Letter: Don’t stereotype ‘climate refugees’

Graphic by Lori Deaton

There’s a conservative streak in the Mountain Xpress’ comic strips. Even so, I was shocked by the explicit xenophobia in Brent Brown’s “The New Exotic” [Nov. 2].

The strip depicts two bees — residents of “Bee City,” a play on “Beer City”— complaining that, due to environmental warming, migrants may be drawn to Asheville’s climate. The bees are concerned about “new residents” and their “baggage.” The last frame shows a newcomer, depicted as a mosquito, carrying a suitcase labeled “West Nile virus” and a bag labeled “vector-borne diseases.”

How did it become acceptable for a cartoonist at Asheville’s long-standing alternative weekly to stereotype “climate refugees” in this way?

Of course, there’s a history in this country of depicting outsiders as contagious pests. And concerns about foreigners have always intermingled with concerns about nature and the environment. A hundred years ago, Jews and Asians were thought to breed disease because they had settled in dense urban areas, and their “rootlessness” was contrasted against the healthy Protestants who were more “tied to the land.” A half-century later, racist environmentalists Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin famously compared the growing South Asian population to a bomb that would explode the Earth’s equilibrium and unleash disease and starvation.

In Brown’s defense, he may have been simply parroting back to readers what has become a ubiquitous provincialism in Asheville’s political discourse. Residents across the ideological spectrum lament the presence of outsiders, declare that Asheville should be “closed” and spout fears about population growth.

The city’s commonsense provincialism shows up in subtler ways than as in Brown’s comic. For example, it manifests in opposition to new multifamily homes and in the scapegoating of workers who move in from out of state — blaming them for Asheville’s rising cost of living. Like Ehrlich and Hardin, our provincialists resent migrants and urban populations, proclaiming them threats to “nature.”

But if this resentment leads to such gross generalizations as “refugees will bring diseases,” it’s clearly past time to rethink Asheville’s exceptionalist, insular worldviews.

Some political scientists have a term for an orientation that draws upon mythic, pastoral, romanticized ideas that define a group of people as special because of that group’s connection to the land where they live; an orientation that presents outsiders as spoilers of their idyllic home; and one that fearmongers about refugees and population growth, and exploits global warming as a justification for zero-sum contests over control of a place’s climate and resources. They call it “far-right ecologism.”

Other political scientists use a shorter phrase: “eco-fascism.”

Brown’s comic may have inadvertently trafficked in some of the language that fuels eco-fascism. But it’s incumbent on the rest of Asheville to consider how we do the same.

— Andrew Paul
Asheville

Editor’s note: Thank you for your feedback. Brown offers the following response: “Mr. Paul has the cartoon’s intentions backward. The bugs in the comic weren’t meant to represent human climate change refugees as disease-carrying pests in a metaphorical way; their discussion of the new residents/baggage was about the literal nonnative mosquitoes and concerns of ‘local transmission of an exotic ailment’ such as viruses found in warmer climates, as reported in a local news story (avl.mx/c64).

“Realizing that as the intent of the comic does depends on the reader having knowledge of that bit of information, in hindsight, I probably should have put that somewhere in the final panel (loath as I am to do such a cliché) as a newspaper headline reading: ‘West Nile Virus Cases Could Set NC Record in 2022’ to avoid such misunderstandings. I shall try to keep that in mind for future strips.”

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7 thoughts on “Letter: Don’t stereotype ‘climate refugees’

  1. Taxpayer

    Boo hoo. A cartoon hurt your feelings. Let’s ban that scary, mean old cartoonist and his message, right?

  2. MV

    This is the same Andy Paul who in a previous op-ed stereotyped (and made sweeping generalizations about) older Prius-driving residents he’s spotted in grocery stores. The same Andy Paul who makes sweeping generalizations about land-use ordinances being classist and racist when in fact many ordinances are designed to protect working-class neighborhoods.
    Oh Andy, Ye who live in glass (or tall skinny) houses……..

  3. Peter Robbins

    Andy Paul’s take on the intersection of housing, climate, class and racial-justice issues is, as usual, spot on. But I disagree with his interpretation of this particular editorial cartoon. As I read it, the cartoon is saying that human and mosquito migrations are being accelerated by the same cause – climate change. It’s as stupid to blame the newcomers for responding to environmental stresses as it is to blame the mosquitos – and there’s just as much chance of fencing either one out. Better to accommodate the newcomers in an environmentally responsible way through progressive land-use reforms like the open-space amendment that was recently approved by the Asheville City Council and the “missing middle” zoning revisions that are on the way. I’m sure that’s what the cartoon was trying to say. Because otherwise it would make no sense.

  4. Grant Millin

    “ Residents across the ideological spectrum lament the presence of outsiders, declare that Asheville should be “closed” and spout fears about population growth.”

    Anthropogenic Climate is a sweeping generalized crisis. What are the core desired outcomes; what is the array of valid Ethical Logic solutions; and what are the challenges in the way?

    Someone write about that!

  5. R.G.

    What might the ‘eco-fascist’ indigenous people think of this quote below?

    “Some political scientists have a term for an orientation that draws upon mythic, pastoral, romanticized ideas that define a group of people as special because of that group’s connection to the land where they live; an orientation that presents outsiders as spoilers of their idyllic home; and one that fearmongers about refugees and population growth, and exploits global warming as a justification for zero-sum contests over control of a place’s climate and resources. They call it “far-right ecologism.”

    Other political scientists use a shorter phrase: “eco-fascism.””

  6. Peter Robbins

    I’m guessing they’d accuse the local gentry of cultural appropriation.

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