The changing climate and its effect on the local environment continues to dominate the headlines in Rye News. So it’s a good time for our book reviewer, Phil Mullane, to look at Nomad Century by Gaia Vince.
Nomad Century raises important questions. Can the warming of the planet be arrested? How should the thorny issue of immigration be addressed and managed in the face of significant movements of people across the world?
Gaia Vince tells her readers that “within decades a great upheaval is coming. It will change us, and our planet.” In this comprehensively researched book she says that the movement of people already happening across our world is likely to increase exponentially during this century and that the migration issue is inextricably interwoven with the climate crisis facing our world. Despite the alarm sounded by such a forecast, a central question she addresses is how these eventualities can be effectively managed.
Rising temperature and rising sea levels will significantly accelerate migration. Vince references a Climate Central report that indicates that on average 1.7 million people will be displaced for each centimetre of global sea-level rise, so hundreds of millions of people would have to move by 2100. Coastal cities like New Orleans, New York City, Venice and Dhaka are at high risk of sinking below sea level. South Vietnam is expected to be below sea level by 2050.
Rye residents should not feel protected. An article by Anthony Kimber, recently published in Rye News, states that “the Environment Agency, using medium risk scenarios in its models, is anticipating a rise of up to 50cm in Rye Bay and Dungeness by 2080.”
Vince laments the loss of biodiversity and also mankind’s folly in allowing the situation to unfold. Before it is too late, attention needs to be given to restore elements from nature that have been degraded — forests, coral reefs, soil and river quality. Developments like automated vertical farming should be exploited to minimise those intensive agriculture methods responsible for around 15 per cent of global carbon emissions.
She speaks of “an unprecedented political, social and technological response” needed to exploit other carbon reduction methods like geo and bio-engineering. There is the risk of unintended consequences, and of the moral hazard of believing that if we can only work out how to suck carbon and methane out of the atmosphere then we can happily continue large scale hydrocarbon investment. A recent report shows that the fossil fuel industry has engaged in a “dual deception” of the public by denying there is a climate crisis and presenting the industry as an environmentally sustainable enterprise.
“Migration is not the problem; it is the solution,” she tells us. Rather than constructing impediments and demonising immigrants, time will come when governments will need to institute economic and social support for those needing to relocate. Countries like Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Portugal and Sweden currently adopt a comprehensive approach to integration, guaranteeing equal rights, opportunities and security for immigrants and citizens thereby encouraging the public to see immigrants as their equals, neighbours and potential citizens.
Challenging the anti-immigrant rhetoric of certain politicians and commentators will be essential if we wish to face up to the new reality and avoid outbreaks of social unrest recently witnessed in our own country. That there are intelligent, good people already planning for our changing world is a positive sign. A UK city mayor has joined nine others from across the world to participate in The Mayors Migration Council, an international coalition collaborating to accelerate ambitious global action on migration and displacement in order to create a world where urban migrants, displaced people and receiving communities can thrive.
The emerging changes to conditions on planet earth are sometimes too overwhelming to comprehend. This can result in a resistance to face the facts and can result in denial or in an instinctive refusal to acknowledge that such ominous predictions can be true. In his book The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman refers to “the pessimism-aversion trap — the misguided analysis that arises when you are overwhelmed by a fear of confronting potentially dark realities.”
So, is our species capable of collectively addressing and resolving all these complex and momentous issues? In 1959 Carl Jung, the influential Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, said in a BBC Face to Face interview that “the only real danger that exists is man himself. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil. We are so full of apprehensions and fears that one doesn’t know exactly to what it points. One thing is sure, a great change of our psychological attitude is imminent.” Sagacious prescience from someone for whom imminent and perilous climate change was unknown!
A brief review can only touch on the range of detail and supporting research in a book that references many inter-related topics — global population dispersal, public attitudes to migration, perception of national identity and the emergence of nationhood as an invented concept and much more. I did not find Gaia Vince’s approach tendentious in character. She seeks to inform her readers through a thoughtful analysis of the complexities of a hugely important global issue we cannot afford to ignore.
Image Credits: Nick Forman , Allen Lane .