The notion of changing climates influencing politics in nations that have barely felt the effects of it and have the advanced technology and basic infrastructure to weather its worst effects may seem absurd at first glance. In every discussion of rising global temperatures, we’re talking about diseases and food shortages in the developing world, or political unrest in fragile and failing states while wealthy nations adapt and overcome, and isn’t that what has been happening? Yes, it has. All those assumptions are right. But because those assumptions are correct, the West is being indirectly, but very deeply affected by the effects of all this turmoil, and things are bound to get worse unless we do something serious about climate change.
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| Newly arrived Somali refugees wait outside a UNHCR processing center at the Ifo refugee camp outside Dadaab, eastern Kenya, 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Somali border. Human-induced climate change contributed to low rain levels in East Africa in 2011, making global warming one of the causes of Somalia’s famine and the tens of thousands of deaths that followed, a new study has found. |
You see, borders are not supernatural boundaries that allow nations to live in a vacuum and pretend that what happens in another country will always stay there. A painful transition to a post-industrial knowledge economy marked by wild inequalities and disparity in opportunities taking place in the West has created a lot of toxic strain between rural and exurban communities and their urban counterparts in the developed world. It’s arguably the defining struggle of these societies right now. Tens of millions began to feel as if the world was leaving them behind and changing into something they didn’t understand or really want to learn much about because it was too new, too scary.
Read the story on Politech by Greg Fish - “How Climate Change Fueled The Far-Right’s Rise And Why We Need To Stop Both.”
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