Climate Memo Mondays, #57

 

 

57.  Climate Memo Mondays, #57, January 10, 2022

Contents
Bromwich, Climate THE issue.
ARPBS, 2 documentaries on climate change
Todd Miller’s Books on CC Refugees

David Bromwich, “The Only Issue,” The Nation (1-10/17-22).
“If there were ever a cause that demanded single-minded attention, this is it. . . .This reformation [mitigation, adaptation, resilience] will be full of drudgery and very little uplift. . . .The task calls for clear scientific explanation accompanied by political persuasion—in short, exactly the kind of leadership we haven’t yet seen.”

Wednesday, December 29, ARPBS, Ch. 13, gave us two excellent documentaries on the calamity of warming:  "Earth Emergency" and "Climate Change: The Facts."  They often overlapped and reinforced each other.  Greta Thunberg was featured in both. The first discussed well the science of feedback, amplifying loops, and permafrost, among many other topics.  The second, hosted by the great Attenborough, especially discussed the consequences of cc.  It was shown again 12-30 channel 700 at 7p.m.   I wonder how well Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth compares.

 

Todd Miller’s Four Books on Refugees

Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security.  City Lights, 2014

Empire of  Borders:  The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.  Verso, 2017. 

Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security.   City Lights, 2019.

Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders.   City Lights, 2021.

 

BUILD BRIDGES, NOT WALLS: A JOURNEY TO A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS

“Todd Miller cuts through the facile media myths and escapes the paralyzing constraints of a political ‘debate’ that functions mainly to obscure the unconscionable inequalities that borders everywhere secure. In its soulfulness, its profound moral imagination, and its vision of radical solidarity, Todd Miller’s work is as indispensable as the love that so palpably guides it.”—Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“The stories of the humble people of the earth Miller documents ask us to also tear down the walls in our hearts and in our heads. What proliferates in the absence of these walls and in spite of them, Miller writes, is the natural state of things centered on kindness and compassion.”—Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

 

By the time Todd Miller spots him, Juan Carlos has been wandering alone in a remote border region for days. Parched, hungry and disoriented, he approaches and asks for a ride. Miller’s instinct is to oblige, but he hesitates: Furthering an unauthorized person’s entrance into the U.S. is a federal crime.

Todd Miller has been reporting from international border zones for over twenty-five years. In Build Bridges, Not Walls, he invites readers to join him on a journey that begins with the most basic of questions: What happens to our collective humanity when the impulse to help one another is criminalized?

A series of encounters—with climate refugees, members of indigenous communities, border authorities, modern-day abolitionists, scholars, visionaries, and the shape-shifting imagination of his four-year-old son—provoke a series of reflections on the ways in which nation-states create the problems that drive immigration, and how the abolition of borders could make the world a more sustainable, habitable place for all.

Is it possible to imagine a borderless world? How could it emerge, and how might it be better equipped to solve the global emergencies that threaten our collective survival? Build Bridges, Not Walls is an inspiring, impassioned call to envision—and work toward—a bold new reality.