A Roundtable on Environmental Injustice and Border Abolition

Abstract

This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a group of eleven activists, organizers, scholars, practitioners, educators, and storytellers to discuss their work building cross-border solidarities along the US-Mexico border and in US immigration detention, Puerto Rico, Ghana, and the Bengal Delta. Participants provide critical analysis of the origins of environmental injustice and border violence and discuss how a confluence of ecological crisis, environmental racism, and border militarization since the 1980s disproportionately impacts BIPOC and queer/trans communities and exacerbates migrant precarity and displacement worldwide. Participants share ways they have built alternatives to border and ecological violence through migrant accompaniment, legal and policy advocacy, divestment activism, storytelling, education, and sustainability projects. The discussion is organized around three key themes: environmental injustice, racism, and borders; strategies adopted by organizers to build environmental and migrant justice; and visions of border abolition.