At the beginning of this book, I discussed how a 2018 report on the journey of a Honduran migrant caravan heading toward the U.S.-Mexico border was depicted by the Guardian newspaper as an episode of climate migration. Relying on expert opinion that the 2015 drought had caused a food crisis, the report related one quote from a member of the caravan describing crop failure following the drought. Although a variety of other parts of the story of the caravans might have been emphasized—including the recent U.S.-supported coup, paramilitary violence, a history of poverty related to international debt, border militarization, and the work of activist groups to organize the caravan—journalists struggle to synthesize stories of such events in ways that are attentive to the complexities underpinning migration. For this reason, a number of online platforms have emerged to shift public discussions of migration and center refugee writings in the critiques of border imperialism and racial capitalism.
In 2019, Migrant Roots Media was founded by activist Roxana Bendezú in North Carolina to add resolution and complexity to public discussions of transnational migration, in part by helping to advertise how receiving countries influence migration flows. One of the website’s early publications was a testimonio by Alejandra Mejía, who describes her family’s journey from Honduras to Panama at the time of Hurricane Mitch, which caused massive flooding and destruction in Central America in 1998.1 Noting that poverty had already limited economic opportunities in her birth city of Tegucigalpa prior to the hurricane, Mejía’s narrative integrates environmental issues related to flooding with a broader context of debt dependency, poverty, and urban violence that converge to promote migration. By reconstructing a life narrative in the wake of violence or displacement, the testimonio genre allows for integration of environmental factors leading to migration that might otherwise escape attempts by journalists and policy makers.
The fact that the flooding damage wrought by Hurricane Mitch—which intensified in the storm’s aftermath due to corporate logging—predated contemporary journalism on climate migration suggests that environmental problems also have a history that is irreducible to the narration of climate change as a crisis trigger event. Such histories are deeply intertwined with forms of development and land arrangements that make agrarian populations more susceptible to events like Hurricane Mitch or the 2015 drought mentioned by the Guardian. One lesson of what is missed in the gap between the Guardian article and Mejía’s story is that postcolonial agrarian struggles for a share of the wealth generated by extractive enterprise are commonplace worldwide but structured by particular ecologies and social forces that affect people’s lives in context. Such struggles can be rebranded generically as the struggles of “climate migration” in environmental media focusing on locations from Kiribati to Bangladesh to Syria to Honduras. This fact reflects not just that public knowledge of environmental problems has been compromised and slow to emerge but also that the social movements challenging environmental destruction may benefit from a clearer articulation of how structural forces of oil-fueled development and capitalist expansion make rural-to-urban labor migration a requirement for large minoritized populations worldwide. The history of attempts to represent “climate migration” as a public problem is a reflection that rural lifeworlds themselves are one of today’s targeted geographic horizons of accumulation, rendered commoditizable by both the forces of climate change and extractivist industries that work in tandem to render growing swaths of humanity as surplus labor.2
As these processes expand transborder migration, the inequalities between zones of securitization—Christian Parenti’s armed lifeboats—and zones of shrinking opportunity intensify impacts on those most affected by the social ecologies combining debt, loss of livelihood, and extractive displacement. One of the difficult challenges that arises in this context is to critically address the fears of mass social breakdown that energize ethnoclass securitization and determinist claims about how climate change might inherently promote social conflict and, thus, racism. This book has argued that climate migration narratives in public media and policy studies have a tendency to mask complex structural forces underpinning migration. Instead of embracing a planet-scale story that contemporary mass displacement is being generated by climate change, I have turned to the recent past of the rise of the oil economy and neoliberal structural adjustment to understand how the world’s most rapid processes of industrialization and urbanization—concentrated across Asia—produce racially marginal migrant populations whose vulnerability may be accelerated by environmental forces but whose histories are irreducible to the weather. If in Bangladesh the anticipation of climate-driven extinction of local lifeways underwrites state and NGO discourses of adaptation that preemptively displace agrarian populations, in Syria the climate war thesis works to erase some of the complexities of agrarian challenges that preexisted the war and reflected the broader political discourses of the opposition. In both scenarios, climate migration discourse produces obstacles to allowing environmental movements to integrate histories of war and displacement into narratives of environmental racism, which often retain an ex post facto valence. Rather than alternatively turning to paradigms of environmental harm under the banner of the Anthropocene and its cognate “cenes” (Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Eurocene), these contexts call for a focus on the agrarian base, Indigenous struggles, conflicts over extraction and debt, and the role of the state in creating conditions for migration in national and transnational contexts.
One goal of this book has thus been to consider how it might be possible to link up local particularities with accounts of global processes, with the goal of integrating environmental factors into the broader systems of racial capitalism that have taken shape with the rise of neoliberal Asian manufacturing and labor diasporas. By developing a method for analyzing how oil-driven logics of transnationalism have produced both population flows and environmental harms, it is my hope that this book has also demonstrated that it is possible to offer a systemic account of how such equalities emerge internationally without separating environmental from economic, social, and political forces. While the particular, the local, and even the individual contexts of migration and environmental harm must be explored in accounts of contemporary climate change, moving from particular to planetary contexts—and in the process developing geographical knowledge about how local problems are scaled up in environmental discourse—is one of the most difficult tasks of critical social methods that analyze migration, security, and environmental risk. Unlike the security thinking arising from border imperialism, which tends to reinforce crisis narratives and the stereotyped discourses of difference reifying a nationalist or statist worldview, thinking about how the carbon economy, racial capitalism, and neoliberalism intersect in developing contemporary forms of international inequality and violence is vital when developing transnational methods for connecting shared struggles of people affected by agricultural collapse and weather disaster.
Such an approach can help us work through some of the challenges that have emerged in scholarship that attempts to integrate environmental concerns with critical social theories. Critical refugee studies, for one, reflects a growing interest in how environmental questions intersect with social ones. Since the field is invested in rethinking the normative legal categories through which migration is publicly narrated and interpreted, in the process interrogating the presumption that receiving states confer a gift of freedom on the refugee, thinking about environmental forces in migration may help the field articulate the complexity of refugee lifeworlds and the political potential of refugee critique. By refusing the legal distinctions separating migrant from refugee and political from nonpolitical displacement forces, critical refugee studies in turn makes room for thinking about the long-term, differently unfolding crises that affect access to water, food, employment, and other resources in climate-affected regions. However, it will be necessary for such methods to follow the complexity of social and environmental factors and insist on a historical approach to borders, race, and labor in order to understand the imbrication of environmental processes in longer political economies of displacement. At the same time, breaking down “environment” or “climate” into distinct ecological processes such as drought and coastal salinization can help demonstrate how specific zones of ecological change are recruited into national and transnational migration pathways. Rather than assimilating “climate refugees” as an iconic new alternative to traditional definitions of the refugee, the field can insist on a community-centered cartography of displacement attentive to the ways in which environmental processes enter into practices of social reproduction in agrarian zones and other communities rendered vulnerable to neoliberal circuits of debt and displacement.
At the same time, the figure of the climate migrant presses Asian American studies to grapple with the complex ways in which transnational migration flows structure forms of U.S. imperial securitization and the formations of racial capitalism that emerge with changing relations between North America, the Gulf states, the Pacific, and East Asia. If the geographic shifts in international finance have generated visions of a New Asian Century, the figure of the climate refugee as an underside of economic globalization suggests that the field’s attention to growing global inequalities and new forms of militarism and colonization in the Pacific can be generative for reflecting on how environmental phenomena is ambivalently positioned in such transcontinental visions of global interconnection at a moment in which U.S. empire has been challenged on a variety of fronts.
The roles of both critical refugee studies and Asian American studies in expanding such a transnational perspective is especially critical in this moment of rising fascism worldwide, intensified by the inequalities of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, the interlinked health, environmental, economic, and political crises of the moment require activists and scholars to develop an understanding of how the rise of fascist leaders emerges from the combination of post-9/11 militarized security and longer-term neoliberal transitions that shift the economic bases of nationalism. The retrenchment of provincial and national borders under emergency public health authority has created complex pressures for migrants and their natal communities. If in India we have witnessed the massive expulsion of millions of migrant workers from the cities, in other locations enhanced border enforcement and visa restrictions are forcing increasingly perilous journeys for workers and other displaced peoples.
On the other hand, it is not enough to narrate how this neoliberal circuit of transnationalization and nationalization generates persistent crisis. We cannot understand the racialized violence of the carbon economy without emphasizing the interspecies and infrastructural complexity of interrelated environmental disasters such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. As discussed in chapter 2, between the SARS outbreaks of 2002–4 and the COVID-19 outbreak of December 2019 to the present, China experienced what may be the largest and most rapid urbanization process in history.3 The number of urban residents in the country grew to over 670 million, as manufacturing and transit networks spread across the country, including to central China, where the COVID-19 outbreak began. At the crossroads of many migrants who shuttle between the cities and agrarian natal communities, Wuhan had become a transit hub, a center of rapid development, and a growing industrial region. Even as such development encroaches on habitats for bats, which provide a natural reservoir for coronaviruses, growing migration transit pathways help to conduct possible zoonoses farther afield on the routes of the supply chain. To the extent that the pandemic was generated by growth in migration and transnational travel, it emerged from the same energy and environmental relations that I have discussed throughout this book.4 The interspecies basis of the current pandemic travels along routes of environmental destruction that intensify pressures on agrarian zones and render them increasingly vulnerable to forms of environmental surveillance that disavow the role that consumption in urban centers plays in spaces configured as potential sites of zoonotic propagation.5
In order to explore how political and economic transformations are linked to environmental ones through the centering of racial capitalism in Asian trade, finance, and labor circuits, it is necessary to engage with some geographic questions that have been historically taken up by Asian studies scholars, at times critically reflecting on the limits of Cold War influences on such area studies. However, this book has also asserted that the reproduction of the capitalist system through its transnationalization into Asian migration and extractive circuits has had more widely distributed impacts that require Asian studies and Asian American studies to rethink the cartographic outlines of the fields. The rise of climate security discourses and the circulation of the climate refugee as both a legal category and a media icon have occurred alongside rapidly growing carbon emissions that affect locations across the globe. By stressing the key role of labor, oil, and production in Asia to these transborder forces, I do not mean to sideline work that attends to other regional dimensions of racial capitalism or environmental crisis. Given the regularization of weather disasters over the past two decades, there is likely to be much more future scholarship exploring the specific ecological effects of climate change as they intersect with varied crises of social reproduction.
Although these effects are worldwide, they also map onto long-standing settler colonial violences of racial capitalism. The debates among comparative racialization scholars that stress the foundational violences of settler colonialism and anti-Black labor regimes emphasize the key role that Atlantic processes of commoditized land and labor played in the making of the modern system of racial capitalism. Comparative racialization studies—which work to disentangle the ways that forces like warfare, colonization, labor exploitation, and debt forge particular regimes of racial power that differentially affect Indigenous and racially minoritized groups—have much to contribute to tracing the situated differences and divergences in climate change impacts. This is particularly important today, since finance weaves these other forces of racial violence into a speculative economy that reinforces indebtedness across varied contexts of accumulation. It will be a key challenge for comparative racialization studies in an era of climate change to confront how diminishing land bases and growing surplus labor are revalued through circuits of finance and massified agrarian debt in the South, as well as through climate adaptation schemes that tend to favor migration and urbanization as solutions to poverty.
At the same time, the differences in context that produce some of the key debates in comparative racialization studies—for example, the differences in the ways that Indigenous land and Black labor have been historically appropriated by colonial racial regimes—can at times devolve into a kind of exceptionalism that moves away from systemic analysis of the manner in which war, land, labor, and finance interrelate in racial capitalism. The racial hierarchies of labor discussed in this book have at times been modeled on anti-Black strategies of labor exploitation, as discussed in the histories of Aramco oil production and the Gulf kafala labor system. But it is important to not simply view Asian labor diasporas as mimetic copies of an original exclusionary labor regime aimed at other groups.6 Nor is it enough to note the relative privilege of some Asian immigrants in settler colonial contexts, wherein Asian settler colonialism emerges as a secondary violence following white settlement.7 It is possible to critique complicity with structures of settler colonial racialization within Asian diasporic communities without reifying xenophobic stereotypes of Asian migration as a sign of the growing domination of Asian nation-states in the world system. Taking account of how neo-fascist depictions of the “rise of Asia” have made “Asia” itself an overburdened signifier in many contexts of political debate is critical as comparative racialization scholars and Asian diasporic activists reflect on emerging circuits of migration. Comparative racialization studies is best poised to develop an integrated account of racial capitalism in the present if it subjects exceptionalist claims about the durability of racial structure to critical analysis by tracking how economic transformations bring new racial regimes and meanings into relation.8 This book has thus stressed the interdependencies of Asian production, finance, and labor with neoliberal, carbon-fueled circuits of U.S. settler colonialism and its resulting border imperialism. Such a line of thinking helps us understand the persistence of racialized disposability in this transitional moment where U.S. power appears threatened even as some aspects of U.S. domination are structured into the reproductive forces of racial capitalism.
Critical migration studies and critical race theories are in turn necessary for developing methods to address the social violences of planetary forms of environmental change. This is especially so as they address the ways that race configures the very divide between society and nature—the ethnoclass struggles that Sylvia Wynter defined as the basis of our public debates over the environment. They furthermore help environmental racism scholars address the ways that ideas about managing waste also configure emerging turns to environmental governance that, this book argues, reinforce international inequalities. Although northern spaces of industry and urbanization—as sites of development of ecologically razed settlements, extractive technologies, and massified forms of capitalist circulation—might themselves be seen as the primary zones of environmental degradation, the contradictory racialization of southern environments as both carbon sinks and wastelands—sites that must be alternately conserved and developed—maintains a focus on climate-affected agrarian environments as sites of likely intervention by the forces of neocolonial development or conservation. As such, critical refugee studies and critical border studies can benefit from thinking about environmental racisms that subject migrants to transborder forms of ecological harm, even as such forms of harm are often determined by basic inequalities of infrastructure, access to land and property, and vulnerability to toxicity and other negative effects of capitalist waste.
Studies at the intersection of critical race studies and critical security studies are, finally, another fruitful intersection for understanding how race configures strategies of governance in the present context of migration. Groups configured as security risks or mobilized as Indigenous adaptation models are likely to face compounding forces of displacement generated not only by extractive enterprise but also by the speculative governance of climate adaptation schemes. The connection between efforts to account for climate migration as an environmental injustice and the potential to mobilize race within new governance techniques of human security is one potential outcome of the collision of security and migrant rights efforts. The manner in which this may proliferate calculation of environmental harms as a speculative race-making technology may still play out in a variety of directions. Although such accounting of differential vulnerability to disaster could be used to redistribute state resources to particular groups facing ecological change, it also portends new forms of surveillance and disaster intervention that have unequal effects based on factors like citizenship/documentation status and conditional resettlement funding that requires populations to move away from coastal or agrarian home regions. Environmental racism research is necessary to track how displacement is used for such race-making projects and to consider how this configures migration as a sign of vulnerability, an adaptation strategy, a node of human capital, or a condition of surveillance in different contexts.
Overall, environmental knowledge must be configured as part of a larger picture of racial capitalism attending to the historical trajectories of migration, the systemic causes of environmental destruction, and the speculative horizons of climate finance and security. Emphasizing climate change’s effects on social systems without analyzing the feedback loops and interrelations with political economy may offer a strategic shortcut to challenging climate denialism among corporate elites and right-wing supporters of continued fossil fuel use. However, to overemphasize the potential of environmental thinking by itself to undo humanist conceits at the heart of liberalism can run into complicated roadblocks, especially when invoking “human” environmental agencies without attending to the complexity of how the human is conceived and crosscut by inequality, or even how such differences are increasingly mobilized in human security practices.9 To the extent that climate adaptation schemes engage with crisis thinking and techniques of securitization, they reflect how climate change is itself a site of narrative worldmaking, a proliferation of speculative visions of human extinction that anticipate life itself as a shrinking zone of habitation.
In contrast to the securitizing forces of racial capitalism and border imperialism, many of the social movement responses to weather disaster involve mutual aid and the attempt by climate-affected peoples to make connections to struggles elsewhere—for example, in the agricultural cooperatives of Rojava or the attempts to model mutual aid among hurricane-affected coastal peoples from Puerto Rico to Bangladesh and points in between. If collective responses to climate change are able to produce fundamental resources to challenge current configurations of racial capitalism, it is likely that they will do so through the development of networks of solidarity that both deliver material resources beyond the purview of state visions of aid (attached, as they are, to inequalities of citizenship and access) and build on decades of resistance to neoliberal transnationalism. The social movements that in the early 2000s challenged the international debt regime and structural adjustment requirements produced intersections between organizations focused on Indigenous agrarian struggles, hunger, environmental violence, animal liberation, and labor conditions, articulating models for later convergences, such as the World Social Forum, the Arab uprisings, and Occupy mobilizations. To the extent that such developments have been accompanied by a revanchist formation of rising fascism in many countries should come as no surprise, as the very condition of neoliberal accumulation has been the massive expansion of wealth inequalities among and between states, a situation that energizes nostalgic invocations of nationalism, sexism, and racism in varied political contexts.
This is especially important given my emphasis in chapter 1 on the emerging right-wing interest in climate migration, including a new political opening for green nationalism. Although political parties and formations on the Right have, since the 1990s, tended to oppose stronger environmental regulation and undermined public understanding of climate science, the Far-Right formations—including the Alt-Right and white supremacist groups—are increasingly finding that xenophobia is more successful politically than anti-environmentalism. Climate migration discourse forms the key bridge between environmental thought and xenophobia that may allow a shift in the manner in which the Right addresses climate change. For anyone who has observed the longer histories in which the nostalgic romanticization of national environments—from the United States to Germany to India, as only a few examples—has been yoked to notions of racial identity and national superiority, it should come as no surprise that environmentalism can be entirely compatible with fascism. Today, dozens of countries have erected border walls to keep out migrants, and the idea that environmental disasters might stoke racial animus and social crisis is one of the primary ways that the Right may be able to capitalize on disasters to advance its growing influence over state policies and media discourse. If in the early 1990s Etienne Balibar was correct in suggesting that postcolonial migration to Europe reflected a “neo-racism” that reframed racism as an inevitable outcome of increasing transborder contact and ethnic assimilation, climate migration discourse offers a potential discursive site for embedding the normalization of racism and xenophobia, configured as social realist responses to a world of massifying population and socio-ecological complexity.10 Rather than doubling down on the turn to security and to nationalism in responses by the Left to such neo-racist discourse, it is more useful for anti-racist, environmental, and immigrant movements to forcefully critique and challenge security thinking.
Given this situation, Planetary Specters argues that oil-fueled debt and environmental change helps to regenerate some contours of race and racism, primarily through the shifting geographies of rural-urban mobility and remittance and through the acceleration of major inequalities in the world system. Neoliberalism is not an independent economic logic but a reproductive system reliant on racialized management of labor, disposing of some workers through intricate physical mobilities and telemobilities while recruiting other segments of vulnerable labor and extractable land. As long as oil supports a deeply unequal international financial structure, combined with accelerating environmental catastrophe, it will continue to exacerbate forms of human mobility that reproduce the unequal vulnerability of racialized agrarian peripheries. To the extent that these peripheries have been collected into forms of governance and securitization that blur migration with war, they have been subjected to neocolonial adaptation interventions emphasizing debility, underdevelopment, and the potential for conflict. These associations in turn may be mobilized to ensure that speculated displacements take place in advance, that vulnerability be rescripted as adaptive capacity by simply declaring the unlivability of the extractive zone. As such, racism helps to devalue Indigenous and agrarian spaces that are written off as less productive than spaces of production. Such developments may extend into new forms of green valuation, which for the time being remain vested in the high price attributed to fossil fuels and the interrelation between carbon consumption and the development of human capital.
To the extent that focus on the figure of the climate refugee appears new, it is also embedded in the distinct configurations of neoliberal difference that situate race itself in the structures of communication and media. Tracking this development benefits from analyzing race in relation to gender, sex, and disability using approaches to understanding rights and humanitarianism from feminist, queer, and disability studies. The icon of the debilitated climate migrant—from Ioane Teitiota in chapter 1 to Alan Kurdi in chapter 4—thus teaches us something about how the vulnerable body provides affective scaffolding for the racialization of migrants today. Such is the case in the framing of climate migration as a scene of debilitation threatening security, as well as in more hopeful visions of climate adaptation as overcoming such debility. Icons of vulnerability or activist transcendence may help to distill activist struggles around a key figure signaling transformation of a social order, but they also accrue symbolic meanings that may be turned against various forms of liberatory struggle.11 If social media was once championed as a tool for social change by some activists critiquing mainstream media discourses, the deterritorialization of digital media in the present moment configures ever more detailed population constructions and iconic associations that may be mobilized for control. This is not an intractable problem but one that energizes spurious discourses of climate migration, the form of which is at times overdetermined by the platform. Entrenched in the liberal mediasphere, climate migration stories shared on platforms like Twitter and Facebook transform migrant bodies into digital avatars of blowback produced by the fossil-fueled corporate nationalisms they seek to transcend via figures of humanitarian rescue. As refugee stories and migrant crisis discourses occupy an increasing online presence in traditional and social media, more research will need to examine how digital infrastructures affect securitization, migration, and environmental processes alike.
This is one reason why attempts to intervene in climate migration discourses like Mejía’s digital testimonio are necessary for developing integrated analysis of racial capitalism that will address systemic factors of displacement. Such efforts are only one step in combating the lengthy history of neocolonial representations of southern peoples and environments, but they show us how the intertwined geographies of communication, environmental change, and economic structure are central to the political challenges raised by the specters of climate change, economic inequality, and rising fascism in the twenty-first century.
Acknowledgments
This book took its final form as I began teaching, writing, and advocating alongside the students, staff, and faculty in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Thanks to Dana Ahern, Taylor Ainslie, Chrissy Anderson-Zavala, Neda Atanasoski, Courtney Bonam, Micha Cárdenas, Vilashini Cooppan, A. M. Darke, Camilla Hawthorne, Christine Hong, Talib Jabbar, Jenny Kelley, Jane Komori, Shauntay Larkins, Adonay Lozano Moreno, Nick Mitchell, Nidhi Mahajan, Trung Nguyen, Marcia Ochoa, Emily Padilla, Aitanna Parker, Juan Poblete, Eric Porter, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Jared Semana, Savannah Shange, Anney Treymanny, Ronaldo Wilson, Karen Tei Yamashita, Alice Yang, Ka-Eul Yoo, and Jerry Zee for their commitment to promoting CRES, building its community, and insisting on its orientation to transform the institution despite all odds. Special thanks to Neda, Christine, Nick, and Taylor for their leadership during the most difficult moments of administrative foot-dragging, and to countless graduate student strikers and members of the People’s Coalition who worked to collectively envision a new relationship to the university amidst the wildcat strike of 2019.
Thanks to numerous comrades in North Carolina, whose organizing against racist monuments, policing, and immigration surveillance has provided inspiration for this book. I thank a number of colleagues at other universities, including Aimee Bahng, Mabel Gergan, Jairus Grove, Dana Luciano, Michael Lundblad, Renisa Mawani, Jasbir Puar, Malini Ranganathan, Trisha Remitir, Pavithra Vasudevan, and Priscilla Wald, whose discussions of environment, species, and colonialism have been generative for this study. I benefited from feedback I received from audiences at Dartmouth College, the University of Colorado–Boulder, Wesleyan University, American University, and Georgetown University. Different versions of sections of the manuscript have been published or are forthcoming as “Race, Human Security, and the Climate Refugee,” English Language Notes 54, no. 2 (2016): 25–32; “Figuring the Climate Refugee: From Insecurity to Adaptation in Representations of Bangladeshi Environmental Migration,” in Insecurity, ed. Richard Grusin and Maureen Ryan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming); and “Weather as War: Race, Disability, and Environmental Determinism in the Syrian Climate Wars Thesis,” Critical Ethnic Studies 6:1 (2020): https://doi.org/10.5749/CES.0601.ahuja. I was extremely lucky to have the guidance of Dylan White at the University of North Carolina Press, who oversaw the editorial process and carefully attended to all the details. I give special thanks to Renisa Mawani and Priscilla Wald, whose careful reviews of the manuscript helped me clarify the arguments of the book in its final stages.
Finally, I have benefited from the direct support of many close friends and family members during the writing of this book. Special thanks to Hong-An, Dwayne, Xuân June, Jes, Sarah, Nina, Antony, Eliza, Jenny, Dylan, Trisha, Chelsea, Jess, Pavithra, Atiya, Armond, and Felicity for sustaining community over these past few years. Thanks also to my family, including Sain, Usha, Liliana, Radoslav, Sonia, Shyla, Sarita, and Barney—and to Neda, Naya, and Persia for filling each day with surprise, laughter, and love. This book is dedicated to Naya in the hope that you may one day inhabit a more just world, one in which the wonders of life around us no longer sacrificed in hollow pursuits of profit and domination.