Land and migration
The fight for environmental justice must move together with the critique of the colonial-capitalist system
by Martina Cangialosi
The new report by Associazione A Sud “Environmental Migration and Climate Crisis” broadens the look at contemporary migration and shows how climatic-environmental factors play a significant role in the choice to migrate. From the experience of 348 migrants, it emerges that in the face of increasingly extreme weather events and natural disasters, the climatic-environmental cause assumes significance on the decision to leave one’s country of origin. However, when discussing climatic and environmental migration, “reaching conclusions is not so simple, due to the complexity of the phenomenon and because, unfortunately, it is still relegated to a grey area,” says Maria Marano, co-editor of the report, in an interview with Voice Over Foundation. These difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that it would be simplistic, as well as complicated, to identify a single driver behind human mobility, especially in the cases of climatic change, which is a multiplier of threats and affects more populations facing other structural challenges (social, economic, political instability), exacerbating or provoking further adverse effects (famine, armed conflict, violence).
These dynamics intersect with subjective factors (desires, aspirations, expectations, etc) and combine to constitute the motivations of each migrant person. Yet, these connections are not taken into account when assessing asylum applications, and from a legal perspective the category of “environmental migrant” or “climate refugee” has no value. The 1951 Geneva Convention, which regulates the status of refugees, does not include climatic causes among the grounds for persecution.
Emblematic is the case of Bangladesh, one of the countries most impacted by climate change in recent years.
In 2023, internal displacement due to climate causes affected 1.8 million people, a high number for a country that contributes only about 0.5% to global emission. Despite this, the Italian government considers Bangladesh a safe country of origin, which means fewer procedural safeguards for those seeking protection. “The experience of Italy-Albania Agreement has shown us from the beginning, and at the expense of migrants arriving precisely from Bangladesh, that the vulnerability of people cannot be constrained by bureaucratic criteria that risk becoming a tool of exclusion for all those who do not fit in,” Maria Marano points out, considering also the fact that proving the climate-environmental cause of migration is very complicated.
While introducing this category might be useful for those seeking protection, in terms of the overall framing of the phenomenon is not enough. The risk is to fail to recognize the political responsibilities that characterize these issues.
“International institutions never talk about the motivations behind climate change.
At most they say it is an anthropogenic phenomenon, meaning caused to human beings, but that’s not the full picture: billions of people produce almost no CO2 emissions,” explains Gennaro Avallone, researcher at the University of Salerno. The problem is not human action generically considered, but the dominant economic and cultural development system that, because of its predatory logic, has social consequences and dramatic impacts on the environment and the lives of millions of people. “We are talking about a system that allows the richest 1% to own 43% of global wealth and to pollute in one year what the poorest 99% does in 1,500 years,” says Maria Marano.
Jason W. Moore, professor of Political Economy in the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University (USA), in the book “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” writes
“capitalism does not have an ecological regime; it is an ecological regime”,
that is a specific way of organizing nature subordinated to the needs of production and accumulation of wealth. Natural resources (water, soil, forests, minerals, etc) are seen as an external object to be appropriated, a free resource of raw materials or a dumping ground for waste, in the name of an infinite growth. Moore uses the concept of Capitalocene to identify the capitalist economic model, and man’s domination of nature, as the trigger for environmental degradation.
Thus, climate change is not a historical accident, but is a phenomenon determined by social and economic forces. Gennaro Avallone highlights the historical continuity between the enclosure of common lands, carried out in England since the 16th century, and today’s environmental migrations. As a result of land privatization, many people were deprived of their livelihoods and moved to the city to seek work. Here they found anti-vagrancy laws, which since the mid-1600s, have provided for vagrants, in effect those expelled from the privatized countryside, to be interned in workhouses. The same happens today to people who, ousted by land grabbing, are left without land and are forced to move. “It is not only a matter of historical parallelism, but it is the same appropriative logic, of privatization of the commons, that is continuously reproduced and determines a very strong condition of impoverishment of populations,” Avallone argues.
Today as then, faced with the loss of livelihood, many people find themselves forced to migrate.
Those who left the countryside in the 17th century found laws against vagrancy and workhouses in the city; those who migrate now come up against walls and militarized borders and end up in refugee camps, reservoirs of cheap labor for the receiving states.
Land appropriation may take place through imperialism or through economic force, but the effects are no different on local populations and the link between land exploitation and repression of autonomous mobility has been repeated from the 1600s until today. In the climate context, colonialism refers not only to the historical responsibilities of Northern countries with respect to the climate crisis (with the “Global South” paying the greatest costs in environmental, social, and economic terms), but also to the predatory dynamics of the center toward the margins, ranging from the grabbing of fertile land and water resources to wars over oil and mining. “Without considering the false solutions for climate change, interventions presented as climate action but in reality based on carbon market mechanisms or other technologies that do not challenge the fossil-based energy model and do not take action on cutting climate-changing gas emissions,” Marano says.
The displacement of people is not only induced by the climate crisis, but also by the relocation of polluting industries, unsustainable agricultural practices, and land and water grabbing. This hierarchization of land and human beings, enacted by the capitalist economic and cultural system, is further reinforced by the climate disaster, which has far more violent consequences on lands at the margins than on those at the center, increasing already existing inequalities. This is precisely why, as political scientist Fatima Quassak writes in “Pirate Ecology. So we can be free!” (K. Verlag),
the fight for environmental justice must move together with the critique of the colonial-capitalist system and the inequalities it generates that allow the exploitation of lands and peoples.
Mainstream ecological projects lack “a real questioning of the social relations that the capitalist system produces and on which it is based, particularly in terms of class, gender and race domination”. As a solution, the author proposes a pirate ecology, a struggle that includes getting rid of the system that causes climate disaster and restrictions on freedom of movement. The latter must become a guaranteed fundamental right and an indispensable tool in the response to the climate emergency, with the goal of allowing the most vulnerable and ecological disaster-affected populations the chance to get to safety.
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