The Displaced

Abstract

This chapter discusses the question of climate migration and reads a series of texts that follow climate refugees as they cross, or are prevented from crossing, heavily guarded US national or state borders. The chapter shows how some American Climate Emergency Narratives employ allegory to cast the racialized climate refugee as a border-scaling monster, but it also reveals how even texts that seek to critique the racist ideology that informs extractive capitalist border-thinking focus on the future plights of the white majority.

Displacement, Refuge, and Rupture

Socio-ecological breakdown and displacement go hand in hand. As described in the first chapters of this book, the violence employed by agents of the capitalist world-system to clear the land of Indigenous people and species forced survivors to escape and seek refuge elsewhere. The extractive practices that followed and that sought to source nature on the cheap initiated a global ecological breakdown that soon took the form of soil erosion and contamination, and that has now evolved further into hyper-charged storms, droughts, and floods, and slowly increasing global warming (Seneviratne et al. 2012; Ummenhofer and Meehl 2017; Padrón et al. 2020). This erosion of the Earth System is now producing new exoduses, as people must abandon homes and lands that cannot feed or shield them any longer. As Xu et al. (2020) have argued, the Holocene ‘environmental niche’ that humans have taken advantage of during the past millennia, where the mean temperature is around 13 ℃, is slowly disappearing in many places and being replaced by hotter zones. By the year 2070, Xu et al. estimate, ‘1 to 3 billion people’ (p. 11350) will live in parts of the world where the climate niche that sustains human life today no longer exists. These people will have to abandon these regions, or slowly succumb to heat death and starvation. The problem is that there are few places to escape to. If the Holocene was a time when species could find refuge and recuperate, the Capitalocene is a period when such refuges are rapidly disappearing. As Donna Haraway (2016) has observed with Anna Tsing, ‘the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge’ (p. 100).

This search for refuge is likely to contribute to the violent geopolitical conflicts and depleted futures discussed in the previous chapter. If military conflict increases, it will greatly accelerate the displacement caused by a warming planet (and its underlying causes). A briefing commissioned by the European Parliament estimates that in 2020 alone, more than 30 million people were displaced by environmental disasters linked to climate change (Apap and Revel 2021). In the coming 50 years, as the biosphere continues to warm and as capitalism intensifies its pursuit of Cheap Nature, this number will most likely increase drastically. Unless measures are taken to significantly mitigate socio-ecological breakdown, it is likely that between 200 million (Wyett 2014) to 1 billion (IEP 2020), will find themselves displaced by the unravelling of the capitalist world-ecology by the year 2050.

In this way, socio-ecological breakdown and the armed conflicts meant to secure the extractive potential that remains in various parts of the world, are already creating a slow but inexorable movement of people from the most affected areas into parts of the world where conditions for human and extra-human life are still decent, or where the economic resources that create social resilience are present. Such areas are obviously located mostly in the core and the privileged semiperipheries of the world-system, but as the number of refugees surges, governments in these parts of the world-system are increasingly reluctant to provide necessary sanctuary. As I will return to in this chapter, politicians in privileged parts of the world are now making grand careers out of the promise to keep refugees out of their nation-states.

With these developments in mind, this chapter moves on from the large-scale geopolitical confrontations discussed in the previous chapter, to instead centre the unsanctioned but inevitable human and extra-human mobilities that the interconnected and cascading erosion of social, economic, ecological, and atmospheric worlds produces. The chapter thus shows how the American Climate Emergency Narrative imagines the relationships between displacement, mobility, the biospheric crisis, the depletion of Cheap Nature, and the systems designed to keep capitalist modernity operational. In studying this development, I am building on already existing literary scholarship. Bryan Yazell (2020) has importantly observed that the climate migrant or refugee displaced in a world destabilized by biospheric erosion is a common figure in what he terms climate fiction. Similarly, Ben De Bruyn (2020) has investigated a set of British literary novels that centre climate-induced migration, arguing that these texts help readers to move ‘beyond [the] simplistic militarized and humanitarian frames’ (p. 1) offered by anti-migration populist discourse. Adding to this work, this chapter discusses how the American Climate Emergency Narrative, as a type of fiction produced in an increasingly fortified hegemonic core of the world-system, portrays displacement. The chapter focuses on two central tropes that structure this narrative. The first such trope appears in texts that cast the racialized climate migrant or refugee as a border-scaling and monstrous being that produces an acute state of insecurity. In this conservative and often perversely violent narrative, exemplified by Marc Forster’s film World War Z (2013), the only way forward is to make full use of the vast military and scientific arsenal that the core controls. The second trope centres on white Americans who have been deprived of land, livelihood, and dignity, and who are forced to enter fundamentally insecure ecological and political spaces. This part of the chapter briefly considers Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), but it primarily discusses Brian Hart’s Trouble No Man (2019). As the chapter argues, narratives such as these novels are instructive in the sense that they help readers in the Global North to understand what the consequences might be for people of the core if nothing is done to prevent further biospheric erosion. Even so, and as a type of Climate Emergency Narrative, these texts centre on the future plight of white, middle-class protagonists and fall short of imagining a world beyond borders, border violence, and border thinking.

Mobilities, Borders, and the Migrant

The official descriptor for those fleeing land that has been depleted by the pursuit of Cheap Nature and by the erosion of the climate is ‘climate migrant’. According to the definition, ‘climate migrants’ are people who have chosen, rather than having been forced, to leave their homelands. As migrants, rather than refugees, they are not given refugee status and thus do not have the right to international protection defined by the UN in the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees passed in 1951. When crossing national borders as migrants rather than as refugees, they can be, and routinely are, deported back into the hostile environments they escaped from.¹ In this way, climate displacement is perceived, by the security institutions of the Global North, as a security crisis. This crisis is typically mediated with the help of the established national security paradigm (Vietti and Scribner 2013; d’Appollonia 2017) that casts international and internal migration movements as putting unsustainable stress on border maintenance, federal and state policing efforts, the National Guard, the social and health security apparatus, and the economy of the nation-state generally.

In addition to this, corporations central to the operation of the extractive capitalist world-ecology perceive climate migration as problematic because it creates a shortage of cheap labour at sites of extraction in the Global South and in the semiperipheral areas of the US. Todd Miller shows in Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (2017), how this development is another reason why the global security apparatus worries about socio-ecological breakdown. Miller thus reveals how players within the military-industrial complex are aware of, and deeply concerned by, the fact that socio-ecological erosion is forcing people in places such as Sub-Saharan Africa to abandon areas rich in metals (chrome, columbium, titanium) that are essential to the US defence industry, potentially curbing access to these important commodity frontiers. In this way, as Miller observes, ‘climate-driven migration crises directly threaten powerful U.S. military-corporate business interests’ (Miller 2017, p. 39). Not surprisingly, actors within the global extractive community have developed ways of managing this particular security issue. In Militarized Global Apartheid (2020) Catherine Besteman describes what she terms a ‘new apartheid apparatus’ created by the functioning core of a dispersed but interconnected ‘global north’ (p. 3). This apparatus is modelled on the pre-1990 South African system and ‘takes the form of militarized border technologies and personnel, interdictions at sea, biometric tracking of the mobile, detention centres, holding facilities, and the criminalization of mobility’ (p. 2). The primary function of this apparatus is, as it was for apartheid South Africa, to establish and maintain ‘a labor regime responsive to the specific needs of industrial capitalism’ (p. 14), at a time of ‘advanced’ (p. 1) neoliberal globalization.

I want to again stress the fact that while many of the migrants and refugees that are escaping eroded social worlds—and the poverty, crime, and formal or informal warfare that flourish in such social worlds—rather than depleted ecological worlds, social and ecological exhaustion are consequences of the same extractive system. As many of the critical interventions discussed in this book reveal, and as Moore’s (2015) work on the material history of the biospheric crisis explains, this ecological crisis is not in itself the driver of social depletion and displacement, but rather a direct and inevitable consequence of the extractive class relations that have become ubiquitous through the expansion of the capitalist world-ecology. As stated in a different way by former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Christina Figueres (2022), the ‘climate crisis, the nature crisis, the inequality crisis, the food crisis all share the same deep root: extractivism based on extrinsic principles’ (p. xvii). This means that treating climate migration as a security problem is not simply a step towards demonizing migrants, it is a move that elides the entangled processes that cause displacement across the world-system.

However, and to return to the point made earlier in this chapter, from the perspective of the US Department of Defence and other institutions tasked with keeping the US secure, climate migration is an acute ‘threat multiplier’ (Marzec 2015, p. 2), both because of the stress migrants are seen to put on the system and because migrating people have been forced to abandon extraction sites crucial to (military and civilian) industry. Again, and as Ingrid Boas et al. observe in ‘Climate Migration Myths’, climate migration is described in securitization discourse as a ‘looming security crisis’ (2019, pp. 901–902). In this discourse, it is the climate migrant/refugee, rather than the extractive violence that has produced both biospheric breakdown and the precarious living conditions that are forcing people to become migrants/refugees, that is perceived as the agent of insecurity. When the US DoD is preparing to ‘adapt’ to climate change, this adaptation is dependent on this understanding of the climate migrant as a security problem. In this way, and as argued by Desmond Tutu, climate ‘adaptation is becoming a euphemism for social injustice on a global scale’ (2007, p. 166).²

As the first chapters of this book touch upon, the securitization of migration in core or ‘Western’ societies has a long history intimately related to the formation and development of these societies. In the US, the construction of systems designed to encourage white Europeans to migrate to the US so that they could participate in settler colonialism or become (semi-skilled) labour in US-based industry, while at the same time limiting the possibility of people from other parts of the world from entering the nation (as in the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882), mark an important stage. Other notable developments include the notion that the post-Cold War era had inaugurated a clash of civilizations as proposed by Samuel Huntington (1996), the casting of Middle Eastern migrants as terrorists (Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002), and the introduction of the idea that the US and the white European world are scenes where a ‘great replacement’ is taking place (Jones 2021). It is through such discursive, ideological, and judicial action that the migrant is rhetorically transformed from a human in need to a security concern.

The Migrant as Monstrous Body in the American Climate Emergency Narrative

Many of these stages, and the extractive security logic that makes them seem rational, have been rehearsed in literature and other media forms. In early twentieth-century popular culture, the Mexican or Asian migrant is typically a fiendish other; a staggeringly cruel Spanish-speaking foil for the heroic white protagonist (Perry 2016), or a Fu Manchu-like criminal mastermind introducing illicit drugs and a culture of depravity into the white urban society of the West Coast (Mayer 2013). Since then, a long tradition of scholarship in cultural studies, postcolonial studies, American Studies, and related fields has problematized these representations.³ While there are certainly still plenty of films and novels that rehearse this racist imagery in the open, the American Climate Emergency Narrative tends to avoid openly racist depictions of migrants and instead employ allegory through which black and brown bodies appear in the guise of undead or otherwise monstrous figures.

A striking example is Nicholas Sainsbury Smith’s Extinction Horizon (2015).⁴ In this novel, military scientists have crossed an experimental drug named VX-99 with the Ebola virus to create super soldiers of prodigious strength and endurance. Predictably, the virus gets loose and begins turning the human population on all continents into ferocious killers with superhuman strength and speed. These are referred to as ‘Variants’ and they are fast, hungry for human flesh and blood, and lack the capacity for complex thinking. In a matter of weeks, only 1 per cent of the human population remains worldwide. The US president succumbs to the infection and what is left of the American military retreats to ships and islands to begin the project of de-accelerating the planet-wide apocalypse and taking back the world. The protagonist of the novel is Master Sergeant Reed Beckham of ‘Special Forces Delta Team Ghost’. He has spent much of his professional life killing people in the Middle East and to him, the Variants connote ‘Indians’ and the Middle Eastern ‘insurgents’. In the novel and throughout the series, these racially inflected monsters flow into all the spaces capitalism has engineered: SUVs, aeroplanes, bungalows, shopping malls, skyscrapers, megacities, military facilities, and so on until capitalism teeters on the brink of extinction. If it were not for the joint effort of the military-industrial-medical complex, humanity would perish entirely under the unrelating waves of the radically mobile undead.

A similar story is told in director Marc Forster’s Hollywood blockbuster World War Z.⁵ The introductory credits of this film clearly signal that the film speaks about socio-ecological breakdown. This is done by showing ominous images of various global cityscapes teeming with people that are then contrasted with sudden sequences that depict swarming ants, snarling, feeding alpha predators, flocks of birds, stranded dolphins and whales, and tempestuous oceans. In this way, the film calls attention to itself as a narrative about overpopulation, mobilities, ‘natural’ aggression, and (anthropogenic) climate violence.

The film moves from this collage of colliding human and animal worlds to protagonist Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), who is making pancakes for his wife and two daughters in an idyllic suburban two-story house somewhere on the East Coast. Between Lane serving breakfast and doing the dishes, it becomes clear that this is not his natural habitat. He used to work for the UN in the most troubled parts of the Global South but has opted out so that he can tend to his growing, female-dominated nuclear family (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1

Gerry Lane and his family at a sunlit breakfast before the zombie migration crisis strikes in World War Z

After breakfast, the family heads into the city of Philadelphia, where they become stuck in traffic. This is part and parcel of urban life in the core, and the two daughters play happily in the back seat of their Volvo station wagon. Then, in a matter of seconds, a tide of bodies and teeth surges up further down the street, turning people into a rapidly growing horde of aggressive and border-crossing undead. Lane steals an abandoned RV and escapes the inner city, he loads up on water and medicine for his asthmatic daughter, and he is given shelter by a Latin American family in an apartment building in Newark. Lane manages to contact friends at the UN and the US Department of Defense and because he is an unusually skilled operator, they send a helicopter for him and his family. While he waits, he tells the father of the host family that ‘I used to work in dangerous places and people who moved survived, and those who didn’t… Movement is life’. When the transportation arrives, Lane and his family escape by the skin of their teeth, undead bodies peeling off from the landing gears of the helicopter, but the family that has sheltered them remains behind. ‘There is nowhere to go’, the family’s father exclaims.

While this father pays the ultimate price for his reticence, or inability, to move, Lane remains eminently mobile throughout the film. He travels to a crumbling South Korea and then on to Israel. Israel is the only nation in the film that has been able to control the infection. Endemically suspicious, they have been ‘building walls there for two millennia’, Lane is informed. Enormous ramparts reach up to the sky, encircling all of Jerusalem. Thus, movement is clearly also death, depending on which side of the wall you are standing. The walls at first keep the undead in check. However, ‘mere islamophobic moments later’ (Bould 2021, p. 30) a celebratory song by one of the Palestinian refugees catches the attention of the undead outside the walls. These undead look disturbingly like the stock image of the modern-day (climate) refugee from the Global South: emaciated, dressed in tatters, brown-skinned, and hungry. However, once they catch the scent or the sound of living humans, they become like the migratory, predatory animals or insects showcased during the film’s introductory credits. Modelled by the special effects unit after ‘animal-kingdom biomechanics’, they scale the enormous walls with ‘all the intuitive cooperation of an insect colony’ (Boucher 2013). In other sequences, the undead move more like a tidal wave, flowing over and through everything in their path (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2

The undead climbing Israeli walls like teeming ants, and flowing over a bus like a tidal wave in World War Z

So relentless is this wall-storming mass of brown bodies that all the guns of the Israeli armed forces cannot prevent them from breaching the barriers that keep the racialized infected apart from the armed and the vulnerable. Lane must keep on running. Movement is life.

The portrayal of the undead as seething and relentless animals or insects activates the planetary dimension discussed in detail in Chapter 4. Like the kaiju, these undead are vengeful avatars of the planet, and as such a security issue to resolve for US armed forces. In this way, the war that US troops engage in is a war with an angry planet; with a severely damaged and uncooperative ecology. At the same time, this imagery also informs the concurrent reading of the undead as migrants emerging from the peripheries of the world-system. As Mark Bould aptly argues in The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021), ‘any depiction of a massive, mobile and “unwanted” population cannot not be about climate refugees’ (p. 29). A similar reading of the undead in zombie films such as World War Z is performed by Penny Crofts and Anthea Vogl (2019), who observe that ‘the anxieties connected to and generated by refugee movement reflect the monstrous qualities of the zombie’ (p. 30). Thus, they argue, World War Z’s depiction of a zombie war raises ‘fears that refugee populations will contaminate systems of national order’ (p. 30). With this in mind, it can be argued that what the US and Israeli soldiers are gunning down in scene after scene of World War Z is a nightmare evocation of a global precariat evicted by the extractive violence that capitalism has subjected their homes to.

By casting the migrant as a voracious zombie, the film accelerates the sense of acute crisis that is central to the American Climate Emergency Narrative. The undead is a figure that cannot be talked to, it scales any obstacle in its path to acquire entry into orderly, capitalist modernity, and, if given half the chance, will overflow and literally consume it. Simultaneously, Lane’s small, nuclear family evoke capitalism as a soft, vulnerable, feminine, and white entity, something that must be made secure at all costs. The juxtaposition of this unit and the animalistic, biting undead legitimizes an immediate and total state of exception. Enormous walls and constant and extreme military-grade violence are now the order of the day. In this way, World War Z registers the precarity and violence that militarized capitalism produces in the US and globally only to narrate this violence as necessary and existential. The migrants as undead must be massacred as they scale the border. The unthinkable alternative is the grotesque and abject eating of Lane’s wife and daughters.

Despite its celebration of brave and self-sacrificing soldier heroes, World War Z was not financially supported by the Department of Defense (Tarabay 2014). As an extremely expensive Hollywood production, it did, however, receive funding from other actors of the military-industrial and petrochemical complexes, this in exchange for various product placements. Thus, the film features bottles of Royal Purple Motor Oil, made by Calumet Specialty Products Partners (CLMT), a refiner and processor of hydrocarbon products headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. It also contains signs that advertise Capital One, an American bank headquartered in McLean, Virginia but operating throughout the US, as well as cans of Pepsi Cola that Lane, in a strange, drawn-out scene, guzzles down. However, the most striking example of product placement in the films is an automatic rifle that clearly reads ArmaLite. Inc, Geneseo, IL. US (Fig. 6.3).⁶

Fig. 6.3

ArmaLite product placement in World War Z

When named products are folded into the visual fabric of the story in this way, characters no longer drive cars, but a Mercedes, a Volvo, a Ford, or an Aston Martin. Similarly, soldiers do not simply fire automatic rifles or shotguns, but a Heckler & Koch, a Ruger, or, as in Word War Z, an ArmaLite. Such visualizations can be understood as an effect of the prevalent integration of the entertainment industry, the (military) industrial complex, and the spoken and unspoken geopolitical ambitions of the core. When Lane hunkers down among clearly branded containers of motor oil, or when soldiers flaunt branded assault rifles, the film does not simply register the fact that the world Lane exists within was made through oil and guns, it actively promotes a specific actor/corporation that is trying to ensure and expand its life span within this world. In other words, the hope is that a cinematic gunning down of the undead in the film should stimulate the sales of hydrocarbons, sugars dissolved in water, mortgages, and assault rifles from specific agents, this while projecting a general sense that these items and services will remain essential even as the world burns. In this way, narratives from the core do not just celebrate the sense that the core is essential to the prolongation of human life, they advertise and seek to stimulate specific actors and corporations. This is part of how capitalism makes fiction within the world-system, and also of how fiction sponsored by actors within the system attempts to make the world.

In World War Z, this network of commercial entities helps make possible, even accelerates, the film’s anti-migration narrative. Corporations such as these rely upon, feed from, and help maintain the very intellectual and physical borders that also secure US world-system hegemony. Petrochemical industries, banks, and arms manufacturers can tolerate, even be energized by, capitalist crisis,⁷ but they prefer labour to remain in place and is premised, in ways described by Cedric Robinson (2019), upon a racialization of labour. It is not strange, then, that much popular culture from the core, energized by product placement, casts displaced and supremely mobile racialized labour as deeply disturbing, or that the anxieties such disturbance produces are promoted via images of gruesome violence. Again, as Besteman (2020) and Miller (2017) note, for commodities such as palm oil, sugar, or lithium to flow into the industries of the core, racialized labour must be kept in their place. At the same time, fear that such labour might be breaching borders is what energizes xenophobia, prepper lifestyles, and gun sales. World War Z thus registers, but also contributes to, this precise confluence between the needs and commodifiable fears of the core of the capitalist world-system.

The Body in Place

If movement is life, as Lane argues in World War Z, it is clearly also a privilege. When the father of the Latin American family that harbours Lane’s family for the night exclaims that ‘There is nowhere to go’, he speaks from a position of peripherality. For him, this is the end of the road. This does not mean that there is nowhere to go, as Lane’s family’s last-minute helicopter transfer to the aircraft carrier demonstrates, but such mobilities are reserved for those belonging to the predominantly white core of the world-system; those who are defined as fully human.⁸ Lane relies on such mobilities and, throughout World War Z, he never stops his movement. He is shepherded by soldiers and civilians all over the world. He takes control of vehicles, he is picked up by helicopters, Air Force transportation planes, and jet airliners, in the process crossing all conceivable national and intrastate borders. In these fast-moving, border-transcending vehicles, Lane is a body in place. By contrast, the racialized migrant, whether cast as covering Latin American or ravenous undead, is what Sarah Ahmed has called a ‘body out of place’ (2013).⁹ In concert with Judith Nicholson (2016), Paul Gilroy (2020), and Barbara Harris Combs (2022), Ahmed notes how anti-black racism identifies the body of colour as out of place at the moment when it tries to cross into, or when it presumes to exist within, spaces colonized by whiteness. This is what motivates the immense violence enacted in the film. The racialized migrant turned undead is monstrously out of place in the white spaces produced by capitalist modernity. Thus, there is no alternative to the brutal violence used to keep the undead at bay in World War Z.

As discussed in previous chapters of the book, the notion that some bodies are out of place is ingrained in the extractive history of the US’s rise to world-system hegemony. Chapter 2 thus shows how settler writing narrated the mobility of the invasive white body as natural, irresistible, and transcendent, while Indigenous mobility was depicted as disturbing and dangerous. Similarly, as discussed in Chapter 3, the movement of black bodies was strongly regimented during slavery, and the fugitive slave act allowed slave owners to pursue black bodies far into ‘free’ territory. In the apartheid era that followed the 14th amendment, the social relationship between black and white bodies was determined through the legal and semi-legal designation of particular spaces as white or black. The black codes that emerged in the South immediately after the Civil War thus sought to hinder black people from leaving the plantation, from congregating, and from entering white spaces. After the Supreme Court gave its blessing to segregationist policies in their decision on the Homer Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, restaurants, rest rooms, parks, schools, compartments on public transportation, health-care facilities, and so on could be, and frequently were, marked as white or black.

The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case of 1954 helped make this overtly racist practice illegal, but the marking of certain bodies as out of place (and others as in place) remains systemic in American (and much of global) society. As discussed by Simone Browne (2015), present-day ‘racialized disciplinary society’ (p. 6) locates white, brown, and black bodies differently in relation to space, it surveilles the movement of bodies, and it curbs or privileges this movement according to race. The very well-documented profiling of black and brown people driving cars or attempting to enter the US are present-day examples of how this society operates (Jernigan 2000; Gilroy 2020; Romero 2008; Ramirez et al. 2003). This situation, it should be added, is an important part of how what Robinson (2019) terms racial capitalism, and Besteman (2020) calls militarized global apartheid, works. Just like the US cotton plantation demanded the presence of a vast (racialised) workforce, the extraction and refinement of resources in Sub-Saharan Africa require a stationary labour force: a black or brown body in place. In this way, ‘racialized disciplinary society’ is central to the working of the capitalist world-ecology.

It is thus not surprising that the colour coding of (migrant) bodies informs the American Climate Emergency Narrative’s account of the lived experience of biospheric erosion and its impact on human and extra-human worlds. As Ahmed, Browne, and other scholars argue, the dominant and racialized ‘disciplinary society’ relies on a biopolitics that surveilles and calls attention to the body as a racialized (and gendered) entity, and that encourages, sanctions, or enforces certain actions upon this body if it is perceived to transgress. In texts that take place in futures where the biosphere is breaking down and people are forced to take to the road, the disciplining of bodies provides the narrative with a certain structure. To return to World War Z, the racialized undead become legitimate targets of violence. The relative blackness of the undead body marks it as an entity that must be prevented from crossing the border that separates the periphery from the core. This is part of the extractive logic that provides the film with its narrative momentum. It can be argued that Lane's assignment is ultimately to ensure that bodies such as his remain mobile and in place. By contrast, Lane’s (normative settler) whiteness provides him with a universal passport. His body is in place everywhere. Yet, such privileged white mobilities demand the fortification of borders that curb the mobilities of those racialized, gendered, sexualized, or classed people who are described as not entirely human.

In World War Z, Lane manages to halt the unfolding apocalypse. His trick is to infect himself with a conventional virus that makes him a bad host for the zombie virus. Thus contaminated, he is of no interest to the undead. Lane can hide in their midst, seemingly undead but in fact as mobile as ever. His discovery creates breathing space for survivors and the military all over the world. In the final sequence of the film, images of vaccines being dropped from military transport planes, evacuees walking unmolested past zombies, soldiers showering hordes of the undead with napalm, and bomb planes targeting mass gatherings of zombies are interspersed with scenes that show how Lane arrives on a boat to be reunited with his family. His daughters and his wife hug him and celebrate his return with tears and shouts of joy. They are grateful he has returned in one piece, but also because he has restored their future. Even though their ‘war has just begun’ as Lane thinks to himself, the ending promises that it will be possible to restore the world that provided such tranquil privilege and such effortless mobilities in the opening kitchen scene.

The Unbearable Whiteness of the American Climate Emergency Narrative

World War Z imagines a future where white agents such as Lane are able to assist the military-industrial-science complex in preventing the (gothicised) climate emergency from unfolding. As a result, the white, middle-class body out of which subjectivity flows will be able to reclaim its privileges and retain its transcendent mobilities. But this is not the only possible trajectory. Other American Climate Emergency Narratives are less optimistic and explore futures where the gallant efforts of men like Lane have failed and where, suddenly, the white body finds itself out of place and deprived of all the comforts that it once enjoyed. The main characters of these texts are typically characters who used to have a place at the core but who find themselves in the shoes of the undead in World War Z: they cannot get on planes or drive cars, they are constantly hungry and miserable, and they may even suffer a kind of systemic violence. Cormac McCarthy’s influential, post-apocalyptic The Road (2006), discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, makes this exact point when, in a retrospective scene, the wife of the novel’s (white) male protagonist informs him that ‘We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film’ (p. 47). In The Road, the whiteness that clings to the wandering father and his son means nothing and thus offers no protection.

By revoking the privileges of white people, narratives such as The Road imagine futures where the social relationships that Lane works so hard to maintain in World War Z have been permanently terminated. This does not mean, however, that The Road is antithetical to World War Z. Rather, McCarthy’s novel takes place in a future world in which agents such as Lane has failed to prevent the climate apocalypse from unravelling so that the utter chaos that threatens on the other side of the nightmare created by the film has become a reality. In World War Z, the ultimate horror is not the emergence of a global and enormously violent pandemic, but the possibility that Lane’s and his family’s white, middle-class bodies should cease to generate privilege. Such cessation would mean the collapse of the capitalist world-system they are part of and that has privileged them. Again, in The Road, this is precisely what has happened. The white bodies of the father and the son mean nothing and thus offer no protection. Thus, both texts can be said to explore the same apocalyptic future but to focus on two different stages. The Road obviously eschews the spectacular fireworks and the hopeful closure of World War Z, yet it makes use of a similar climate emergency imaginary where the collapse of capitalist modernity inaugurates a socio-ecological state so bleak it cancels life entirely.

There are a number of studies of ‘climate fiction’ that focus on, and recommend, precisely this rhetorical scheme. The argument put forward by these studies is that ‘climate fiction’ such as The Road raises awareness of global warming by allowing readers to imaginatively and emotionally enter the dark social and ecological futures that the ‘climate crisis’ will produce. Thus, as discussed in the introduction, Gregers Andersen attempts, in his book Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis (2020),

to demonstrate that climate fiction represents a vital supplement to the reports published by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) because, by depicting humans in worlds resembling those forecast by the IPCC, climate fiction provides speculative insights into how it might be to feel and understand in such worlds. And these are basically insights we as contemporary humans cannot obtain anywhere else. (p. 1)

Also following this line of thinking, Alexa Weik Von Mossner (2017) has proposed that ‘climate fiction’ such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife ‘channels its dramatic evocation of climate change’s external effects through the minds and bodies of its protagonists, thus allowing readers to imaginatively experience what it is like to live in a climate-changed world’ (p. 174, italics in the original).¹⁰ In other words, fiction such as The Road or The Water Knife narrate how a certain, previously privileged social stratum (the ‘contemporary humans’ that Andersen describes as reading ‘climate fiction’) wakes up to a world where nothing or too little has been done to prevent global warming and where their privileges and mobilities have been drastically reduced as a consequence. By telling such stories, this fiction makes people who belong to this still privileged stratum aware of the profound social upheaval that may result if the ecology of the planet is allowed to continue eroding. What ‘climate fiction’ furnishes is not simply an intellectual wake-up call, but an emotional and affective encounter with this deeply disturbing future.

However, while this type of affective engagement may well serve a purpose, stories such as the ones promoted by Andersen or Mossner risk eliding the temporal, social, and geographical dispersion of global warming, other types of biospheric erosion such as pollution and the planetary spreading of plastic waste, and, most importantly, the social and economic drivers that have caused these developments. To return to the beginning of this chapter, and also to the historical perspective that informs this book, biospheric breakdown is, to a large number of people, not a thing that will unfold in the future, but an ongoing socio-ecological disaster. Again, as Rob Nixon shows in his ground-breaking book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) and as Farhana Sultana (2022) has also observed, climate breakdown is in fact a socio-ecological development and thus an already lived experience in many parts of the world. The existing capitalist world-ecology was built upon a foundation of theft of Indigenous lands and on the violent extraction of nature and people. This enabled a thriving modernity at the core and in parts of the global semiperiphery, but it also produced profound inequality, soil erosion, pollution, war, global warming, and, of course, displacement. When what Andersen and Mossner refer to as ‘climate fiction’ focuses on the loss of privileges in the Global North, rather than the history of extraction, the slow violence and the long-established inequalities that exist in the Global South and that have made these privileges possible, a crucial story goes untold.

The absence of this story, and the history of extraction it would tell, in fiction that seeks to make ‘contemporary humans’ aware of global warming by focusing on the curbing of (white) mobilities and privileges is noticeable. One of many examples is Brian Hart’s Trouble No Man (2019). This text narrates, in a series of temporally fragmented chapters, the life of the white Roy Bingham, once a semi-professional skateboarder, who tries to settle down in rural California with his partner Karen and their two daughters. This is difficult not only because Roy is an itinerant soul—he craves movement on his skateboard, in his car, or motorcycle down the road and across state and nation-state borders, and he shuns commitment to people and places—but because increasing drought is eroding both the land and the politics of his state. New and violent communities made up of white farmers who have lived on the land ‘forever’ (p. 105) begin to take command of the area. These farmers are running out of water, and their efforts to seize power are made easier by the fact that they have a tradition of sending their sons and daughters to the military to become trained militia. These new ‘totally racist, not to mention fascist’ (p. 105) communities attract preppers from all over the US, and they have begun to form militant enclaves that unite under the ‘Jeffersonian flag’ or similar signs of secession. They erect fences and establish political borders and roadblocks and while people of colour are even more likely to be stopped at these improvised borders, Roy, Karen, and their two white daughters and friends also find their mobilities constrained. Going for a drive one evening, they come across newly formed borders, and there is no guarantee that they will be allowed to pass: ‘The Jeffs have doubled their security at the roadblocks, and after the first two they decide to turn around and go home. More and more they’re in occupied territory. Strangers in camo with M4s directing traffic’ (pp. 129–130). In this future, the white bodies of the Binghams do not guarantee entry any longer. The new and increasingly politicized security order has transformed him and his family into bodies out of place. Thus, and as in The Road, this imagined future is hostile not simply because the land is unable to yield the clean water and the food needed to sustain human bodies, but primarily because the borders that regulate human mobilities have become difficult to cross for the white subject.

Tensions rise further and the part of California where the Binghams live is increasingly riddled with fences, roadblocks, and landmines. Still mobile, the grown daughters manage to escape to Alaska. In futures transformed by global warming, northern territories are often described as offering sanctuary. Karen and Roy find moving more difficult, partly because of the borders put in place, but also because it is hard and expensive to abandon land that you formally own. As they make plans, Karen and Roy are persuaded by Karen’s old stepfather to transgress one of the new borders, to enter space that has become forbidden to them. They are attacked, and manage to escape, but are now marked as enemies of the local clan. Before long, Karen has been shot and killed during an ambush. In this future transformed by socio-ecological breakdown, it is not just South American migrants or the undead that are kept in their place, and who pay with their lives if they go astray. Roy responds to this killing via the same logic. The entire novel is thus framed by a scene where Roy and another man take vengeance for the killing of Karen. Following the established paradigm, biospheric erosion produces both emergency and the state of exception that suspends the rule of law. The difference is that, in Trouble No Man, white people are not only the engineers but also the victims of such improvised states of exception. All mobilities are curbed and everyone can be the target of organized gun violence.

Unlike many other American Climate Emergency Narratives, Trouble No Man is not entirely oblivious to systemic violence. Watching California drying out and filling up with armed and border-building secessionists, Karen reflects that ‘This has all happened before, right? […] Drought, fire, strife, dead forests, the threat of world war. Actually, this has happened forever. It’s never stopped. Moves continent to continent. It’ll be our turn soon but not yet’ (267). The observation that biospheric erosion and war go hand in hand and that they are global phenomena does suggest an understanding of socio-ecological breakdown as world-systemic, but the claim that such breakdown ‘has happened forever’ erases the particular history of violence that the emergence of the world-system initiated. Thus, Karen’s statement rehearses the Anthropocene thesis: the human species has always made the world burn. Perceived via the logic this thesis affords, capitalist modernity is not the engine of ‘fire, strife, dead forests, the threat of world war’, it is rather what has, until now, protected people like Karen, Roy, and the preppers that surround them, from being engulfed. It is the accelerating erosion of this modernity that makes it ‘our turn’, as Karen puts it. The roadblocks and border skirmishes that eventually kill Karen are only the beginning—but it is the beginning of a development located, for white Californians, in the future.

Trouble No Man obviously lacks the spectacular and frequently racist cinematics of World War Z, and Roy is a far less heroic character than Brad Pitt’s Lane or even the father of McCarthy’s The Road. Yet, this novel also, if more furtively, centres the white body as a prioritized victim of socio-ecological breakdown. This is the entity imagined as experiencing the detrimental ecological, social, and material effects that biospheric breakdown causes. The book also locates such breakdown to the future. In this way, Trouble No Man also contributes to the erasure of the ongoing, slow, and fast violence that extractive capitalism has long subjected people in the periphery and semiperiphery to. Observing these Eurocentric/Amerocentric tendencies in American ‘climate fiction’, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (2019) has noted a lack of, or disinterest in, ‘climate justice’ and how the prevalent description of ‘climatic destabilization primarily as a problem for white, wealthy, educated Americans’ (p. 945) normalizes a white experience of the world while at the same time universalizing the white subject into a representative of the suffering human. Again, this representation erases the long history of climate injustice as lived by people of colour, in the process potentially reifying ‘a narcissistic tendency among many white American readers’ (p. 945). Similarly, Hsuan L. Hsu and Bryan Yazell (2019) have argued that fictions about future biospheric erosion that centre the suffering of white middle-class protagonists, while ignoring the long history of extractive colonialism that has produced the ecological crisis that drives the narrative, exemplify what they term ‘structural appropriation’ (p. 347). This is ‘a process in which the world-threatening structural violence that has already been experienced by colonized and postcolonial populations is projected onto American (and predominantly white) characters and readers’ (p. 347). Trouble No Man exemplifies this tendency.

Thus, while Trouble No Man does not locate the emergency in the movement of black and brown bodies across white borders, it does rehearse the notion that socio-ecological breakdown is a crisis for a particular white subject. In this way, its description of the lived experience of future climate breakdown has more to do with the anxieties that haunt the core, than with the processes that have caused breakdown in the stories, or with the unevenness of its impact. Again, little is said in this novel (or in The Road) about why the land is drying out and dying, and why the services of the world-system have been partially or completely suspended. Instead, socio-ecological breakdown is registered via certain effects that breakdown will have on the white American subject. Such subjects, it is suggested, risk being forced to leave the land they once settled, and they may have to undertake fundamentally unsafe, migratory journeys towards uncertain or even non-existent goals. In Trouble No Man, this uncertainty is at the heart of the emergency the novel describes.

Displacement and Insecurity

This chapter begins and ends with the realization that the ongoing fortification of the physical and legal barriers that keep climate migrants/refugees displaced is a manifestation of both militarized global apartheid as defined by Besteman (2020) and of environmentality as described by Marzec (2015). Rather than trying to come to terms with the deep and underlying systemic processes that cause global warming, states in the Global North are treating the socio-ecological upheaval as a national security issue that can only be resolved with the help of the existing national security apparatus. In the process, people displaced by the planetary emergency become a ‘rationale for measures to strengthen and protect national and regional borders in the Global North’ (Boas et al. 2019, p. 902). Ultimately, border building and border enforcing in the Global North is an effort designed to keep extractive, racial capitalism operational, in the hope that capitalism will somehow become so sustainable that no actual systemic change will be needed to avert socio-ecological collapse, or simply to postpone the collapse for a few more years.

The American Climate Emergency Narrative registers this particular development through two dominant tropes. As the analysis of World War Z reveals, a strongly speculative register is employed to cast the climate migrant or refugee as a security threat of such bizarre proportions that it can only be kept at bay through large-scale military action. Thus, the film leverages military violence as a rational way to manage the displacement of large groups of people produced by ongoing planetary breakdown. In this way, displacement is narrated as yet another security crisis akin to that presented by a riotous planet in Chapter 4, or by competing states within the world-system as in Chapter 5. The implicit message of this narrative, and many others like it, is that biospheric erosion will produce conditions where capitalist modernity finds itself under siege. At the same time, climate deterioration will turn neighbours into displaced and riotous monsters. This again produces socio-ecological breakdown as an emergency for capitalist modernity and thus legitimizes the state of exception that allows for constant and ferocious military violence.

Texts such as The Road and Trouble No Man complicate this very simplistic casting of the climate migrant as a transgressive monster. In these texts, the climate migrant is instead a representative of white lower-middle-class society. These narratives change the story by centring on the people who have been displaced by socio-ecological breakdown, rather than those who seek to prevent mobility. By casting the migrant as a recognizable person from the present core or US semiperiphery, readers are asked to put themselves into the worn shoes of the displaced. This is what your life may be like if nothing is done about the climate emergency, these texts are saying. The general assumption, rehearsed by much climate fiction scholarship (Von Mossner 2017; Andersen 2020), is that such warnings may inspire change on some level. The reader will want to avert the catastrophe narrated on the pages of these dystopian novels.

There can be little doubt that the reading of The Road and Trouble No Man produces an awareness of climate breakdown as a phenomenon. These texts may even encourage some kind of climate activism. However, as I have argued, while these texts do transport their audiences and readers into violent futures where climate breakdown has caused the partial collapse of the nation-state and where (white) people have lost their settler privileges, they do not recognize how the suffering experienced by their protagonists has long been lived by other global communities, and they do not explain the extractive history that has produced this present and future suffering in any detail. Race-based, myopic politics may loom in the background as an engine of violence in stories such as Trouble No Man, but none of the characters in the novel work towards upsetting the system that has produced climate breakdown. Via the micro-perspective employed in the novel, the characters are confined to ending their displacement by escaping the zone of suffering. This is a short-term strategy that dismisses any other relationship to the environment than the one made possible by capitalism. This is how the individuals in these texts adjust to climate breakdown: not by changing things but by adapting to new circumstances; by moving on, gun in hand, until the gates of capitalist society are again opened and the individual is let in, for now. As fiction from the core, these are the futures these texts are conditioned to conceive. In this way, the narratives discussed in this chapter all imagine worlds where US capitalism is still in place. It may be predatory and unjust, but it still exerts an enormous gravity on the displaced characters of the texts. Finding themselves outside of its cold embrace, and stripped of its convenient means of transportation, there is nowhere else to go.