Robert Suits on Neel Ahuja’s *Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century*

Is anyone truly a “climate migrant?” The concept, Neel Ahuja contends, is rooted in racist mid-twentieth century tropes of the dangers of overpopulation and the inherent ecological destructiveness of non-white societies—and it is far from an accurate term for people displaced by sea level rise or weather events. “No migration is purely climate migration,” he writes, contending instead that the term obscures the political and economic origins of migration. Using the theory of racial capitalism to level a mostly-sympathetic critique at the environmental humanities’ work on climate change, Ahuja argues that it is not climatic stressors but capitalism as a whole that displaces populations. “Climate migrants” migrate for many of the same reasons, and follow the same routes established by, migrant laborers in late twentieth century racial capitalism.

Ahuja begins by surveying the intellectual roots of environmentalism to trace how non-white countries have historically been portrayed as having an unusually destructive lifestyle. Extreme poverty and environmental destruction often went hand in hand, in the eyes of well-meaning NGOs, with tropical societies constantly on the verge of overexploiting their environments. Even with recent recognition that carbon emissions, principally from the Global North, are the single most urgent environmental calamity in the world, the Global South remains a racialized other; Western intellectuals imagine the impact of climate change will drive the Global South into resource conflicts and subsequent migration crises. Climate change, in other words, is still read through a mostly-Malthusian lens. Ahuja argues that refugees are simultaneously constructed as 1) sources of inspiration and hope, proof that adaptation is possible, 2) driven atavistically by apolitical, non-economic environmental triggers, and 3) are the object of “securitization”—here meaning defense discourses. We still, in large part, fret about holding back non-white refugees from the borders of the “developed world.”

In the second chapter, Planetary Specters explores the creation of the fossil fuel order in Persian Gulf states through oil wealth and the importation of human labor from the Indian subcontinent. Linking the Anthropocene and racial capitalism, Ahuja shows that in the wake of the 1973 oil shock, neoliberal capitalism propelled a triple process of “deepening international debt, growing transborder migration, and intensifying anthropogenic climate change,” forcing the agrarian poor of South Asia into migrant wage work in Southwest Asian oil exporters. Here, they provided the labor for Gulf State economies, in a process that followed directly from and drew its logic and mechanisms from the ways earlier capitalist accumulation exploited Black labor in the Atlantic world.

The book subsequently explores the place of Bangladesh in stories of climate disaster. Bangladesh is assumed to be the hub of climate migration, due to its position as a mostly-low-lying country. But these conversations are always envisioned as tide of climate refugees washing into India, prompting conversations around border security. Bangladeshis are thus simultaneously employed as a warning of the ways brown people are displaced by environmental triggers, and yet simultaneously appropriated as an emblem of hope for how people can survive and adapt to climate catastrophe. In reality, Ahuja shows, those who flee disaster in Bangladesh are largely responding to the same political economy of extraction and exploitation which generated the climate catastrophe in the first place. They ultimately follow paths of migration established by the age of oil, towards major cities like Dhaka, and ultimately often towards Gulf States.

Finally, Ahuja interrogates how the Syrian Civil War has been portrayed as a climate war—perhaps the first one—and Syrians as climate refugees. He argues that the roots of the Syrian conflict instead lie in debt, economic inequality, and internal politics, with climate change-fueled drought playing only a small role. The reading of Syria as a climate war is yet another configuration of the Global South as innately destructive of its environments. Here, Ahuja’s narrative is most straightforward: observers think climate triggers instability, prompting an environmentally driven war over resources, and eventually refugees who threaten to enter Europe. The Islamic world is especially cast as innately aggressive and prone to violent breakdown, and thus a prime target for investment by state security operations.

While the evidence—primarily journalists and environmentalist writings for the intellectual history and national or international government reports for the material side—is convincing, and while it provides quite a satisfying history of climate migration, there is one notable environmental historiography that largely goes unengaged with here: climate history. Despite a section in the introduction titled “Racial Capitalism, Colonial Energy, and the Deep History of Migration,” Ahuja’s story only goes back about 500 years, and has no interest in how climate might have stimulated migratory patterns. Indeed, the entire field of climate history (pre-anthropogenic climate change) is overlooked here. Crucially, climate historians have spilled plenty of ink defending the field from charges of environmental determinism, and in trying to tease out how to talk about the partial and diffuse impacts of climate events on politics, war, and society. It would have been fascinating to see Ahuja critique the growing historiography of the human impacts of climate in the more distant past.

Environmental scholars broadly agree that we are in a period of unprecedented human effects on the global environment. The material underpinnings of our era of industrial prosperity have started to pose an existential risk to human and non-human life; our chickens have come home to roost. The principal challenge of Planetary Specters to this literature is to connect the Anthropocene more strongly to racial capitalism, and the flows of oil, capital, and migration. Ahuja’s emphasis of continuities makes for a striking argument. Although historians may find the book at times underplays the unprecedented geological and climate changes wrought by the Anthropocene and Great Acceleration, they will find it a vital and stimulating read—both for its piercing rebuttal of the racism inherent in current ideas of climate migration, and for its analysis of the material changes of the past seventy years in the age of oil.