{"id":7532,"date":"2019-07-31T13:06:21","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T13:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7532"},"modified":"2020-06-14T16:58:28","modified_gmt":"2020-06-14T16:58:28","slug":"the-fight-to-build-a-better-happier-safer-world-must-include-open-borders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/07\/31\/the-fight-to-build-a-better-happier-safer-world-must-include-open-borders\/","title":{"rendered":"The fight to build a better, happier, safer world must include open borders"},"content":{"rendered":"
So says Ruth London, a campaigner on climate and energy justice in a recent Ecologist:<\/a><\/div>\n
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A good friend\u00a0told me that however hopeless things feel\u00a0we have to keep fighting, even\u00a0if there is just one chance in a million of preventing runaway climate breakdown.\u00a0I\u2019ve known him since 2008, when we\u00a0camped next door to one\u00a0another\u00a0at a planned coal-fired power station.\u00a0I agree - but it is not just climate breakdown\u00a0that we are fighting.<\/div>\n
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The climate crisis is not a one-off event -\u00a0it's\u00a0incremental, bit by bit. When scientists estimate how many lives will be lost for each degree of warming, each tonne of CO2, they are also telling us how many lives can be saved\u00a0by each gas power station shut down for a day, each year of no fracking on the Fylde, each million more vegans, each country phasing out coal, each airport runway not built.<\/p>\n

Not only that, but they tell us how many children will have a chance of playing and laughing, how many people can grow old without roasting or freezing, how many homes can be spared forest fires or floods.\u00a0 It\u2019s the difference between gunfire and music, between hunger and plenty, between concentration camps and camps like\u00a0Power Beyond Borders\u00a0<\/em>organised by\u00a0Reclaim the Power<\/a>\u00a0this month.<\/p>\n

Survival and resistance\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Western Europe, the people who know this best are those who have fled from the South or the East, people who can teach all of us about survival and\u00a0resistance. For those of us who have grown up expecting a life of relative safety, comfort\u00a0and possibilities,\u00a0the present is beyond our experience\u00a0and the future is a land without maps.<\/p>\n

Sometimes we comfort ourselves that the little we can do by not eating meat or not flying or setting up an energy co-op will save the world from catastrophe - if everyone does it. This is very unlikely, but every little helps\u00a0and every\u00a0bigger victory,\u00a0every successful confrontation with the forces destroying the world, every\u00a0step towards the unity of our own forces\u00a0helps much more.<\/p>\n

If fighting the climate apocalypse means saving lives, then part of our perspective must be\u00a0open borders. To the degree that the powers of finance and fossil fuel capital allow themselves brains and hearts and plans, their vision must be that they will preserve some bastions of comfort for themselves and their families, some enclave in a temperate zone \u2013 northern Scotland? \u2013 where they can continue to drink champagne, in mansions air-conditioned with the help of precious metals extracted by slave labour in tropical heat.<\/p>\n

Maybe some of them will be disabused of this notion by their\u00a0children. But in the meantime, an essential part of the movement against climate apocalypse is the fight against their dream \u2013 and the\u00a0reality \u2013 of a fortress Europe, because that fortress is an integral part of the apocalypse.<\/p>\n

..............................................<\/p>\n

Heady stuff. \u00a0She's right, of course, about the increasing pressure for migration, but hopeless naive in thinking that voters are going to accept it \u2013\u00a0if<\/em> that is, they are going to be allowed to think. \u00a0It's not obvious to me that open borders and asking voters go together, but I'll leave you pondering that (perhaps) while I have a blog-break.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So says Ruth London, a campaigner on climate and energy justice in a recent Ecologist: A good friend\u00a0told me that however hopeless things feel\u00a0we have to keep fighting, even\u00a0if there is just one chance in a million of preventing runaway...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}