Praise for Storming the Wall by Todd Miller
“A well-researched and grim exploration of the connections between climate change and the political hostility toward the refugees it creates. Journalist and activist Miller (Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, 2014) expands on his earlier focus on U.S.-Mexico border controversies with an alarming catalog of climatological effects on population movements, surveillance, violence, and other current issues.“The theater for future climate battles,” he writes, “will be the world’s ever thickening border zones . . . vast numbers of people will be on the move, and vast numbers of people will be trained, armed, and paid to stop them.” In eight punchy, discretely themed chapters, the author establishes that the destructive effects of climate change are already manifest and that the U.S. is establishing a violent, heavy-handed pattern of response to it, as seen in the ramping up of border security. Miller visited several locales to witness this bleak transition, including Honduras and the U.S.-Mexico border, and he argues that these developing strife zones, far from representing natural change, are fundamentally class-based phenomena: “In the climate era, coexisting worlds of luxury living and impoverished desperation will only be magnified and compounded”. . . A galvanizing forecast of global warming’s endgame and a powerful indictment of America’s current stance.”
—Kirkuk Reviews
“As Todd Miller shows in this important and harrowing book, climate-driven migration is set to become one of the defining issues of our time. We are at a political crossroads: continue hardening under the steadily creeping politics of xenophobia and the repressive militarization of border and immigration policy, or change course and plan for a just adaption to a hotter world. At stake is not only the well-being of immigrants but also the integrity and feasibility of democratic government itself. This is a must-read book.”
—CHRISTIAN PARENTI , author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence
“Storming the Wall is essential reading in our climate-disrupted world. From conferences about the increasingly militarized security state to front-line interviews with climate refugees, Miller delivers a prescient and sober view of our increasingly dystopian planet as the impacts of human-caused climate disruption continue to intensify.”
—DAHR JAMAIL, author of The End of Ice
“Nothing will test human institutions like climate change in this century—as this book makes crystal clear, people on the move from rising waters, spreading deserts, and endless storms could profoundly destabilize our civilizations unless we seize the chance to reimagine our relationships to each other. This is no drill, but it is a test, and it will be graded pass-fail.”
—BILL MCKIBBEN, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
“Todd Miller reports from the cracks in the walls of the global climate security state—militarized zones designed to keep powerful elites safe from poor and uprooted peoples. Weapons of war shoot to kill refugees from rising seas, superstorms, no rain and no food. Hyped-up fears morph climate justice activists into terrorists; the security state targets any and all of the poor and powerless. Despite growing millions of climate refugees caught in the crosshairs of border enforcement regimes, Miller finds hope—hope that may not survive in Trumpworld.”
—MOLLY MOLLOY, Research librarian for Latin America and the border at New Mexico State University and creator of “Frontera List”
“Todd Miller takes us straight to the front-lines of our world transformed by climate change—to the tension points where those of us more protected from its disruptive impacts encounter those who are most vulnerable to them. Here is the largely untold back story to the thousands of people turning up on our borders, and challenging the very idea of those frontiers in the process.”
—MARK SCHAPIRO, author of The End of Stationarity: Searching for the New Normal in the Age of Carbon Shock
“Storming the Wall demonstrates why the struggles for social justice and ecological sustainability must be one struggle. Todd Miller’s important book chronicles how existing disparities in wealth and power, combined with the dramatic changes we are causing in this planet’s ecosystems, mean either we come together around our common humanity or forfeit the right to call ourselves fully human. If ‘security’ comes to mean only that the most privileged people on the planet can secure that privilege, then we are all, literally, doomed. Elites are planning how they will react to climate clashes. Miller explains why we have to as well.”
—ROBERT JENSEN, author of Arguing for Our Lives
“Governments across the world today are planning for climate change. The problem, as Todd Miller ably shows, is that they’re not planning mitigation, but militarization. Storming the Wall offers a dire report from what are literally the front lines of global warming: the razor-wired security zones and drone-patrolled borderlands where the Anthropocene’s first human victims—climate refugees––are dying in droves.”
—ROY SCRANTON, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
Praise for Border Patrol Nation by Todd Miller
“Scathing and deeply reported . . . quite possibly the right book at the right time”
—Los Angeles Times
“At the start of his unsettling and important new book, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, Miller observes that these days ‘it is common to see the Border Patrol in places—such as Erie, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; or Forks, Washington—where only fifteen years ago it would have seemed far-fetched, if not unfathomable.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Solid, absorbing reportage on the government’s racist and constitutionally questionable notions of border security in the post-9/11 world. . . . An unsettling but important read.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Journalist Miller tells an alarming story of U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security’s ever-widening reach into the lives of American citizens and legal immigrants as well as the undocumented. He describes the militarization of the Border Patrol and concurrent dehumanizing of ‘unauthorized’ persons; American citizens routinely harassed and arrested in Constitution-free zones that extend 100 miles from all borders; the expulsion of an exemplary Border Patrol agent for expressing his Mexican identity in casual conversation; and the Border Patrol’s Explorer Academy for children, which, with its lock-step marching, black boots, law-enforcement training, and indoctrination is eerily evocative of fascism and Hitler Youth. Miller reveals the ‘complex and industrial world’ looming behind the border patrol, spanning ‘robotics, engineers, salespeople and detention centers’ and the new generation of Explorers. ‘It is the world in which we now live,’ he states, ‘where eradicating border violations is given higher priority than eradicating malnutrition, poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, [and] unemployment.’ In addition to readers interested in immigration issues, those concerned about the NSA’s privacy violations will likely be even more shocked by the actions of Homeland Security.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Storming The Wall
CLIMATE CHANGE, MIGRATION,
AND HOMELAND SECURITY
Todd Miller
City Lights | Open Media Series
Copyright © 2017 by Todd Miller
All Rights Reserved
Cover design: Stealworks
ISBN: 978-087286-715-4
ebook ISBN: 978-087286-716-1
The