Tag: Migration

Oven

Image: Photo by Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times].

A paper released last year by Mathew Hauer at the University of Georgia sought to identify where future sea-level refugees might end up in the continental United States. If tens of millions of people will need to depart from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, Huntington Beach, New York City, and elsewhere, where exactly are they going to go?

As Hauer phrased it—with italics in the original—he wanted to address “one fundamental question regarding sea level rise induced migration: Where will sea level rise migrants likely migrate? Local officials in landlocked communities can use these results to plan for potential infrastructure required to accommodate an influx of coastal migrants and could shift the conceptualization of sea level rise from a coastal issue to an everywhere issue.”

Inter-American sea-level refugees will end up, he concludes, in places like Las Vegas, Austin, and Atlanta, pushing already strained future resources to the breaking point.

In any case, I thought of Hauer’s paper when I saw a tweet suggesting that “India becoming too hot for human life is probably going to be the migration event that completely destabilizes global geopolitics.”

The comment was made in reference to a New York Times article about literally unbearable temperatures—temperatures too hot for human survival—that are beginning to recur in India.

The article describes heat so intense it “is already making [people] poorer and sicker. Like the Kolkata street vendor who squats on his haunches from fatigue and nausea. Like the woman who sells water to tourists in Delhi and passes out from heatstroke at least once each summer. Like the women and men with fever and headaches who fill emergency rooms. Like the outdoor workers who become so weak or so sick that they routinely miss days of work, and their daily wages.”

By the end of this century, we read, temperatures “in several of South Asia’s biggest cities” could “be so high that people directly exposed for six hours or more would not survive.” Six hours.

Of course, this comes at the same time as worries that Tokyo—Tokyo!—might be too hot to host the 2020 Olympics, and as heat records are set all over the planet.

It’s not hard to imagine a world of militarized checkpoints surrounding regions zoned for air-conditioning, or altitude itself—and the thermal comforts associated with elevation gain—being rewarded more and more in the decades to come.

So, as with refugees fleeing sea-level rise, where will everyone go? Or, to paraphrase Mathew Hauer, where will heat migrants likely migrate?

Heat Maps

[Image: From Heat Maps by Richard Mosse, courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery].

In a highly timely new show called Heat Maps, opening tonight, February 2, at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, photographer Richard Mosse “charts the refugee crisis unfolding across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.”

Mosse has documented refugee camps and staging sites using an extreme telephoto military-grade camera that can detect thermal radiation, including body heat, at great distance. The camera is used against its intended purpose of border and combat surveillance to map landscapes of human displacement. Reading heat as both metaphor and index, these images reveal the harsh struggle for survival lived daily by millions of refugees and migrants, seen but overlooked, and ignored by many.

By attaching the camera to a robotic motion-control tripod, Mosse has scanned significant sites in the European refugee crisis from a high eye-level, creating densely detailed panoramic thermal images. Each artwork has been painstakingly constructed from a grid of almost a thousand smaller frames, each with its own vanishing point. Seamlessly blended into a single expansive thermal panorama, these images evoke certain kinds of classical painting, such as those by Pieter Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch, in the way that they describe space and detail. They are documents disclosing the fences, security gates, loudspeakers, food queues, tents, and temporary shelters of camp architecture, as well as isolated disembodied traces of human and animal motion and other artifacts that disrupt each precarious composition and reveal its construction. Very large in scale, Heat Maps reveal intimate details of fragile human life in squalid, nearly unlivable conditions on the margins and in the gutters of first world economies.

An accompanying book, featuring brilliant silver metallic inks and a new essay by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, is due out this spring, as well.

The exhibition opens today at 6pm; more info at Jack Shainman Gallery.

(Earlier: Saddam’s Palaces: An Interview with Richard Mosse).

Fewer Gardens, More Shipwrecks

[Image: Peder Balke, “Seascape” (1848), courtesy of the Athenaeum].

As cities like New York prepare for “permanent flooding,” and as we remember submerged historical landscapes such as Doggerland, lost beneath the waves of a rising North Sea, it’s interesting to read that humanity’s ancient past—not just its looming future—might be fundamentally maritime, rather than landlocked. Or oceanic rather than terrestrial, we might say.

In his recent book The Human Shore, historian John R. Gillis suggests that, due to a variety of factors, including often extreme transportation difficulties presented by inland terrain, traveling by sea was the obvious choice for early human migrants.

People, after all, have been seafaring for at least 130,000 years.

This focus on seas and waterways came with political implications, Gillis writes. Even when European merchant-explorers reached North America, “It would be a very long time, almost three hundred years, before Europeans realized the full extent of the Americas’ continental character and grasped the fact that they might have to abandon the ways of seaborne empires for those of territorial states.” In fact, he adds, “for the first century or more, northern Europeans showed more interest in navigational rights to certain waterways and sea tenures than in territorial possession as such.”

At the risk of anachronism, you might say that their power was defined by logistical concerns, rather than by territorial ones: by dynamic, just-in-time access to ports and routes, rather than by the stationary establishment of landed borders and policed frontiers.

[Image: “Ship in a Storm” (ca. 1826), by Joseph Mallord William Turner; courtesy Tate Britain].

Gillis goes much further than this, however, suggesting that—as 130,000 years of seafaring history seems to indicate—humans simply are not a landlocked species.

“Even today,” Gillis claims, “we barely acknowledge the 95 percent of human history that took place before the rise of agricultural civilization.” That is, 95 percent of human history spent migrating both over land and over water, including the use of early but sophisticated means of marine transportation that proved resistant to archaeological preservation. For every lost village or forgotten house, rediscovered beneath a quiet meadow, there are a thousand ancient shipwrecks we don’t even know we should be looking for.

Perhaps speaking only for myself, this is where things get particularly interesting. Gillis points out that humanity’s deep maritime history has been almost entirely written out of our myths and religions.

In his words, “the book of Genesis would have us believe that our beginnings were wholly landlocked, but it was written at the time that the Hebrews were settling down to an agrarian existence.” That is, the myth of Genesis was written from the point of view of a culture already turning away from the sea, mastering animal domestication, mining, and wheeled transport, and settling down away from the coastline. It was learning to cultivate gardens: “The story of Eden served admirably as the foundational myth for agricultural society,” Gillis writes, but it performs very poorly when seen in the context of humanity’s seagoing past.

Briefly, I have to wonder what might have happened had works of literature—or, more realistically, highly developed oral traditions—from this earlier era been better preserved. Seen this way, The Odyssey would merely be one, comparatively recent example of seafaring mythology, and from only one maritime culture. But what strange, aquatic world of gods and monsters might we still be in thrall of today had these pre-Edenic myths been preserved—as if, before the Bible, there had been some sprawling Lovecraftian world of coral reefs, lost ships, and distant archipelagoes, from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia?

[Image: “Storm at Sea” (ca. 1824), by Joseph Mallord William Turner; courtesy Tate Britain].

This is where this post’s title comes from. “In short,” Gillis concludes, “we require a new narrative, one with, as Steve Mentz suggests, ‘fewer gardens, and more shipwrecks.’”

Fewer gardens, more shipwrecks. We are more likely, Gillis and Mentz imply, to be the outcast descendants of sunken ships and abandoned expeditions than we are the landed heirs of well-tended garden plots.

Seen this way, even if only for the purpose of a thought experiment, human history becomes a story of the storm, the wreck, the crash—the distant island, the unseen reef, the undertow—not the farm or even the garden, which would come to resemble merely a temporary domestic twist in this much more ancient human engagement with the sea.