If you think that the climate migrant/refugee is a real thing, think again. Andrew Baldwin rattles our assumptions about global climate change, convincingly demonstrating that the idea of climate migration had to be invented to save white humanism, while protecting the West from the future threat of the non-white migrant. The Other of Climate Change is a brilliant, elegantly written, and much-needed critical reflection on the racial underpinnings of our climate crisis.
— Ilan Kapoor, professor of Critical Development Studies, York University, Canada
The climate refugee, forced to flee the South in the wake of climate change, is a phantom and a racialized one to boot. As this book powerfully argues, such a phantom upholds white supremacy and racial capitalism by drawing us into a narrative about white saviors who will save the earth and the hapless Indigenous, Brown, and Black peoples trapped in apocalyptic scenarios of a rapidly deteriorating planet. Key to the fantasy is the innocent European, imagined only as the force of good and never the source of the catastrophe in the first place. We should beware of the racialized phantoms of climate change who populate U.N. reports and political discourses. The simple storyline they peddle, that climate change causes migration, keeps us from confronting the true nature of the crisis we face, the annihilative heart of racial capitalism and the devastation it endlessly wreaks.
— Sherene H. Razack, distinguished professor and Penny Kanner endowed chair, Gender Studies, University of California at Los Angeles
The Other of Climate Change brilliantly dispels any possibility of understanding climate change in simplistic or binary terms. It soars beyond the whiteness of climate change and racialized discourse to tangle with the massive and complex ways in which racialized thinking thwarts and compromises attempts to slow climate change, and further racializes those most affected, especially climate change migrants/refugees, reinforcing and re-entangling the state of racialization. Baldwin is a dexterous, complex, and profound thinker.
— Audrey Kobayashi, Queens University