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Mapping Crisis
Participation, Datafication and
Humanitarianism in the Age
of Digital Mapping
Edited by Doug Specht
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7. Now the totality maps us: mapping
climate migration and surveilling movable
borders in digital cartographies
Bogna M. Konior
Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it
is space not time that hides consequences from us.
(John Berger cited in Toscano and Kinkle, 2015, p. 87)
I
n 1998, when the United States had long secured its position as a
global superpower and a leader in greenhouse gas emissions, soon to be
presidential candidate Al Gore delivered a speech at the California Science
Center. In it, he painted a bright image of a digital future, where all of the
world’s citizens could interact with a browsable, computer-generated, threedimensional globe. Touching this ‘digital earth’ would activate geographically
specific environmental and social information, allowing for a tactile relation
to a planetary space that, if unmediated, would be too vast for humans to
perceive. The Internet was to play a crucial part in this design, assuring that the
project remained public and free. Gore (1998, p. 89) was dismayed that the
vast amount of data collected by satellites had not been yet put to use:
The Landsat satellite is capable of taking a complete photograph of the
entire planet every two weeks, and it’s been collecting data for more than
20 years. In spite of the great need for that information, the vast majority
of those images have never fired a single neuron in a single human brain.
Instead, they are stored in electronic silos of data. We used to have an
agricultural policy where we stored grain in Midwestern silos and let it
rot while millions of people starved to death. Now we have an insatiable
hunger for knowledge. Yet a great deal of data remains unused.
In his address, Gore proposes that an increase in the collection of
‘georeferenced’ information would translate into the ability to conduct
diplomacy in virtual reality, predict crime patterns with geographic information
systems (GIS), preserve biodiversity, predict global rates of deforestation and
other climate-related changes and increase agricultural productivity. Global
climate change cooperation appears here as a problem that could be solved
were the world sufficiently mapped with the latest digital tools. In the 20 years
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since, the ‘blue planet’, beforehand perceived as the unquestionable common
denominator that could transcend differences in social standing (Franke, 2013
p. 14), has become an icon of ‘[the] voracious promise of integration and
cosmic naturalisation of capital’ (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015 p. 35). The global
economy has been entirely subordinated to the flows of finance: vast quantities
of data, remotely collected by mobile sensors and monetised, became the
seminal commodity of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019). Just three years
after Gore’s optimistic speech, in reaction to the dotcom bust, Google’s leaders
embraced their current financial model reliant on increasing ad revenue.
Combining their already vast computational power with unparalleled access to
user logs, they were able to generate predictions of user behaviour and translate
them into parameters of ad relevance. While surveillance capitalism was born
in relation to advertising, ads no longer limit its scope. Governments, the
military, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and scientists seek access to
complex predictive behavioural data traded on the ‘behavioural future markets’
(Zuboff, 2019, p. 45). Speculation on future behaviours, rather than scaring
capital away, has become its feeding ground and its propelling machine. In a
world where human behaviour is viewed as a free resource to exploit for profit,
simulations and risk predictions are a gold mine. The territories of knowledge
and information mapped by these markets provoke conflict. The watchers are
‘invisible, unknown, and unaccountable’ and the watched are mere sources
of behavioural surplus fed into the predictive machine (Zuboff, 2019, p. 67).
Watch or be watched. Map or be mapped (Paglen, 2008).
One of the fastest-growing data sets is predictive and concerns climateinduced migration. For a variety of environmental, economic, political and
cultural reasons, ‘the twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant’
(Nail, 2015, p. 1). While the exact definition of a ‘climate migrant’ is still up
for debate (Biermann and Boas, 2010, pp. 62–7), environmental change, the
economy that triggered it and the related political turmoil provoke researchers to
rethink the models of global governance. Whether this means ‘create[ing] new
institutions and governance mechanisms from scratch’ (Biermann and Boas,
2010, p. 60) or speculating on ascending forms of transnational sovereignty
(Wainwright and Mann, 2018), this challenge calls for a cognitive remodelling
of our planet in a hitherto unprecedented manner, one that needs to bypass
the borders drawn on traditional maps between sovereign states. Questions
concerning our ‘global commons’ or ‘natural resources’ are increasingly
important, while simultaneously, as Sussman (2012) identifies, we live in
a post-global age, where the only things that slide with ease across national
borders are ecological calamity and finance. With that said, the border has not
receded from sight. To the contrary, new borders are erected on a planetary
scale. In 2009, a team of 28 scientists led by Johan Rockström coined the
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term ‘planetary boundaries’, which has subsequently become one of the most
cited frameworks for thinking about global sustainability (Biermann, 2012;
Hughes et al., 2013; O’Neill et al., 2018; Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al.,
2015; Whiteman et al., 2013). The nine boundaries – atmospheric aerosol
loading, nitrogen and phosphorus flows to the biosphere and oceans, land
system change, freshwater consumption, ocean acidification, climate change,
chemical pollution, biodiversity loss and stratospheric ozone depletion – call
into place a cosmic spatiality constrained by uncrossable borders. As the planet
is surveilled by the all-seeing eye of capital, border crossings become the key
political problematic.
This chapter explores the connection between cartography and current
mapping of climate migration. First it examines several existing representational
maps and counter-maps that deal with the movable borders in the era of climate
change, with the stipulation that these representational maps do not capture the
essence of climate migration mapping. It subsequently proposes that the essence
of climate migration mapping today is to be found within the infrastructure
of satellite monitoring and security. This infrastructure, such as the European
Union (EU) satellite monitoring project Copernicus discussed in this chapter,
is built on the assumption that migration predictions immediately require an
in-built early risk response system. In consequence, mapping, surveillance and
simulation of political risk become indistinguishable, while the ‘behavioural
surplus’ of actors in the global South is constantly mapped and analysed in
order to ‘secure’ climate migrants before they are even tangibly brought into
existence by environmental change. Herein lies the extension of colonial
cartographies: just like colonisation requires the production of humans who
need ‘colonising’, securitisation requires the production of humans who need
‘securing’ (Duffield and Waddell, 2006, p. 2). This demands a re-evaluation of
what exactly ‘cognitive mapping’ (Jameson, 1990) should be in the times that
humans are the ones being mapped rather than doing the mapping. Within the
futurological prediction of climate-induced migration patterns, surveillance
mapping does not restrict itself to space but encompasses ‘space-time’ and the
future itself becomes a commodity.
Maps of the Anthropocene
Even a seemingly straightforward projection of a curved surface on to a twodimensional plane is no simple matter of collecting and communicating
information (Harley, 1989). Maps make choices about how they reflect
the world (see Pickles, 2004; Wood, 1992). Most famously, the Mercator
projection, created in 1569 and still used today, situates the United Kingdom
as the centre of the world and distorts the size of continents, asserting the West’s
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imperial position (Harpold, 1999). Today, Google generates contradictory
maps, taking into account political conflicts (Ribeiro, 2009). Much has been
written about the relationship between cartography and colonialism, where
the map, rather than representing, created the territory that it sketched
(Specht and Feigenbaum, 2018; Stone, 1988). Do maps ‘find the world or
[do they] make it up?’ (Specht, 2018, p. 1). The partition of Africa by the
colonisers between 1881 and 1914 is a prominent example of the latter.
The map, based on the imperative of political economies, can summon the
territory into existence: ‘The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it
survive it’, but rather, ‘space is constituted through mapping practices, among
many others, so that maps are not a reflection of the world, but a recreation
of it, mapping activates the territory’ (Kitchin et al., 2011, pp. 2, 6). France,
Britain and Germany saw in Africa a market that could generate massive trade
surplus by buying more than it sold, providing free natural resources and free
slave labour.
This overlap between colonial gaze and capitalist imperatives has been
explored by numerous critics (Blaser, 2019; Friedmann, 2005; Larrain,
2013; Mbembe, 2003) and kept alive not only by those who, like Zuboff
(2019), want to understand political mutations of technological and financial
infrastructures, but also by a growing number of interdisciplinary scholars
clustered around the term ‘the Anthropocene’ (Haraway, 2015; Mirzoeff,
2014; Moore, 2014; Todd, 2015). The designation has become increasingly
popular as a way of pointing out that many ‘natural’ transgressions follow the
spatial development of industrial capitalism and colonial history. First coined
by the Dutch chemist Paul J. Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000
(Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), the term ‘Anthropocene’ gained currency in
2007, when paleobiologist and stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz requested that
the Geological Society of London’s Stratigraphy Commission review the case
for a new geological epoch to replace the currently prevailing Holocene. It
has since been hotly debated. Proposed starting dates include the invention
of agriculture 8,000 years ago, the invention of the steam engine, the Great
Acceleration and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Davis and Turpin,
2015). Recently, however, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015) suggested
that the Anthropocene is an extension of colonial imperialism, slavery and
the fossil fuel trade, dating it back to the 1610 ‘golden spike’ in the geological
record. The spike indicates that humans had made an irreversible change to
the planet’s biochemistry in consequence of the global slave trade and the
intercontinental transport of animals, plants, as well as microbial life forms
across the Atlantic Ocean. Lewis and Maslin (2015) argue that the death of
50 million Native Americans and the resulting loss of agriculture as well as
subsequent forest regrowth altered the concentration of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere.
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There has been no shortage of computer-generated maps, crafted alongside
the aesthetics of classical cartography, which aim to measure up to the reality
of the Anthropocene and climate change as one of its defining parameters. Esri,
the international supplier of geodata, GIS and web GIS, currently valued at over
a billion USD, has recently debuted the Anthropocene Atlas, developed by the
Wildlife Conservation Society. The website includes several interactive maps
ordered around themes such as population density or the rise of megacities
(Esri, n.d.). The website GIS Geography1 has compiled a list of maps, including
the Earth Climate Change Global Map by the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), the Surging Sea Map by Climate Central, the FourDegree Interactive Map by the Met Office and the Sea Level Map by the National
Geographic, which are primarily concerned with registering or even ‘proving’
the effects of climate change. While some scholars praise GIS as a possible
counter-mapping tool (Kwan, 2012), it has also been the subject of intense
critical scrutiny, focused either on its political implications for different social
groups (Burrough and Frank, 1996; Obermeyer, 1998; Winter, 2001) or its
(in)ability to represent local and contextual knowledge (Aitken, 2002; Elwood,
2001; Ghose, 2001; Sieber, 2000). The obvious thing to point out about the
aforementioned maps is that they attempt to register the pace of changes in the
biosphere without acknowledging the uneven social conditions that produce
them. They implicate humanity equally, an approach that has been consistently
criticised for neglecting the specific history of the Anthropocene and its roots
in colonial and imperialist economies (Biermann et al., 2016; Cuomo, 2017;
Grusin, 2017). Presumably intending to address this problem, CarbonMap.org
is an interactive map where countries are resized based on their (past, current
and predicted) extractions, emissions, fuel burning and consumption of the
resulting goods. These interactive cartograms (maps distorted to reflect a data
set) were developed by an independent data visualisation company for the
World Bank’s Apps for Climate Change competition. While they attempt to
link social and geographical conditions, the limitation is that the cartograms
remain organised around nation states. It could be more informative to
distribute the data by class – a small group of the super-wealthy are responsible
for the lion’s share of global carbon emissions (Klein, 2015). Aware of this
uneven social and industrial history, the Atlas for the End of the World (World
Maps, n.d.) proposes an ‘ecological cartography’ as a counter-mapping practice
organised around biodiversity themes such as land degradation, health of
waters or deforestation. These maps, all accessible via a dedicated website, are
accompanied by ambitious educational essays that relate current ecological
predicaments to social history. Optimistically, however, the authors propose
that the problem of distortion and the resulting power dynamics of exclusion
1
See https://gisgeography.com.
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in two-dimensional maps will ‘largely absolve itself [due to] global positioning
systems (GPS), remote sensing and real-time visualizations with the increasing
ability to cheaply stream data to personal computers’ (World Maps, n.d.). They
also argue that the key element of ecological cartography is embracing this
process, eventually creating an atlas that would be a ‘web-based platform that
tracks the evolution of the hotspots, if not all of the world’s 867 ecoregions
in real time’ (World Maps, n.d.). These maps can be understood as countermaps – their purpose is to destabilise or question dominant representations and
open up the possibility of mapping the world differently (Nash, 1994; Sparke,
1998). And yet, as if following Gore’s vision, they understand their own maps
as sketches for the coming integrated real-time flow of ecological cartography,
implying that the objective recording of data is able to correct imbalances of
power inherent in the subjective selection and organisation of information in
two-dimensional maps.
But does this comprehensive recording and processing of data resolve the
problem of power inherent in mapping? The answer seems to lie beyond
investigating specific representations made through maps. In an age where
both visibility and invisibility can do equal harm, maps also exert power
by withholding information. Architect, theorist and head of the Forensic
Architecture research group at the University of London, Eyal Weizman
(Weizman et al., 2014, p 72) notes that power lies also in the choice of what
to ‘un-show’:
The resolution of commercially available satellite imagery of the kind we
see in newspapers, such as suspected nuclear sites in Iran or destroyed
villages in Darfur or Gaza, are limited to a resolution of half a metre per
pixel, which means the size of a pixel is exactly the size, or the box, in
which a human body fits. Within that logic of visibility, there is also a
structured, built-in lacuna: the loss of the figure, or the human.
New media call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between technology
and space. Geography’s recent communicational turn (Falkheimer and Jansson,
2006) considers, for example, how mediation produces new spatial narratives
or how media infrastructures are distributed spatially (Adams, 2011), as if
directly responding to some of the most influential work in media studies,
from Marshall McLuhan’s (1964, p. 5) electronically constructed ‘global village’
to Henry Jenkins’s (2004) ‘convergence culture’, where media are compressed
within everyday spaces. Critical geographical research also considers how ‘smart’
technologies such as real-time spatial search apps produce rather than represent
the territory. For example, whole working-class neighbourhoods can be
excluded from the economic map of the city by not being sufficiently reviewed
and promoted on Yelp (Frith, 2017). The current ‘spatial turn’ in media studies
is increasingly preoccupied with infrastructure (e.g. Bratton, 2016; Starosielski,
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2015) or with analysing how mediation influences how people interact with
places (Wiley and Packer, 2010). The focus increasingly shifts from examining
how humans represent the world through maps to how the world, that is, our
‘accidental [technological] megastructure’ (Bratton, 2016, p. 31), maps humans.
Jennifer Gabrys (2014), for example, describes how in the smart city, humans
are not only constantly mapped by machines but themselves become sensors
that, continually monitoring themselves, produce behavioural surplus that the
machines can analyse and optimise. In some cases, the question then becomes
not how to have the mapping machines map us better, but whether machines
should map us at all.
This brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s famous if underdeveloped framework
of cognitive mapping. In Cartographies of the Absolute: An Aesthetics of the
Economy for the Twenty-First Century, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015,
p. 73) attempt to map the invisible economies of capitalism, arguing after
Jameson that ‘cognitive mapping cannot involve anything so easy as a map’. To
drive this point home, in his seminal work on the cultural logic of capitalism,
Jameson (1991, p. 409) writes that ‘once you knew what cognitive mapping
was driving at, you were to dismiss all figures of maps and mapping from your
mind and try to imagine something else’. This is because, as Jason Farman
(2015, p. 89) puts it, ‘maps tend to obscure their own authorship to deliver
their content, thus seeming to create the interface (and its politics) entirely.
As a result, the networks of circulation that allow maps to arrive are often
obscured’. Instead, cognitive mapping describes for Jameson (1991, p. 415)
aesthetic practices that can grasp the relation between the element and the
system, specifically, ‘the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship
to his or her real conditions of existence’. In simpler terms, it gestures at the
relation between our individual understanding of the world and the totality of
economic relations at a specific time in history. In even simpler terms, aesthetics
that hint at the totality known as capitalism, or the totality of class relations,
are doing the work of cognitive mapping. The problem of cognitive mapping
bestows a task upon culture. Capitalism, Jameson (1991) argues, is essentially
an alienating relation to space and it consequently makes it impossible for
our psychogeography to align with the physical spaces that we inhabit. While
‘space’ is for those living under capitalism a scrambled and incoherent territory,
aesthetics alone have the power of hinting at the totality behind disjointed
elements.
In light of current Anthropocene research, we could speculate whether
climate change is a totality separate from capitalism and therefore requires its
own type of cognitive mapping or whether mapping capitalism and mapping
climate change are, in fact, the same process. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009,
pp. 219, 221) argues, for example, that while ‘the story of capital, the contingent
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history of our falling into the Anthropocene, cannot be denied by recourse to
the idea of species’, while at the same time asserting that nevertheless ‘the whole
[ecological] crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism’. Against scholars
who argue that the Anthropocene is simply a decoy that diverts attention from
the fact that capitalism had been the problem all along (Malm and Hornborg,
2014; Moore, 2017), Chakrabarty (2009, 2017) insists that humanity must
develop an understanding of itself as a species, a task that invalidates many
of the current ‘humanist’ axioms of historical understanding that aid us in
understanding humanity as social, rather than geological.
Perhaps an interactive, GIS-based installation project such as Italian Limes
could be cognitively mapping the movable border within this new socialgeological dynamic in the Anthropocene (Italian Limes, n.d.). Part of the
2016 exhibition ‘Reset Modernity!’ curated by Bruno Latour, the project
explores remote Alpine regions, where national borders between Austria and
Italy morph due to melting glaciers and global warming. It advances a new
media cartography that does not result in a traditional map. In the spring of
2016, the team led by researchers from the Comitato Glaciologico Italiano, the
National Institute of Oceanography and of Experimental Geophysics and the
Department of Physics and Earth Sciences at the University of Parma installed
a series of autonomic devices at the foot of Mt Similaun. The sensors allowed
them to track the changes in the tridimensional geometry of the glacier in
consequence of melting ice. The project’s website (Italian Limes, 2016) states:
Since 2014, Italian Limes has aimed to monitor the shifts in the Austrian–
Italian watershed on the Alps as an inquiry into the relation of borders
and their representation. International borders have become one of the
most reported topics on public media. In Europe, a network of apparently
dormant 19th-century frontiers woke up from the dream of a borderless
continent and materialised into a 21st-century psychosis of police checks,
barbed wire fences, migrant encampments, proxy sovereignties and
displaced jurisdictions. Almost completely exiled into the map, borders
have claimed back their mark on the territory, wielded by governments as
the ultimate defence for the continuance of the nation state.
The installation is based around an interactive real-time representation
of shifts in the border, continually measured by a grid of 25 solar-powered
sensors, which record change every two hours. This is an automated form of
counter-mapping that allows us to grasp the relation between the geological
and the social. The border has been considerably altered between the 18th
and 20th centuries, chiefly in consequences of the two World Wars, provoking
the development of ever-more accurate border mapping tools, beginning with
aerial surveys in the 1920s, to trigonometric networks, and finally GPS (Italian
Limes, n.d.). Concurrently, Alpine glaciers have been melting at an accelerated
rate, eventually provoking adjustment in the social definition of the border.
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In a 2006 agreement between Italy and Austria, the legal term ‘moving border’
was introduced and alongside it the necessity of constant monitoring of
the shifting border and the updating of state maps. The ‘maps’ that Italian
Limes creates are not projections onto a two-dimensional plane but rather
a projection-mapped three-dimensional reproduction of the glacier and an
automated ‘drawing machine’, a programmed pantograph that translates
the real-time changes into coordinated drawings. Is this a type of cognitive
mapping or maybe, still, ‘[culture] conflates ontology with geography and
endlessly processes images of the unmappable system [of global capitalism]?
(Jameson, 1995, p. 4).
Perhaps because the idea of cognitive mapping dates back to the 1990s,
Toscano and Kinkle (2015) focus on novels, photography, films, posters and –
most interestingly – architecture. After Jameson, Toscano and Kinkle (2015,
p. 44) argue in favour of making the invisible visible: ‘forcing into being a
certain kind of political visibility’ as a form of counter-mapping. They see
in aesthetics, and especially in visual culture, an opportunity of grasping the
totality of capitalism and therefore acting on the totality of capitalism. Is this
not, however, similar to Gore’s imperative that more data means better action,
more knowledge means a better world? Gary Marx (2016) sees in this the
implicit fallacy of surveillance capitalism – ‘some information is good, more
information is even better’. If capitalism ‘represents’ itself in the activity of
extracting data, perhaps cognitive mapping is not necessarily an aesthetic project
anymore? In The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System,
Jameson writes (1995, p. 10) that postmodern capitalism is ‘inconceivable
without the computerized media which eclipses its former spaces and faxes
an unheard of simultaneity across its branches’. Technology thus seems to at
least provide the opportunity for representing the unrepresentable. But in the
current economy, as Hito Steyerl (2012) argues, we are already ‘represented to
pieces’. So is the planet – the business of climate data and geodata visualisation
is booming. Does the problem really lie in the fact that we cannot sufficiently
represent the totality of climate change and capitalism? Do we possess
insufficient visualisation tools? Are our mapping technologies not sophisticated
or accessible enough?
If the method of surveillance technology is multiplying visibility, making
everyone hypervisible and therefore easy to track, prepped for the harvesting
of biodata, should we maybe consider withdrawing from mapping altogether?
While Jameson’s (1991, p. 36) statement that technology ‘seems to offer
some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power
and control’ remains relevant, in the context of new media, it is important
to remember that Jameson (1990) understands representation as figuration,
and that he understands ideology, after Althusser, as an apparatus. We do
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not need, therefore, to restrict ourselves to analysing and producing visual
representations but to pay attention to the specific figurations made through
the material apparatus. In other terms, Toscano and Kinkle (2015, p. 450)
write perceptively that commanding maps result not from a ‘representation
of logistics’ but from the ‘logistics of representation’ – it is not (only) about
what is in the images but about the forces that produce the images and act on
them. This again directs our attention to infrastructures that map rather than
the maps themselves. Cognitive mapping is no longer humans trying to map
totality. It is the totality mapping us.
Totality maps us: surveilling climate migration
While the map of Africa created by the colonisers – and its continued reflection
in the existing geopolitical reality – was a blatant visual proof of economic
power, surveillance capitalism does not expose its own logic in the same way.
Nevertheless, Zuboff (2019) draws an explicit connection between colonialism
and the current form of capitalism. Both define something that had previously
not been a commodity as free or as a surplus, whether that is land, water, human
behaviours, humans themselves or their cognitive processes: ‘For today’s
owners of surveillance capital the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and
feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers,
oceans and forests before they fell to the market dynamic [under colonialism]’
(Naughton and Zuboff, 2019, para. 28). The term ‘digital native’, Zuboff
notes, is cruelly appropriate (Naughton and Zuboff, 2019).
The terms ‘environmental refugee’ and ‘climate migrant’ date back to the
1980s, when the possibility was first suggested (El-Hinnawi, 1985; Myers 1986,
1989). Shortly after, the alarmist discourse, based mainly in the United States,
of catastrophic ‘waves of environmental refugees’ (Homer-Dixon, 1991, p. 7),
‘the coming anarchy’ (Kaplan, 1994) and the 200 million-strong ‘environmental
exodus’ (Myers and Kent, 1995) began to take hold. A decade later, mainstream
news and pop culture caught on. In 2004, Hollywood debuted its disaster
blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow; the Guardian ran the heading ‘Now the
Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us’ (Townsend and Harris,
2004); and David King, chief scientific advisor to the UK government, stated
that climate change represented ‘a far greater threat to the world’s stability than
international terrorism’ (cited in Brown and Oliver, 2004, para. 13). In 2007,
when Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, the
connection between preventing climate migration and the preservation of peace
was solidified. No wonder, then, that the most impactful (policy-wise) research
related to climate migration right now is in security studies (Baldwin et al.,
2014). Climate migration is there envisioned as a security threat to Europe, the
United States and Australia before it ever happened. While climate migration
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has been called ‘the human face of global warming’, images of projected migrants
have been criticised as predictable extensions of colonial rhetoric. Numerous
studies focus on analysing the dehumanising visual representations of refugees
as a threatening mass of bodies or as racialised, docile victims of global warming
(Bleiker et al., 2013; Methmann, 2014; Methmann and Rothe, 2014). The
global North feels threatened by migrants and by the instability that they are
thought to carry within. However, there exists no clearly delineated group of
climate migrants. Terms such as ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are already contentious
in their misuse and embodiment of existing resettlement policy (Biermann and
Boas, 2010). Clearly discerning environmental causes for individual migrations
becomes increasingly difficult as ‘climate refugees’ can reject being labelled as
such (Farbotko and Lazrus, 2011).
A recent New Yorker article paints regions that are exposed to extreme
weather events, sea level rise, drought and water scarcity, especially sub-Saharan
Africa, South Asia and Latin America, as the dangerous three migration ‘hot
spots’ because they represent 55 per cent of the ‘developing world’s populations’
(Kormann, 2018). However, Miami, Houston, Tokyo, New Orleans, Hong
Kong, New York and Amsterdam are also at high risk of flooding and yet the
alarmist narrative rarely revolves around the inhabitants of these cities needing
resettlement. They are instead commonly portrayed as citizen-saviours that need
to fight against global warming (Baldwin, 2012), while the racialised migrants
are envisioned as ‘an object of governance’, inherently troubling and in need
of control, living on the ‘ground zero of global warming’ (Methmann, 2014,
p. 425). While wealthy countries of the North may protect a share of their
citizens through ‘adaptation measures such as reinforced coastal protection or
changes in agricultural production and water supply management’, it is predicted
that those living in poorer countries might need to rely on international support
or will have no choice but to migrate (Biermann and Boas, 2010, p. 61). Longterm predictions are potentially catastrophic (Biermann and Boas, 2010, p. 69):
According to a number of studies, a temperature increase of 3–4 degrees
centigrade could lead in the worst-case scenario (high population level and
low economic growth) to 302 million people flooded each year by storm
surges by the 2080s, assuming evolving protection mechanisms. However,
this would be only 34 million assuming enhanced protection, and even
lower if lower temperature targets could be maintained. More than 90 per
cent of these affected people will be from Africa and Asia.
At the same time, some studies predict that most citizens will choose to
stay in their countries and migrate locally rather than internationally (Clark,
2007; German Advisory Council on Global Change, 2006); ‘many assessments
directly link predictions about changes in environmental parameters with the
migration of the current or predicted population living in the affected areas …
it is merely assumed that [all] these people will decide to flee’ (Biermann and
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Boas, 2010, pp. 67–8). The discursive, imagined climate migration is epic in
scale. For now, it remains a ‘futurology’, a speculative possibility (Baldwin et al.,
2014). Both the news headlines and the security software that is increasingly
targeted at migrants are ‘written in a future-conditional tense’ (Baldwin et al.,
2014, p. 121). Not to neglect the real dangers of climate-induced uprooting,
the mapping of ‘hot spot’ regions is inherently asymmetrical.
Let’s take the EU Copernicus programme, a system created for earth
observation and monitoring, as an example. Consisting of satellites and in situ
sensors, it focuses on six main areas: land, marine, atmosphere, climate change,
emergency management and security, and is handled, among numerous other
national bodies, by the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy
(Wiatr et al., 2016). The data are freely available and Copernicus encourages
their use by public, private and research institutions. At the same time, two
modules on security and early warning are built in. Drawing on satellite and
ground station data, it not only collects information about climate change but
measures population pressures, chiefly in African countries. These tools already
factor in an emergency response. Environmental monitoring intersects with
border control and maritime surveillance; in fact, Copernicus contributes to
the European Border Surveillance System by tracking border areas. As Iraklis
Oikonomou (2017, p. 1) writes, the EU’s flagship space projects, Copernicus
and Galileo, ‘are characterised by an element of politico-military sensitivity
due to non-civilian applications that both projects involve’. He urges us to
consider that satellite monitoring is currently ‘planned, organised and funded
by industrial actors whose primary motive is the maximization of profitability’,
thus echoing Zuboff’s argument about ‘future behaviour markets’ that
surveillance capitalism produces (Oikonomou, 2017, p. 2). The EU promotes
and popularises its space programmes through a security and common benefit
rhetoric: ‘Space assets and offered services are today indispensable enablers for
a wide spectrum of applications to answer societal challenges in fields such as
climate change and environment, transport, development and competitiveness
in Europe and beyond’ (European Security Research and Innovation Forum,
2009, p. 166). However, while the official policy reports clearly indicate that
the programmes fuel military needs and stakeholder interests, the popular
rhetorical impulse is to present them as public, civilian research projects
(Oikonomou, 2017, pp. 3–5). Through such coaxing, a symbiosis between the
public and the military becomes naturalised (Marx, 2016) as public and private
interest are presented as interchangeable (Dwyer, 2016).
These predictive mapping tools are at the same time the tools of
implementation – the presupposed climate migrants are controlled, both in their
bodily movements as in the images that the media create of them. An existing
migrant can be tracked from point A to B by existing state surveillance tools,
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but a ‘climate migrant’, not in existence yet, summoned to presumed existence
by yet-unknown catastrophes, has to be mapped by predictive surveillance.
The explosion of a climate catastrophe is a projection-as-implementation tool
that legitimises the tightening grip of security technologies along the existing
axis of power. Such mapping extends the ‘view from above’, or what Michel
de Certeau (1984, p. 92) describes as ‘looking down like a god’, into a preemptive strike, where the world, seen from above by military and information
industries, is chiefly a safety problem (Steyerl, 2011). For Zuboff (2019),
knowledge and information created through surveillance are thus the main
territories of power and contestation. Felix Stalder (2018, p. 336) adds that
predictions that emerge as a result of such surveillance are a type of magical
knowledge – the prediction itself can never be verified because it has already
been acted on and therefore the reality submitted to the prediction has
already been altered:
Outside of rapidly shrinking domains of specialized or everyday
knowledge, it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain an overview of the
world without mechanisms that pre-sort it. Users are only able to evaluate
search results pragmatically; that is, in light of whether or not they are
helpful in solving a concrete problem. In this regard, it is not paramount
that they find the best solution or the correct answer but rather one that
is available and sufficient. This reality lends an enormous amount of
influence to the institutions and processes that provide the solutions and
answers.
In the futurology of climate migration mapping, time itself becomes a
weapon. Monitoring tools are spells that call into being what they want to
prevent. This is meltdown culture, the volume of data analysis tools and
thermal-imaging cameras rising as ice glaciers are melting. Even though climate
change is our ongoing, mundane reality, the discourse narrates a coming great
disaster, barren lands, starvation and thirst. Surveillance, which touches not
just specific information anymore but ‘life in general’ (Lyon, 2010, p. 327),
grasps it an eschatology. Within an increasingly mediated experience that we
have of the world, incomprehensible climate narratives, despite their scientific
reality, migrate to the realm of what previously might have been called the
fictional, the simulated or the otherwise designed (Jasanoff, 2010). While we
can observe changes in weather, we cannot observe climate change within
the bounds of human perception. We know about climate change through
a cluster of statements, headlines on the news and other attempts to make
vast data sets understandable. Essentially, as far as our experience is concerned,
climate change is statistics and simulations. This would mean that speculation
and prediction is very much ‘the real’ today. The maps of climate migration
might be speculative but this does not mean that they are not real. In fact, they
are so real that they become reality.
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MAPPING CRISIS
This finally returns us to the question of Jameson’s cognitive mapping and
his assertion that each historical stage of capitalism generates a space unique
to it following the ‘quantum leaps in the enlargement of capital in the latter’s
penetration and colonization of hitherto uncommodified areas’ (Jameson,
1990, p. 348). As Daniel de Zeeuw (2011, para. 5) summarises:
Jameson traces the need for cognitive mapping back to the historical
moment when a gap was first produced between the ‘existential data’
and empirical position of the individual observer and the unlived and
abstract socio-economic or geographical system in which it is embedded.
This moment largely coincides with the invention of technical mediators
for colonial sea trade, whose function it is to coordinate the individual’s
existential data and the geographic totality (for example: the compass and
the [sextant]).
If the tools of surveillance capitalism colonise and commodify futures, mapping
is a question of space-time rather than just ‘space’. While humans increasingly
need to be secured and locked within delineated borders, both on a national and
a planetary scale, capital flows freely and the ‘escape velocity [that it generates]
turns [all of ] us into deportees of a new kind’ (Virilio, 2010, p. 13). Paul Virilio
(2010) writes about the current space of capital as the space of ‘geocide’, delineated
by the creation of zones of free capital through which humans constantly move,
continually inserted and expelled, no longer simply restricted in movement but
forced into the logistics of behavioural commodity extraction. The surveillance
apparatus stratifies, the conditions of uneven access it creates foreclose not only
information but the future itself. Integrated with the commercial aspects of the
futurology of surveillance and security, digital cartographies hail from the future,
retroactively creating the territories that they map.
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