Today is World Refugee Day, an occasion promoted by the United Nations High Council on Refugees (UNHCR). There was some controversy last year about the definition of the word “refugee.”

In some dictionaries the definition of refugee is simply “one seeking refuge.” But other dictionaries include the qualifier that the word is usually applied to a person crossing national boundaries because of persecution. Even the etymology of the word contains examples of applying only to trans-national evacuators, and to those who don’t leave their borders.

This is more than an argument over semantics. The word refugee has certain connotations. Sharpton’s point was that it strips a person of dignity. “They are not refugees wandering somewhere looking for charity,” he said. “They are victims of neglect and a situation they should have never been put in in the first place.”¹

What an odd statement. Does that, by implication, mean that the refugees the United Nations is trying to call our attention to today—the victims of Pakistan’s earthquake, the victims of ecological catastrophe and genocide in Darfur and Sudan, or those fleeing the strife in Afghanistan wrought by the last two superpowers (first the Soviets, and more recently, the U.S.)—are “looking for charity,” or should have “been put [there] in the first place”?

“The word refugee has certain connotations,” and those connotations became clear in a very ugly way in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when the United States had to deal with its own citizens becoming refugees. We didn’t simply mean someone seeking refuge; we mean it with a sneer. “Refugees” are only those people in the Third World, those dirty brown people. Maybe we’re “Christian” enough to send them “charity,” but in some sick way, we see their plights as somehow deserved.

Legally, the word has a different meaning from what we commonly use:

Refugees are a subgroup of the broader category of displaced persons. Environmental refugees (people displaced because of environmental problems such as drought) are not included in the definition of “refugee” under international law, as well as internally displaced people. According to international refugee law, a refugee is someone who seeks refuge in a foreign country because of war and violence, or out of fear of persecution “on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group” (to use the terminology from U.S. law).²

We will need to become more accustomed to more and more refugees. 40% of the world’s population relies on run-off from melted ice for drinking water—and with rising temperatures, there’s less and less ice to melt.^{3, 4} Lake Chad is drying up. At the same time, sea levels are rising, threatening areas like Tuvalu, Bangladesh, and Kiribati, and sending refugees into other, neighboring areas.

As always, the problem is not one-sided, and the greatest threat does not come from a single facet of the crisis, but the synergy of many convergent forces. In this case, beyond the environmental stresses that displace large populations looms the greater threat of “water wars.”^{5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10} Wars over water will only increase the flow of refugees.

The correlation of environmental stress, and geopolitical stress, is not a coincidence. As Jared Diamond wrote in Collapse:

Ask some ivory-tower academic ecologist, who knows a lot about the environment but never reads a newspaper and has no interest in politics, to name the overseas countries facing some of the worst problems of environmental stress, overpopulation, or both. The ecologist would likely answer: “That’s a no-brainer, it’s obvious. Your list of environmentally stressed or overpopulated countries should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus others”.

Then ask a first world politician, who knows nothing and cares less about the environment and population problems, to name the world’s worst trouble spots: countries where state government has already been overwhelmed and has collapsed, or is now at risk of collapsing, or has been wracked by recent civil wars; and countries that, as a result of those problems, are also creating problems for us rich first world countries. Surprise, surprise: the two lists would be very similar.

Today, just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.

The results of these transparent connections are far-reaching and devastating. There are genocides, such as those that exploded in Bangladesh, Burundi, Indonesia, and Rwanda; civil wars or revolutions, as in most of the countries on the lists; calls for the dispatch of troops, as to Afghanistan, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia; the collapse of central government, as has already happened in Somalia and the Solomon Islands; and overwhelming poverty, as in all of the countries on these lists.

Hence the best predictors of modern “state failures” prove to be measures of environmental and population pressure, such as high infant mortality, rapid population growth, a high percentage of the population in their late teens and 20s, and hordes of young men without job prospects and ripe for recruitment into militias.

Those pressures create conflicts over shortages of land, water, forests, fish, oil, and minerals. They create not only chronic internal conflict, but also emigration of political and economic refugees, and wars between countries arising when authoritarian regimes attack neighbours in order to divert popular attention from internal stresses.

In short, it is not a question open for debate whether the collapses of past societies have modern parallels and offer any lessons to us. Instead, the real question is how many more countries will undergo them.

Things are going to become worse before they become better. Civilization is not capable of stopping voluntarily; it can only stop when the anabolic growth curve has run its course, and it smashes itself into the ground. The good news is that we will likely survive this catastrophe as a species. The bad news is that at this point, we have already pursued this path of rampaging environmental destruction so far that we had best become comfortable with the idea of refugees in our own country very soon. We sneer for now, but we would be well advised to cultivate our capacity for empathy at least far enough to remember that these are human beings in terrible circumstances. After all, would we not like others to think the same of us, when (rather than if) we face similar straits in the coming years?