 My name is Thomas Nail. I'm a professor at the University of Denver. I am not a professional artist. So I bring some different gifts to share today. But I got into the topic of migration and climate change, which is what I'm going to talk about today very shortly. I was a Fulbright scholar. I did cultural exchange in Toronto, and I work with the migrant justice group. No one is illegal on building a sanctuary city. So I'm sad that our lawyer talking about sanctuary cities not going to be here. That was the project that we're working on. And out of that project, I wrote two books. I mentioned as one, but the publisher was like, 600 page book is not going to go. So you got to write two. And so I wrote one called The Figure of the Migrant and One Theory of the Border. And that's how I got into this topic. And so today I want to offer, hopefully within 10 minutes, two ideas, two small ideas, introductory ideas. One is about the, I'm a philosopher. So this is a kind of view from 10,000 feet here, not exactly as concrete. I mean, there's lots of concrete things to say about the Anthropocene. One way to think about the current geological epoch that we're in is that it is absolutely defined by mobility and movement. There's a very strange way in which we've sort of through extraction have sort of turned the earth inside out. We've pulled out all of the metals. What used, if you think about geology, it's like, oh, these layers of different materials and they fold and people study this kind of stuff. But what we've effectively done is we've ripped all of those layers of the earth out and we've just sort of thrown them up into the air. And we've distributed them everywhere. Where are those sedimentary metallic ores? We're driving them around. There is an entire geological strata of vehicles, boats, cars, airplanes, flying around. I mean, I know that if there was a geologist in the audience who was like, no, that is not what I'm talking about. Okay, I realize that that is not, but that is essentially what has happened to geology. Geology now is in motion. I mean, we are seeing this happening. We have 500,000 pieces of space debris flying around at, you know, 175,000 miles an hour around the orbit. I mean, we have made our own geological strata around our planet. That's the state of geology right now. If you want to talk about our age, we can talk about the layer of plastic and petroleum that's just covering everything. I just read recently that we are digesting one credit card's worth of plastic, microplastics, a week. A week. Yum. So where exactly is that petroleum, that oil, those broken down plants and animals, they are there in you. Right now, microplastic is in your body and you are part of a geological layer of petroleum. Okay, so that's another way to think about what is going on. And it's moving. That's the thing. We think about geology. We think about, oh, rocks were affecting a sedimentary layer. The other great one I really love is chicken bones, the McNugget O-scene or something. You know, like we eat so much chicken. There is now just a layer of chicken bones that, you know, future geologists, if there are any, will discover, oh, these were the people who loved McNuggets. They ate so many damn chickens that it became an entire geological strata. Okay, so there's a lot of different ways to think about what's going on. But one of, I want to venture this forth. There's all these different scenes. There's the Anthropocene, the Capital O-scene, the Plantation O-scene. I like the Plantation O-scene. But, you know, maybe one way to think about this is in terms of the mobility of the entire geological strata, including the bones of the animals that will have been buried and become those strata. So more than half of the species on this planet are now in migration. Forced migration due to climate change. So this includes tons of humans, but also animals. Everything, Karl Marx did not have this in mind, but everything that is solid is now melted into air as carbon dioxide. So I want to just read you one little thing very quickly because I couldn't find a way to spontaneously say this. Certain humans, it's important, certain humans, may have initiated this increase in planetary motion, namely the movement of all these geological strata, and capitalism has certainly hastened it. But now geological mobility is taking on an unpredictable life of its own that I think should be recognized. That's this kind of mobility of this strata that's beyond what humans can do on their own. Perhaps we're living less in an Anthropocene, and this is a very problematic term you may know, because not all humans are responsible for causing climate change. Just talk to any indigenous people to be like, Anthropocene, are all humans responsible for this geologic attack? No, they are not. About 100 corporations are responsible for 75% of emissions. Anthropocene is a little bit, you know, it's like, humans, look what we've done. It's like, wait, hold on a second, we know who did this. Okay, so capital is seen as a little bit more specific there about who's responsible for this. But just as a descriptive term, what we're witnessing is the most mobile geological epoch in the Earth's history. We are living in what we might call, and I'll just throw my own term into these ocenes, but the kino scene, and the management of those mobility, everything is in motion. And so the management of this mobility is what we are going to see in the 21st century. When we look into that prospective dark future of the next 100 years, one of the biggest things that we're going to see is what I'm going to call here, the climate-industrial complex. That is the anticipation, the management of the huge movements of people, of plants, of animals. That is the largest growing global industry right now. Okay, I'm throwing a lot of things into the climate-industrial complex here, but let me just give you some examples. So 30 years ago, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, there were 15 walls, border walls in the world. There are now 70 border walls. There are over 1 billion national and international migrants. International migrants alone are projected, the estimates vary, but can up to double in the next 40 years due to climate change. This industry of building walls to keep people in certain places and keep them out of certain places, and the same industries of security that are securing nations against climate change, building sea walls to keep water levels low, building walls to keep humans out. That industry is projected to be over $742 billion by 2023. So if you're evil and you have a lot of money and you want to invest in the future, it's security, securing these giant movements of humans, plants, animals, waters, and so on. So this industry has a lot of different tentacles and arms, but one of them is the detention process. When you think about what happens to immigration, it is a huge business. Cremigration, it is the criminalization of migration for-profit institutions and corporations that basically make money transporting people, detaining them for as long as they possibly can, sometimes up to years without any formal charges. But they are making money on this, and they want immigration. That sounds weird, but let me get to this. This is the very strange paradox that we are living in, which is, on one hand, you have right-wing nationalist xenophobic groups who are like, we want all immigrants out. The difficulty is here, if you actually got that, dear right-wing racists, what you would get is the collapse of huge economies. It's suicidal to want to do this. I mean, it's homicidal, but it's also suicidal. It would destroy that economy. So there's a tension there. If Trump actually got what he wanted, the economy would be destroyed. And of course, the narrative is Trump is like, yes, we want to build the economy. Well, here's the other side of the paradox. From the kind of economic perspective, and any honest economist will tell you, that immigration increases GDP. It is a wealthmaker, and it always has been. So this is the kind of paradox we are living in. On the one hand, you have huge populist xenophobic outcry against immigration. On the other hand, corporations who very much want that migration, but the catch is they want those immigrants to be cheap. They want them to be affordable. How do you do that? If you actually have to pay them living wages, my God, it'd be too expensive. Just stay home. It's not worth it, right? But what these two poles work together, and Donald Trump is really, I'm not saying he knows this, but he really is the solution to this problem. Not in a positive solution, like in a really devious kind of solution. Not this conspiracy, because again, conspiracies, you have to know what you're doing. But he doesn't really know that. But what he is doing is he mobilizes a right-wing xenophobic populist to essentially devalorize, criminalize, and socially subjugate a population of people. On the other hand, the companies are like, this is, you know, on one hand, they say it's politically despicable, whatever, but they benefit because that devalorized labor is a lot cheaper. It can be exploited a lot easier as long as you have the people, which brings us to the climate refugee. How do you get people to move away from where they live and want to be and go to some place where a bunch of racists exploit them? How do you convince people to do that? And this is the second idea that I want to share with you, a hypothesis. Again, it's not a conspiracy, but let's just say that there are certain countries that are benefiting strategically by climate refugees and climate-related migration. Corporations benefit by that. They make money when people migrate and that those migrants are not given full status. They can't vote. They are not paid the same wages. They are overworked and exploited and deported and interested through a criminalization system. Tons of money is being made off of those people. It is in the very strange interests of the capitalist system to displace people through climate change. So I want to read you this, again, little pithy quote here. If only there were a way, the capitalist dreams, to kickstart the economy and cheaply dislodge huge numbers of people from their land, devalorize their labor and then appropriate that labor extremely cheaply. In other words, if climate change did not exist, capitalism would have to create it. Lucky for it, it does because it did. Climate migrants today now form what we might call a disposable climate labor army, wading around in underemployed global poverty until the next climate-related disaster strikes and they are moved around to whatever precarious, securitized and criminalized labor is ready to exploit them next. Yeah, so that's one way to think about what's going on. Again, not that there's anybody in a back room cooking this up, but this is simply how this has unfolded, is that it benefits these companies who manage migration, who incarcerate, who build walls and so on. They even succeed when those walls fail, because walls mostly fail. They're not that successful in keeping everybody out. So what you can do is you sort of mobilize, if you mobilize enough people, shockingly, I'm over time, but the music has not gone on. Okay, so I'm going to wrap up very quickly then. I don't know how that's happened, some terrible mistake has happened. So I want to wrap up that. I got lucked out. So the last thing I want to... There it is. Okay, the last thing I wanted to say is about the migrant arts. Very briefly, I think this is why migrant arts, and I mean that like art created by migrants, art about migrants, having curated institutions and galleries for migrants to tell their stories. I don't have a solution to this problem. My point is the starting point of the solution is to get everybody together, and part of that we is not just even valorizing or kind of exoticizing migrant art or migrant stories, but those stories are our all everyone's story. They need to become the story of the we. How do you change the political we who does anything? Everybody's got to be on board. Until all of those people have a voice and have a place to say that voice, then there's no solution that I or anyone else is going to be able to offer that's going to solve this problem unless everybody's brought in. And the migrant arts in creating that space for people to share those experiences is at least a starting point. Thank you.