Gaia Vince (@wanderinggaia) is an award-winning science writer and author. She is particularly interested in the interaction between human systems and Earth’s planetary systems. Her research has taken her around the world. Gaia’s latest book is Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World. We are already at 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, with significantly more to come. The four horsemen of the anthropocene - fire, heat, drought, and flood - will lead human migration on an unprecedented scale. Gaia describes what we must do, individually and collectively, to prepare.
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And the First World middle classes are behaving as if the future will be like a past that never existed in the first place!
ReplyDeleteA couple of quibbles:
While l remain a huge supporter of open borders in principle, the WEIRD world needs to stop being naive about our ability to absorb and integrate a huge influx of immigrants/refugees from the non-WEIRD world quickly and successfully. There's a vast cultural chasm between the two worlds, and it imprints on people by age 15. Gone are the days when first-generation immigrants could easily support themselves and their families through labour jobs where these differences didn't matter, with their children socialized into the mainstream in the next generation...
Population decreases through dropping birthrates are a good thing across the board, except for capitalist overlords who require a permanent poverty underclass as desperate, cheap labour to fill their coffers with filthy lucre! The poor have many children because they can't afford only zero to two, as the affluent can, and smaller families in the First World have benefited from huge quality of life improvements as they got richer... The social contract premise of the young working to support the old in developed economies is based on the demonstrably false myth that currency-issuing federal governments fund themselves, and their populations' benefits and entitlements, through taxes. As long as economies are producing enough goods and services for everyone, including the retired elderly, fiat currency operates more like a ration card than a repository of value, and governments can easily issue as much as necessary to ensure everyone gets a fair share of the output of the real economy. And unlike the said capitalist overlords, we don't need loads of labour for the productivity required to make that feasible!