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But when we explain wildfire and the resulting migration in terms of climate change alone – when we label this “climate migration” – we tell only half the story. Just as important is the history of home ownership in the state.
The uncomfortable fact is that the suburban landscape in California, however normalised it now appears, is the culmination of settler colonial history, white flight from city centres, lax planning laws and a dominant car culture.
It is also the result of an economic model in which homeowners are now expected to meet the costs of old age, education and health care by selling up the family home. No wonder people are liquidating their only asset and moving out of harm’s way.
To say this migration is because of climate change obscures the fact that it is white suburban families who tend to have accrued enough wealth over the generations to move away from hazards like floods and fires.
This becomes even more apparent when we consider how the same choices were unavailable to black people fleeing New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As this example illustrates, when social outcomes like migration are explained in terms of climate change we are invited to disremember the history of racism in America.
The ‘other’ of climate change
In his classic work Orientalism the late literary scholar Edward Said developed his concept of “the other”. Said’s reading of European literature and art is tremendously important because it explains how 19th-century European attitudes were made possible.
Central to Said’s thesis is that Europe denied this other its own history. He sought to show how generations of European writers, artists, statesmen and conquerors imagined Europe’s other living in a realm outside history.
Orientalism was, for Said, not a form of knowledge that simply documented the reality of life in the Orient. It was an extension of European imperial power in which non-Europeans were said to be part of nature rather than western European humanity. It allowed Europe to believe it had a moral duty to intervene in the lives of the other, to modernise the other by bringing it into the folds of history.
We might say the same today about the figure of the climate migrant or refugee – what I have termed “the other of climate change”. The circumstances we face today with climate change are, of course, dramatically different than those that prevailed during the 19th century.
Still, constructs like climate migrant and climate refugee are analogous to the power that was the focus of Said’s criticism. These categories are used to define vast numbers of people, including millions of the world’s poorest, in terms of climate, as opposed to history. They render the history of places secondary to climate change, and in doing so, undermine the right people have to represent themselves on their own terms.
The power I am describing is not universal in form, nor does it serve a singular set of interests. Bangladesh and California are not remotely equivalent. Yet in both cases, when climate change is used to explain socio-political phenomena like migration, social inequality is naturalised.
When we see categories like climate migrant and climate refugee in use today, we should treat them not as innocent descriptors of reality. Instead, they should alert us to the presence of an insidious power whose origins are European. Rather than accept these terms at face value, we might instead ask ourselves: who does the idea of the climate migrant, or climate refugee, really serve?
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