What is worrying about the entire top-of-the-line survivalist phenomenon (apart from its general weirdness) is that, as the wealthy create their own luxury escape hatches, there is diminishing incentive to maintain any kind of disaster response infrastructure that exists to help everyone, regardless of income—precisely the dynamic that led to enormous and unnecessary suffering in New Orleans during Katrina. (The survivalists refer to FEMA as “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid”—a joke that is only funny if you have the means to pay cash for your own escape.)
This two-tiered disaster infrastructure is galloping ahead at alarming speed. In fire-prone states such as California and Colorado, insurance companies provide a “concierge” service to their exclusive clients: when wildfires threaten their mansions, the companies dispatch teams of private firefighters to coat them in fire-retardant. The public sphere, meanwhile, is left to further decay.
California provides a glimpse of where this is all headed. For its firefighting, the state relies on upwards of 4,500 prison inmates, who are paid a dollar an hour when they’re on the fire line, putting their lives at risk battling wildfires, and about two bucks a day when they’re back at camp. By some estimates, California saves about a billion dollars a year through this program—a snapshot of what happens when you mix austerity politics with mass incarceration and climate change.
I Don’t Feel Hot—Do You Feel Hot?
The uptick in high-end disaster prep also means there is less reason for the big winners in our economy to embrace the demanding policy changes required to prevent an even warmer and more disaster-prone future. Which might help explain the Trump administration’s determination to do everything possible to accelerate the climate crisis.
So far, much of the discussion around Trump’s environmental rollbacks has focused on supposed schisms between the members of his inner circle who actively deny climate science, including EPA head Scott Pruitt and Trump himself, and those who concede that humans are indeed contributing to planetary warming, such as Rex Tillerson and Ivanka Trump. But this misses the point: what everyone who surrounds Trump shares is a confidence that they, their children, and indeed their class will be just fine, that their wealth and connections will protect them from the worst of the shocks to come. They will lose some beachfront property, sure, but nothing that can’t be replaced with a new mansion in the mountains.
What matters isn’t their stated views on the science of climate change. What matters is that not one of them appears to be worried about climate change. The early catastrophic events are playing out mostly in poor parts of the world, where the people are not white. And when disasters do strike wealthy Western nations, there are growing numbers of ways for the wealthy to buy their relative safety. Early in Trump’s term, Republican congressman Steve King caused a controversy by tweeting, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” It was a revealing comment on many fronts. Climate change is not a concern for the Republican Party because a great many people in positions of power clearly think it’ll be “somebody else’s babies” who will shoulder the risks, babies who don’t count as much as their own. They may not all be climate deniers, but almost every one of them is catastrophically unconcerned.
This insouciance is representative of an extremely disturbing trend. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, a significant cohort of our elites are walling themselves off not just physically but also psychologically, mentally detaching themselves from the collective fate of the rest of humanity. This secessionism from the human species (if only in their minds) liberates them not only to shrug off the urgent need for climate action but also to devise ever more predatory ways to profit from current and future disasters and instability.
What we are hurtling toward is the future I glimpsed in New Orleans and Baghdad all those years ago. A world demarcated into Green Zones and Red Zones and black sites for whoever doesn’t cooperate. And it’s headed toward a Blackwater-style economy in which private players profit from building the walls, from putting the population under surveillance, from private security and privatized checkpoints.
A World of Green Zones and Red Zones
This is the way our world is being carved up at an alarming rate. Europe, Australia, and North America are erecting increasingly elaborate (and privatized) border fortresses to seal themselves off from people fleeing for their lives. Fleeing, quite often, as a direct result of forces unleashed primarily by those fortressed continents, whether predatory trade deals, wars, or ecological disasters intensified by climate change.
Hands are wrung about the “migrant crisis”—but not nearly so much about the crises driving the migrations. Since 2014, an estimated thirteen thousand people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores. For those who make it, safety is far from assured. The massive migrant camp in Calais, France, was nicknamed “the jungle”—an echo of the way Katrina’s abandoned people were categorized as “animals.” In late 2016, just before Trump was elected, the Calais camp was bulldozed.
But it’s the Australian government that has gone the furthest in treating human desperation as a contagion. For five consecutive years since 2012 migrant boats headed for Australia’s coastline have been systematically intercepted at sea and their occupants flown to remote detention camps on the islands of Nauru and Manus. Numerous reports have described the conditions in the camps as tantamount to torture. But the government shrugs. After all, they don’t run the camps—private, for-profit contractors do (of course).
Conditions are so degraded on Nauru that in one week in 2016, two refugees set themselves on fire in an attempt to awaken the world to their plight. It hasn’t worked. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull continues to refuse demands coming from many Australians to welcome the refugees into their vast country. “We cannot be misty-eyed about this,” he says, asserting that Australians “have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose.”
Nauru, incidentally, is one of the Pacific islands vulnerable to sea-level rise. Its residents, after seeing their home turned into a prison for people fleeing war in places such as Somalia and Afghanistan, will quite possibly be forced to become migrants themselves. It’s another glimpse into an already-here future: tomorrow’s climate refugees recruited into service as today’s prison guards.
Jets, Drones, and Boats