{"id":10494,"date":"2016-05-30T16:07:26","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T16:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-aridity-line\/"},"modified":"2016-05-30T16:07:26","modified_gmt":"2016-05-30T16:07:26","slug":"the-aridity-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-aridity-line\/","title":{"rendered":"The Aridity Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

stoweboyd<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Naomi Klein, Let Them Drown<\/a><\/p>\n

In his latest book, The Conflict Shoreline<\/i>, the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has a groundbreaking take on how these forces are intersecting.\u200b<\/a>\u00a0The main way we\u2019ve understood the border of the desert in the Middle East and North Africa, he explains, is the so-called \u2018aridity line\u2019, areas where there is on average 200 millimetres of rainfall a year, which has been considered the minimum for growing cereal crops on a large scale without irrigation. These meteorological boundaries aren\u2019t fixed: they have fluctuated for various reasons, whether it was Israel\u2019s attempts to \u2018green the desert\u2019 pushing them in one direction or cyclical drought expanding the desert in the other. And now, with climate change, intensifying drought can have all kinds of impacts along this line. Weizman points out that the Syrian border city of Daraa falls directly on the aridity line. Daraa is where Syria\u2019s deepest drought on record brought huge numbers of displaced farmers in the years leading up to the outbreak of Syria\u2019s civil war, and it\u2019s where the Syrian uprising broke out in 2011. Drought wasn\u2019t the only factor in bringing tensions to a head. But the fact that 1.5 million people were internally displaced in Syria as a result of the drought clearly played a role. The connection between water and heat stress and conflict is a recurring, intensifying pattern all along the aridity line: all along it you see places marked by drought, water scarcity, scorching temperatures and military conflict \u2013 from Libya to Palestine, to some of the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan.<\/p>\n

But Weizman also discovered what he calls an \u2018astounding coincidence\u2019. When you map the targets of Western drone strikes onto the region, you see that \u2018many of these attacks \u2013 from South Waziristan through northern Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Iraq, Gaza and Libya \u2013 are directly on or close to the 200 mm aridity line.\u2019<\/b> The red dots on the map above represent some of the areas where strikes have been concentrated. To me this is the most striking attempt yet to visualise the brutal landscape of the climate crisis. All this was foreshadowed a decade ago in a US military report. \u2018The Middle East,\u2019 it observed, \u2018has always been associated with two natural resources, oil (because of its abundance) and water (because of its scarcity).\u2019 True enough. And now certain patterns have become quite clear: first, Western fighter jets followed that abundance of oil; now, Western drones are closely shadowing the lack of water, as drought exacerbates conflict.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought, so boats follow both: boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war and drought. And the same capacity for dehumanising the other that justified the bombs and drones is now being trained on these migrants, casting their need for security as a threat to ours, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army. Tactics refined on the West Bank and in other occupation zones are now making their way to North America and Europe. In selling his wall on the border with Mexico, Donald Trump likes to say: \u2018Ask Israel, the wall works.\u2019 Camps are bulldozed in Calais, thousands of people drown in the Mediterranean, and the Australian government detains survivors of wars and despotic regimes in camps on the remote islands of Nauru and Manus. Conditions are so desperate on Nauru that last month an Iranian migrant died after setting himself on fire to try to draw the world\u2019s attention. Another migrant \u2013 a 21-year-old woman from Somalia \u2013 set herself on fire a few days later. Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister, warns that Australians \u2018cannot be misty-eyed about this\u2019 and \u2018have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose\u2019. It\u2019s worth bearing Nauru in mind the next time a columnist in a Murdoch paper declares, as Katie Hopkins did last year, that it\u2019s time for Britain \u2018to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.\u2019 In another bit of symbolism Nauru is one of the Pacific Islands very vulnerable to sea-level rise. Its residents, after seeing their homes turned into prisons for others, will very possibly have to migrate themselves. Tomorrow\u2019s climate refugees have been recruited into service as today\u2019s prison guards.<\/p>\n

We need to understand that what is happening on Nauru, and what is happening to it, are expressions of the same logic. A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy \u2013 that we must take care of our own first \u2013 will be marshalled to rationalise these monstrous decisions. We are making this rationalisation already, if only implicitly. Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or whether they are among the 36 million who according to the UN are facing hunger due to drought in Southern and East Africa.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

stoweboyd: Naomi Klein, Let Them Drown In his latest book, The Conflict Shoreline, the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has a groundbreaking take on how these forces are intersecting.\u200b\u00a0The main way we\u2019ve understood the border of the desert in the Middle East and North Africa, he explains, is the so-called \u2018aridity line\u2019, areas where there is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-2Jg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}