Book Review: Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-first CenturyJohn Wennersten & Denise Robbins, . (2017). Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-first Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 272 pp. $20.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-253-02588-3.Worrisome title aside, this is a troubling text. The book’s alarmist tenor is standard neoenvironmental determinism: “Out of their camps will come all the evils of tomorrow — from disease to ethnic upheaval and terrorism” (256). The authors acknowledge that their core concept — climate refugees — is a fraught category (cf. Hartmann 2010; White 2011; Bettini 2013), and early in the text, they pay lip service to the multicausality of migration, acknowledging that environment or climate is never its sole determinant — “environmental factors are almost invariably linked with economic factors in the push and pull of everyday existence” (6). But on page 44, they sidestep the issue of causality and instead assert that the “climate refugee” concept is a legitimate category without any convincing justification.