George Monbiot writes:

This is the century in which humanitarian and environmental disasters converge. Climate breakdown has driven many millions from their homes, and is likely to evict hundreds of millions more. The famine harrowing Madagascar at the moment is the first to have been named by the UN as likely to have been caused by the climate emergency. It will not be the last. Great cities find themselves dangerously short of water as aquifers are drained. Air pollution kills 10 million a year. Synthetic chemicals in soil, air and water impose untold effects on both ecologies and people.

But it also works the other way round. Humanitarian catastrophes or, to be more precise, governments’ cruel and irrational responses to them, are triggering ecological disaster. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the construction of border walls.

At the moment, with the help of 140 British military engineers, Poland is starting to build a steel wall 5.5 metres high, along 180km of its border with Belarus. The assistance from British troops will help secure a new arms deal between the UK and Poland worth around £3bn.

The wall is described as a “security” measure, but it’s securing Europe not from a threat but against the desperate needs of some of the most vulnerable people on Earth: particularly refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan escaping persecution, torture and mass killing. They have been cruelly exploited by the government of Belarus, which has used them as political weapons. Now, in the depths of winter, they are trapped at the border, freezing and starving, with nowhere to go.

When the Berlin Wall fell, we were promised that this marked the beginning of a new era of freedom. Instead, far more walls have risen than fallen. Since 1990, Europe has built border walls six times longer than the barrier in Berlin. Worldwide, the number of fenced borders has risen from 15 to 70 since the end of the cold war: there are now 47,000 kilometres of hard frontier. [Continue reading…]