The bubble placed here has different connections and associations for each of us.
On a collective level, for each of us in the collective, comprising of people displaced from their
homelands for one reason or other, this temporary space which also could be considered a nomadic space, provides a place to come together. Somewhere where we are brought into a common space if only
metaphorically than in any real or practical way.
This bubble brings attention to how space is a social construction and that any social sphere is also
spatially constructed. The way society works is influenced by the spatial structures it provides or uses.
Within this social determined space we are conditioned to abide to levels of passivity and acceptance.
Could this bubble be a way of introducing a social space that is activated with a potentially for collective
time and new social structures.
The story I wish to tell is a global story that we are all living through in different degrees and with
different levels of awareness.
The story could be called: Plague, war, climate migration and the media bubble.
Our recent times have been dominated in one way or another by plague, war and the immanent threat of
ecological disaster.
Briefly to discuss issues and areas that for me connect to why the bubble is here today. Issues and events
that will have a direct effect on is all this century.
During the time of the COVID pandemic we glimpsed a real possibility of a new global solidarity a
moment of awareness of how everyone on the planet are interdependent and reliant on each other.
During the pandemic we transformed our understanding of what is normal and what is socially possible.
Also the pandemic brought to the surface the inequalities and injustices to public life and exposed the
brute vulnerability of the marginal, the oppressed and the poor.
It also is suggestive of the temporary emergency shelter used in aftermath of natural disasters and war and violence. And this is devastatingly relevant and that cannot be ignored now in terms of the act of genocide being perpetrated upon Palestinians in Gaza by the IDF and the mass destruction it brings.
In terms of a form of emergency shelter this bubble reminds us of what we collectively face in terms of
climate change and other crisis connected with it. Over the next fifty years hotter temperatures combined
with more intense humidity are set to make large parts of the globe lethal for 3.5 billion of us. In the past
150 years we have been loading the sky with far too much CO2 and the planet is heating up. Climate
change now adversely affects over 500 million people and kills over half a million of them per year.
Fleeing the tropics, the coasts and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes;
you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. This migration has already begun as people
fleeing drought hit areas in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where farming and making a sustainable life
has become impossible.
Climate driven movement is adding to a massive migration already under way in the world’s cities
The number of migrates has doubled over the last ten years, and the issue of what to do about rapidly
increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent as the planet heats.
The current and future impact of climate change intersects with the already-existing
crises of poverty and violence. Christian Parenti in his book Topic of Chaos Climate change and the new
geography of Violence calls this collision of political, economic, and environmental disasters ‘the
catastrophic convergence.’ By catastrophic convergence, he does not merely mean that several disasters
happen simultaneously, one problem atop another. Rather, argues that the problems compound and
amplify each other, one expressing itself through another. Societies, like people, deal with new challenges
in ways that Parenti shows are conditioned by the traumas of their past. Thus, damaged societies, like
damaged people, often respond to new crises in ways that are irrational, shortsighted, and self-destructive.
In the case of climate change, the prior traumas that set the stage for bad adaptation, the destructive social response, are Cold War–era militarism and the economic greed and unquenchable growth of neoliberal capitalism. Over the last forty years, both these forces have distorted the state’s relationship to society—removing and undermining the state’s collectivist, regulatory, and re-distributive functions, while
overdeveloping its repressive and military capacities. This inhibits society’s ability to avoid violent
dislocations as climate change kicks in.
Climate change now joins these crises, acting as an accelerate. Across the planet, extreme weather and
water scarcity now inflame and escalate existing social conflicts.
There is a real risk that strong, states with developed economies will succumb to a politics of xenophobia,
racism, police repression, surveillance, and militarism and thus transform
themselves into fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse. By that course, developed
economies would turn into neofascist islands of relative stability in a sea of chaos. But a world in climate
collapse—marked by hunger, disease, criminality, fanaticism, and violent
social breakdown—will overwhelm the armed lifeboat. Eventually, all will sink into the same morass.
However, another path is possible. Progressive political adaptation coupled with aggressive and
immediate mitigation can involve moving toward greater cooperation and economic redistribution within
states and between North and South.
As Andreas Malm states “The ecological crisis is nothing but tragic.” All politics must become disaster
politics and if we are to get through this means learning to live without fossil fuels in no time,
transforming the economy system so all of the worlds population can survive and flourish.
We live in a media bubble that produces states of metaphysical nihilism that produces the mindset where
one feels unable to act in tacking the great challenges and crisis now facing the world.
Being in this collective, for me anyway, brings about a way of thinking outside the bubble of avoidance
and denial propagated by the media and those in power.