I would like to initiate a conversation about climate change and its relationship to slavery, colonization, and genocide. How are these atrocities showing up in relation to climate change? The following are some examples that are drawn from my work in agriculture and land use. They include current impacts, projected impacts, and serious impacts caused by efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND SLAVERYl
Biofuel has been promoted as a climate-friendly alternative to fossil fuels. However, some workers who produce it work under conditions of slavery. For example, sugar cane is a source of ethanol for fuel, and many Brazilian sugar cane workers have been held in “slave-like” conditions. (Producing biofuel also leads to deforestation.)
Food production is a major contributor to emissions and is also linked to contemporary atrocities. For example, slavery has been common on shrimp fishing boats in Thailand. Also, about two kilos of fossil fuel are used for every kilo of wild-caught shrimp. Slavery is not uncommon in oil palm plantations, especially in Malaysia. (In Southeast Asia peatlands are being destroyed to clear land for oil palm plantations. Peat soils hold over a third of all soil carbon on only 3% of the world’s land, so it is extremely important that they be protected.)
Scientists project that if climate change continues, there will be 200 million additional refugees in 2050; that’s five to ten times more refugees than there are today. Migrants and refugees are prime targets for contemporary slavery, and many more people could potentially become enslaved in the coming decades.
COLONIZATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Indigenous and tribal people’s forests and farmland are being bought up by large companies and converted to crops like oil palm. This is done without their permission. There have been massive human rights violations in Indonesia—people have been murdered, tortured, and forcibly evicted when they refuse to give up their land.
Activists describe the above actions as “land grabs.” There’s increasing concern about “carbon grabs,” a type of land grab in which the goal is to obtain profits from carbon offsets or other climate finance measures. A big future concern in this area is Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). BECCS systems, which don’t yet exist on a large scale, burn biomass like wood and turn it into electricity. While doing so they capture the carbon that would have returned to the atmosphere so it can be buried or otherwise stored for a long time. Many policymakers and others seem to be planning on massive implementation of BECCS so that radical reductions to consumption and fossil fuel use are not required. The problem is that growing all of the wood for BECCS takes a huge amount of land—in some plans, as much land as all of the world’s cropland today! That means an enormous potential for carbon grabs this century.
As the world’s temperature rises, the most livable and farmable parts of the world are Indigenous and tribal people’s lands: Siberia, mid- to high-latitude Canada, Sámi land in Scandinavia, New Zealand, and Patagonia among others. It is easy to imagine a new wave of colonization of these lands by denizens of wealthy and powerful lands who are forced to move by climate change.
GENOCIDE AND CLIMATE CHANGE
While it may not technically be genocide to doom millions of people to lose their homeland or have to leave it because it has become a desert or is underwater, it is certainly an atrocity.
Island and low-lying nations are already suffering from sea level rise and increasing salt in their drinking water. Many will become uninhabitable this century. As climate change gets worse, many agricultural regions will become too dry, too stormy, or otherwise not able to be farmed anymore. Central America, South Asia, and Africa are particularly at risk. Pakistan is one of many regions in the world that rely on irrigation water from summer glacier melt. When the glaciers are gone (which is already well underway), these regions will no longer be able to produce food in the ways they have for millennia. Many, many people have already lost their lives, and millions more will lose their lives, if catastrophic climate change is not prevented. These are mostly People of the Global Majority and Indigenous and tribal people. Food security and health are more perilous in many of their communities, infrastructure and government services are often less able to respond to disasters, and extreme weather is more extreme in the tropics where so many people already targeted by racism, colonization, and genocide live.
“Geoengineering” has been proposed to address climate change. Chemicals would be released into the atmosphere to make the Earth cloudiers so it reflects away more sunlight to cool it down. This strategy would likely disrupt the monsoon rains that so much of Africa and South Asia depend on to produce crops as well as dry out the huge and populous region of the Sahel.
While these vulnerable regions and their peoples are perhaps not being deliberately targeted for extermination, clearly fossil fuel-based capitalism does not consider them worth changing for.
WHAT IS POSSIBLE
On a more hopeful note, mitigating climate change can help to make things right. For example, one of the more powerful climate solutions is to return land rights of forests to Indigenous and tribal people. The science is pretty [quite] clear that when Indigenous and tribal people have rights to their own forests, it greatly reduces the risk of deforestation (and the huge emissions that come with it). About fifteen percent of global forest land is already held securely by Indigenous and tribal people, and this area is actually growing quite impressively each year.
In RC we have a good understanding of slavery, colonization, and genocide and therefore have a unique and powerful contribution to make. Let’s talk about these atrocities in discussions of climate change, which will also help ensure that efforts to mitigate climate change do not themselves cause additional atrocities.
Avoiding future atrocities has been the main reason I have dedicated my life to preventing catastrophic climate change. I have been able to do this because of the Co-Counseling sessions I have had over the years on historic slavery, colonization, and genocide. Let’s turn the power of our decades of work on these and other atrocities to the issue of climate change and see what impact we can make.