On Contact: Climate fortresses

On the show, Chris Hedges discusses the building of climate fortresses with the author and journalist, Todd Miller. Industrialized nations, among them the world’s largest polluters, are compounding one human-made crisis with another one. Rather than investing in technologies to end our dependence on fossil fuels, they are spending billions to construct climate fortresses ringed by border walls. There are already more than 63 border walls, manned by tens of thousands of guards. These nations, including the United States, are investing in technologies and equipment including robots, drones, surveillance cameras, iris recognition software, weapons, acoustic detection devices, and ready-to-eat meals to blockade and criminalize those fleeing war and the worsening climate emergency that is triggering famines, droughts, wildfires and declining crop yields. More than 44,000 people (a vast undercount, according to researchers of the International Organization on Migration) have died crossing borders between 2014 and 2020, in both the world’s deserts and seas. And tens of thousands of others are incarcerated in a global network of more than 2,000 detention centers, while companies in the border industry anticipate more profitable contracts with the intensifying climate crisis. For four decades, with virtually no public debate, a handful of large corporations such as Northrop Grumman, Elbit Systems, General Atomics, and Deloitte have driven up immigration enforcement budgets in the United States behind closed doors and beyond public scrutiny. Todd Miller’s new book is ‘Build Bridges Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders’.