Gentle Decline 1/29: Intersectionality & Indications

Hello. This issue was going to be about technology at a personal level, and about objects and devices that will make life easier in an era of climate crisis and declining oil. But because I now need to use two phrases there, I wanted to stop off first and do some thinking about the concept of intersectionality. And then it got away from me entirely. But I think this is more important. So: there are, as ever, a few definitions of intersectionality, but the general gist here is that categories of disadvantage - race, class, gender, etc - overlap and interact. Someone who is in two or more disadvantaged categories is worse off than someone who is only in one or - in the case of middle-class white cis abled males like me - none.

There's a sort of geographic intersectionality that's going to stack on top of that in the next few decades - and by geographic, I mean both at the level of "what country you're in" and "what your physical surroundings are like". So someone who's in a coastal region has a disadvantage, but someone who's in a coastal region that will definitely be lost to the sea (Bangladesh, say) is doubly so. Someone who's in a coastal city will be at a disadvantage, and more so if they're in a country that doesn't take climate crisis seriously (the US, for example). So you can imagine a sort of worst case here, where some unfortunate is in a place that will be flooded, will be overheated, has few resources, has a high population, has poor infrastructure, has high dependency on oil, is prone to outbreaks of disease, and has poor medical facilities. This describes Bangladesh, as above, but it can also describe New Orleans (... also as above, really). Geographic disadvantage will change over time; mostly it'll get worse. In some places, mostly due to intervention and effort and the expenditure of resources, it may get better.

There's a definite energy toward change with regard to intersectionality in the personal sense at the moment. The Black Lives Matter movement has gone from being something fringe to something which politicians and corporate entities have to support, or try to explain why. Some of that support is purely lip service, of course ("Black Lives Matter! Buy our stuff, made by brown people in another country, so the white owners of the company can profit more!"), but some of it is genuine, and even having to maintain the appearance of support is support, or at the absolute minimum, a lack of obvious opposition. The fact that that's a step up is a pretty miserable situation, but that's where we are.

The overlap of personal and geographic intersectionality is going to become an issue. Maybe geographic intersectionality will just become part of the overall consideration of disadvantage and equity, which is absolutely fine - as a concept, I'd really like it to die out or disappear, although to be honest, I can't see that happening. Anyway: there are two ways in which geographic disadvantage is going to be important; where people are and where they're going. There are going to be thresholds at which the pressure of geographic disadvantage becomes too much - where the intersectionalities multiply - and people have to move, or die. This can happen when an area floods permanently, has several days above the human heat limits, suffers a landslide, or is levelled by a hurricane, but it can also happen when occasional flooding and heat enable a huge outbreak of malaria, where smaller mudflows combined with storm damage render roads unusable and sewage systems backed up, or where any of the conditions above take out survival crops or other livelihoods.

Before this threshold, there will be very poor conditions in those areas, some of which will contribute to people not being able to move, and thereby acting as feedback loops. This means that the timescale from "things are ok" to "things are pretty crap" to "we are going somewhere else" is not linear; there''ll be a slow slope down and then a much steeper one.

After this threshold, there will be populations on the move. Some individuals within that population may have choices as to where to go, although to be honest, I think that those people will already have made those choices and moved before the threshold. Most will not; they'll move in the direction of least resistance. This will almost certainly mean that they'll move to the next most disadvantaged location near them. This seems like a daft statement; why would people move from a bad place to somewhere only slightly less bad? Why would they not move to the best location?

Consider the overall intersectionality. The people moving at the threshold are going to be the most disadvantaged in general. They will be poor, for certain. They may also be unemployed, sick, disabled, subject to discrimination in a variety of forms, and otherwise oppressed. They will not be able to move from the worst place to the best (if indeed we can define a 'best' place, although see below on that). Firstly, the best locations will be far away, because proximity to the worst areas will be a sliding scale; you won't see anything like the sharp economic thresholds that lead to favelas next to skyscrapers, and disadvantaged people will not be able to afford to travel far. Next, there will be some kinds of borders - barriers, in effect - between the worst and best locations - national borders are the immediate, but also regional borders, and we've already seen lockdowns on these in many areas due to COVID-19. Third, there will be costs associated with being in the best areas, in terms of rent, food, compliance with local law, availability of employment for disadvantaged people, and so forth.

So when you take all of this into account, the effect is that people will move from a place where conditions are at the threshold of survivability to a place which is not yet at that threshold, but is almost certainly approaching it. Somewhere that isn't that hot, yet, isn't underwater, yet, isn't a dust bowl, yet, and so on. Some of these aspects will continue to worsen with time just as they were; others will get worse as a direct consequence of population increase.

This refugee movement will be unlike any in history, although the prehistoric sea-level rises at the end of the last Ice Age, in as much as it ended, would have been similar albeit with a vastly smaller human population. It will be different because the vacated territory will be gone. It won't be occupied by a different population, it won't be an outflow-and-return when conditions improve; there will be no going back.

So the next-worst area to which people move will now be the worst area. Population pressure is not going to help, so its decline will accelerate, and there will be another threshold point, at which both populations, original and first-wave refugee, will need to move again. Sooner or later, there will be areas which, already disadvantaged, have an inflow of people from two or three places that are hitting the threshold, and some of those people may now be moving away from a threshold for the second or third time.

This has already started, although it's really, really hard to put numbers on, mostly because of the intersections of climate pressure, economics, wars, and the wide variety of forms of systemic oppression. Norman Meyers, writing in the late 1990s, reckoned there were already 25 million environmental refugees by then, and calculated that there would be 200 million by 2050. His numbers have been challenged in all sorts of ways, largely by people with a vested interest in denying them. I honestly think they're low.

The next question is where this cascading effect of thresholds and movements ends, and that's actually easier to answer: it doesn't. There are a few things that will ease it off (for limited values of "ease" and "off"); there's a limit to how high sea level can go, because there's only so much water on the planet. That's at 70m, though. I invite you to take a look at floodmap.net and see what 70m looks like, and in particular to take a look at your favourite coastal city. An actual end to the rises in temperature is out there somewhere too, although nobody knows where. But to be honest, those thresholds are probably well outside the lifetimes of everyone alive today. Even with feedback loops and other accelerating effects, it will take a long time for all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica and the Himalayas to melt, but nobody knows the real measurements for this. It's pretty certain we'll have 2m by the end of the century. If certain crucial bits of ice give way in Antarctica, we could have 3.5m by 2050. Maybe everything will finish melting by 2500. Maybe not. But in any realistic terms, climate crisis induced worsening of geographic disadvantage is with us for the foreseeable future.

Most of the people reading this (at least via email subscription) are in the West, in global terms, and as far as I can tell, mostly not in positions of geographic disadvantage. Some of you live near coasts, and you know what to do about that, but otherwise you're not likely to be under pressure to move anytime soon, and you're very unlikely to become climate refugees in the full sense. Nevertheless, you are absolutely going to be affected by the issue.

First, and most universally, the people forced to move are at the very base of the global economic pyramid (and we're all pretty near the top, really). They are the people who farm basic crops like rice and wheat, who fish and mine and chop lumber. When those things don't happen as much, we're going to feel it. Prices of essential goods will rise, food supply chains will wobble, and stock markets will do the weird shit stock markets do.

Next, we're going to see more immigration. This will be contentious; it's already difficult in the US and the UK and to some degree in France and Germany, and I am well aware of issues in Ireland too. It won't be the direct threshold refugees for a while, but it may be people who foresee climate issues in their own current locations, and decide to move before they have to. After those will be people who see the start of climate refugees arriving where they are now, and work out that they're next in line. And after that, we'll see first degree threshold migrants, assuming that they can get this far without running out of money or food or health, or running into barriers of some kind.

At the same time, we're going to see some people having to move within Ireland (and other places, but examples here from what I know). Low-lying coastal locations will be getting more frequent flooding from... well, it's already happening, really, bits of Cork are underwater anytime there's a stiff breeze coinciding with a high tide. That will increase, and some people will decide they've had enough. The advent of what I expect will be much more widespread working from home during the remainder of and in the eventual wake of COVID-19 will enable this a lot more than I would have thought even last year. This will put pressure on housing in inland areas, both in towns and rural areas, and also on logistics and facilities. It's worth noting here that in the last 3-4 years, there have probably been more than a thousand new houses built in Maynooth, and they were all occupied pretty much as soon as they were built - housing is already under considerable pressure.

The property market is liable to do weird stuff on the back of this; demand will definitely rise, but it'll be a weirdly picky demand at the mid-to-upper end, and a somewhat desperate demand at the lower. I'm not really well up enough on property markets to even guess how that will go, and I don't know that I'd necessarily believe anyone who said they could predict it.

Now, let's layer another bit onto this particular stack - oil, and the decline thereof. Access to oil - at the individual level - isn't determined by geography or race or gender, but just by wealth, which when you apply to to a person means class. That's "Socio-economic class", as I was taught to call it in the Sociology module in DCU. The people with wealth - who are never going to be threshold refugees as described above anyway - are going to be, if not immune to, insulated from a lot of the effects in the short term. As usual, the people without are the ones going to be hit by it.

But access to oil is going to complicate the whole process of migration hugely. First, it's going to make actual transport, the act of moving away from the affected regions, more expensive. In extreme cases, it might mean that the only way out is on foot. This is not because the actual levels of oil are that low, but because it's not worth the time for oil companies and/or fuel retailers to ship oil in when few people will be able to afford it, and storage will be more difficult.

Next, the ways in which we currently deal - poorly - with refugee arrivals is heavily dependent on plastics, because they're still a disposable commodity. Look at any refugee camp in Calais or other such locations, or even the shanty towns and favelas, where those exist, and the camps of homeless people in your city if not; you'll see that almost everything they have is oil-derived. At present, the non-oil-derived equivalents are much too expensive, and in many cases too heavy to move around. Canvas tents are heavy and expensive, leather or even heavy cloth backpacks are heavy and expensive, and non-oil-derived sleeping bags are not, as far as I know, a thing at all.

Overall, climate migration is going to be what's called a Wicked Problem (image from that article):

As heralded by the above diagram, I don't have solutions for this. I do know that we're not going to get through the situation by closing borders or otherwise not letting people in, and I am grimly certain that conservative bodies across the world are going to react that way at the very first opportunity they get. The first thing to do locally in Ireland is to start dismantling our terrible, terrible 'Direct Provision' setup for handling refugees, and moving to something more human.

This issue brought to you by some very hazy summer days, Agents of SHIELD's excellent 6th season, things growing in the garden, and a flying cat. I'm not quite certain whether the next issue will deal with personal tech, as this one was supposed to, or a fictional portrayal of the future as I currently see it in ~2050, which has been putting itself together in my brain without a whole lot of my volition.

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