness is an issue we are going to see more of with the increasing financial gap and with climate change-induced natural disasters that displace people from their homes.  In the coming years, there will be major shifts in a climate that the human race has grown accustomed to.  Major shifts will present themselves as drought, sea level rise, dessertification, unprecedented hurricanes, monsoons, the list goes on.  We are not prepared to handle these displaced persons and we are certainly not on a track to quelling or averting the massive devastation a few degrees of global warming will induce.



There is an increasing number of climate refugees every day.  This is only the beginning.  Fellow humans are being forced into shantytowns where children are subject to awful, unhealthy conditions, lack of education justice, child trafficking, etc.  The gap widens to a chasm.



So, although, I'm looking forward to seeing the Lorax, I feel a message of drastic, necessary change will fall short.  Plus, I'm going in skeptical of a mass produced movie made by a behemoth corporations with a message to end environmental degradation by behemoth corporations...



Peer-reviewed References:

Estrada-Oyuela, Raul A. 2002. Equity and Climate Change. In Ethics, Equity and International Negotiations on Climate Change, edited by P.-R. Luiz and M. Mohan. Cheltenham, UK:: Edward Elgar.

Miguez, Jose, and Gonzalez Domingos. 2002. Equity, Responsibility and Climate Change. In Ethics, Equity and International Negotiations on Climate Change, edited by P.-R. Luiz and M. Mohan. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Paavola, J. 2004. Justice and Adapt ation to Climate Change. Insights 53. 2005. Seeking Justice: International Environmental Governance and Climate Change. Globalizations 2 (309-322).

Paavola, J., and W. N. Adger. 2004. Knowledge or Participation for Sustainability? Science, Pluralism, and Governance of Adapt ation to Climate Change. In 2002 Berlin Conference on Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, ed F. Biermann, S. Camp e and K. Jacob. Place Published: Amsterdam, Berlin, Potsdam and Oldenburg: Global Governance Project. http://www.glogov.org/upload/public%20files/pdf/publications/bc%20proceedings/bc2002/bc_2002_ch16_paavola_adger.pdf.

Patz, Jonath an. 2005. Imp act of Regional Climate Change on Human Health . Nature 384:310-317.

Wainwright, Joel (2010) 'Climate Change, Capitalism, and the Challenge of Transdisciplinarity', Annals
of the Association of American Geographers, 100: 4, 983 — 991, First published on: 15 September 2010 (iFirst)