October « 2017 « LRB blog

Internalising Borders « LRB blog
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/10/31/richard-power-sayeed/internalising-borders

Refugees who can afford it currently pay thousands of dollars to escape war zones and make the uncertain journey to a place of greater safety in Europe. In the future, perhaps some of them will be able to travel by #drone: they will not then have to make extraordinarily dangerous trips across the desert and sea; they will not be raped, tortured or held hostage by traders; and they will not have to trek across hundreds of miles of sodden farmland, watching out for members of the civil guard of whichever country they are traipsing through, their utility belts laden with CS gas, extendable batons and handcuffs.

These drone-renting refugees will be able to fly wherever they choose – within geographical limits; they won’t be able to cross oceans – without going through hundred-page visa applications. They will go to places that are not crushed by war and poverty, where they know someone already, where a language is spoken that they speak, where they have some hope of receiving a warmer welcome, where they think they may get a job, a roof, a future. And on their way to this place of hope, they will pass silently over the seas, rivers, deserts, wire fences, passport check cabins, customs posts, earthworks and imaginary lines known as borders. How will states respond?

#migrants #réfugiés #frontières

El Diablo in Wine Country, by Mike Davis
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/10/14/mike-davis/el-diablo-in-wine-country

And we continue to send urban sprawl into our fire-dependent ecosystems with the expectation that firefighters will risk their lives to defend each new McMansion, and an insurance system that spreads costs across all homeowners will promptly replace whatever is lost.
This is the deadly conceit behind mainstream environmental politics in California: you say fire, I say climate change, and we both ignore the financial and real-estate juggernaut that drives the suburbanisation of our increasingly inflammable wildlands. Land use patterns in California have long been insane but, with negligible opposition, they reproduce themselves like a flesh-eating virus.

#feu #climat #urbanisation #californie #géographie_critique