Storming the Wall

According to U.S. military planners, climate change now poses the #1 national security threat to the United States, even before terrorism. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports that a person is four times more likely to be forced to move due to environmental disaster than by war, and in 2015 alone, 19.2 million people were displaced worldwide by environmental disasters. Droughts, fires, and floods are driving ever-larger numbers of people to cross national borders, and the problem is not just the vast numbers of people on the move, but also the legions of highly militarized border armies being deployed to stop them.In fast-paced prose, Todd Miller travels to hot spots in the United States and around the globe to investigate how environmental crisis is creating millions of climate refugees who are challenging the developed world's borders and resources. Miller explores how a sense of threat in the United States is giving rise to high-tech surveillance fortresses and fueling calls for an ever-expanding border wall. He also weaves in stories of people engaged in creative defiance of the armies, border patrols, and police being deployed to fight those in need. Miller passionately makes the case for ecological restoration, not border militarization, as the best way to achieve sustainability and security.Todd Miller's writings about the border have appeared in the New York Times, Tom Dispatch, and many other places.Praise for Storming the Wall&quote;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&quote;-Bill McKibben, author Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet&quote;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.&quote; -Robert Jensen, University of Texas at Austin, author of The End of Patriarchy, Plain Radical, and Arguing for Our LivesStorming 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.&quote;-Dahr Jamail, award-winning independent journalist, author of The End of Ice&quote;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.&quote;-Christian Parenti, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence