FOUR

THREAT FORECAST: WHERE CLIMATE CHANGE MEETS SCIENCE FICTION

[Elite] fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract.

—Rebecca Solnit

When asked what she thought the greatest challenges facing the field of crisis management would be in the next decade, Lina Kolesnikova, a homeland security researcher for the magazine Crisis Response Journal, hardly hesitated when she said refugees. Kolesnikova was one of a host of speakers at an international conference billed as “Climate, Geopolitics & Economics, Technological Advances.” The presentations were held off to the side of a gigantic exhibition hall in Paris, in an enclosed room with large glass windows. Outside, you could see droves of people moving past from vendor to vendor in perhaps the world’s biggest homeland security shopping mall, known as Milipol, in November 2015.

Every single time the door of the side room opened, the collective noise of more than 24,056 people from 143 countries—including representatives from 949 companies and official delegations from 115 countries—entered the room like a gale force wind. It became difficult to hear the speakers. Outside hung banners from companies of the world’s burgeoning homeland security industry like Taser, Elbit Systems, Airbus, Atos, Verint, as well as companies with names right out of the pages of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel—Protecop, Visiom, Scopex, Ercom, and Ixiom. The SSI Groupe sign, as one example, advertised that the French company had superior “global response to multiple threats” with its audio and video surveillance, tracking and locating, jamming, and monitoring products. This futuristic world—a cacophony of visceral, booming white noise—can be overwhelming at first.

What Kolesnikova is beginning to describe is the threat forecast: escalating crisis is inevitable and amped-up surveillance is the answer—it can keep things under control.

The conference began in the immediate aftermath of the November 13, 2015, terrorist attacks in Paris that left 129 people dead. On November 18, just two kilometers away from where this big bonanza was happening, French authorities fired more than 5,000 rounds into an apartment in Saint-Denis, killing two people and collapsing the entire floor of the apartment. From the hotel where I was staying I could hear the early-morning mortar fire. France’s violent state of emergency was colliding with what most people were calling the most important United Nations climate summit, the 21st Conference of Parties, or COP21, a little over a week away. If world leaders didn’t agree to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, climate impacts would become a runaway train. It felt like the future of the world was in the balance.

Guns and the companies selling them were everywhere. Pistols and assault rifles were elegantly presented so you could pick up a weapon, hold it, and caress it, as I saw so many people do with absolutely no embarrassment, just a concentrated, even serene look, as if the gun might purr when affectionately handled.

Kolesnikova, Russian with short blond hair and glasses, didn’t even need to think about what the biggest threat was. She pinned it down quickly. It was the “influx of people to Europe” that would be a “huge challenge.” Like many of the vendors peddling technologies, she was quick to make a bold declaration that there were “people who pretend they are refugees.”

Her prescription was the “three Gs”: “guns, guards, and gates.”

What she meant was the deafening cacophony of surveillance equipment outside. We could predict not only—as they also discussed during the panel—a world of Category 6 winds, ravaging fires, devouring seas, and parched landscapes, but also a world of surveillance drones, crowd-control, and walls. And the most cutting-edge surveillance industries were there to deliver. Just as every climate projection showed more environmental crisis, market projections for homeland security surveillance revealed a world where Big Brother will dominate. In the 21st century, both dynamics are poised to become a part of people’s everyday lives in ways that they have never been before.

You didn’t even have to read the homeland security market’s optimistic projections to feel its potential in the air at Milipol. Indeed, in 2014 this market surpassed €500 billion (US$558 billion) for the first time, according to an informational brochure handed out at the conference. Perhaps that’s why in between militarized mannequins dressed in body armor, with gas masks and assault rifles, men and women in suits mingled, clinking glasses of wine and eating cheese. Everywhere there were monitoring cameras, drones of all shapes and sizes, armored cars, impenetrable border walls, and biometrics such as facial-recognition technology. At one point I took a “biometric selfie” that rendered my image in multiple separate squares, ranging from normal to thermal energy to green night-vision. I assumed that, as on the U.S.-Mexico border, the device retained my picture and added it to a remote database. Another company, called ISPRA, displayed a multi-barreled—crowd-control—weapon called Thunderstorm that could also be mounted to any of the many armored vehicles on display and launch tear gas, stun grenades, and smoke, either separately or at the same time. Preparing, I assumed, like many in surrounding booths, for the inevitable resistance of the displaced to Koleskinova’s “three Gs.”

And as Koleskinova spoke, when someone opened the door, the noise of this bustling marketplace was so deafening that I had to strain to hear her. I have been to many homeland security trade expos over the years, but never have I been to one with such energy, so much raw excitement. As global warming accelerates, there is a fortune to be made.

“WHICH OTHER MEANS DO YOU HAVE TO SOLVE YOUR BORDER ISSUES?”

British Rear Admiral Chris Parry summed up the international security consensus regarding climate refugees in perhaps the most vivid terms. The future climate migrations would be like the “Goths and the Vandals,”1 the barbarian invaders who brought down the Roman Empire in the 5th century. Large immigrant populations, he said, would have little regard for their host countries and begin a sort of “reverse colonisation,”² a term similar to the reconquista used by members of border militia groups in the United States who fear that Mexico will take its territory back (the United States took over nearly half of Mexico after the Mexican-American war in the mid 19th century). Because of this, Parry laid out a prescient prediction (now backed by the dystopic Milipol floor): the increasing shift to robots, drones, nanotechnology, lasers, microwave weapons, space-based systems, and “customized” nuclear bombs.³ These are the guards, gates, and guns necessary to protect the centers of political, economic, and social power that will really be under attack by the coming climate-induced “barbarian” hordes.

In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit examined militarized responses to natural disasters, ranging from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. Following an essay in Social Forces by Lee Clarke and Caron Chess in 2008, Solnit and many other scholars called these sorts of heavy-handed responses “elite panic.”⁴ Solnit wrote, “Elites and authorities often fear the changes of disaster or anticipate that change means chaos and destruction or at least the undermining of the foundations of their power.”5

The findings that Solnit’s work underscored would not be popular or profitable for the vendors on the Milipol floor: disaster sociologists’ studies demonstrate not only that panic in the face of disaster “is rare,” but that people in such situations are more inclined to engage in acts of mutual assistance, community solidarity, and altruism.

However, as Clarke and Chess write, “planners and policy makers sometimes act as if the human response to threatening conditions is more dangerous than the threatening conditions themselves.”⁶ They say that although it is the powerless, not the powerful, who are said to panic, it is the elite who exercise “hypervigilance.” If the most heightened form of hypervigilance is panic, as they write, then down a couple of notches is the permanent anxiety at the foundation of the homeland security state.

It’s not about the disaster happening now, but the disaster that could happen in the future. It is not the people panicking now, it is the anticipated mass panic in the future as the fires, floods, dust storms, and water shortages impact larger numbers of people over longer amounts of time.

Homeland Security is reacting to this perception of the future, preparing the world for human panic in the face of turmoil and upheaval before it actually happens.

It is preemptive pacification. The government anticipates that the coming crises will unleash movements that expose chronic inequalities and undermine the state’s capacity to enforce a system that benefits the few and, although they might not admit it, disadvantages the many. The perceived danger is not what imperils the whole of humanity, it is what endangers the power brokers of the very system that continues to poison the atmosphere and environment despite the assertions of a consensus of scientists that we must stop, or at least curb, human pollution.

The threat forecasts of human displacement and environmental destabilization in a warming world started well before Parry’s barbarian descriptions, even preceding Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy, and well before there was the type of rigorous empirical research connecting climate change to migration that there is today. In 1990, after the first International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meeting, the initial assessment said that climate change “could initiate large migrations of people, leading over a number of years to severe disruptions of settlement patterns and social instability in some areas.”7 Joseph Romm, then of the U.S. Department of Energy, followed suit the next year by saying that climate change could lead to “conflict or ecosystem collapse,” and then could be a “threat” to the United States “if refugees were allowed to flee in large numbers to this country.”⁸ The threat to the state, again, is not the ecosystem’s collapse, but rather the people displaced by such a collapse. In 2001, German climatologist Herm Ott not only predicted that water and food shortages, rising sea levels, and changing precipitation would lead to “mass migrations,” but also that there would also be “low- and high-intensity warfare in many parts of the southern world.”⁹ U.S. climate guru James Hansen stated climate-induced “forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”¹⁰

If “elite panic” leads to overt militarized operations in moments of turmoil, this “elite anxiety” makes sure that the systems are in place—such as the build-up of homeland security regimes—so that such future overreactions will have a conduit.

In Israel, a 2012 report from more than 100 academics and experts asserted that to “combat increased waves of illegal migration that will likely accompany climate change,” Israel must fortify its borders with “impassable barriers,” including “sea fences” along the Mediterranean and Red Seas.11

A.K. Singh, a retired air marshal from India, might as well have been describing Rear Admiral Parry’s “Goths and Vandals” when he stated that he “foresees mass migrations” that would start out with “people fighting for food and shelter. When the migration starts, every state would want to stop the migrations from happening. Eventually, it would have to become a military conflict.”

He asked: “Which other means do you have to resolve your border issues?”¹²

THREAT FORECAST: HUMAN-MADE DYSTOPIA

The time frame of a national security planner is 30 years. It takes that long for a major military platform to go “from the drawing board to the battlefield,”¹³ according to former assistant deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell, editor of Climate Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change. Based on a 2007 U.S. House of Representatives directive for the National Intelligence Council, top scientists and military practitioners in the United States began making serious projections connecting climate change and national security. The intelligence estimate included estimates of food and water shortages, humanitarian disasters, and mass migration that will “tax U.S. military transportation and support force structures, resulting in strained readiness posture.”14 The United States must “plan for growing immigration pressures,” the report said, too, in part because almost a fourth of the countries with the greatest percentage of low-level coastal zones are in the Caribbean.¹⁵ Their projections were meant to help the Pentagon and Homeland Security visualize the world to come, so that the necessary surveillance, enforcement tools, and weapons could be designed to maintain control.

Migration models and borders were a significant part of these projections, which I will examine here. In the introduction, Campbell wrote, the “sheer numbers of potentially displaced people is staggering.”¹⁶ He pointed out that one recent World Bank report included calculations that, over the course of the 21st century, sea-level rise due to global warming could displace as many as one billion people from their homes between now and 2050.

Climate Cataclysm looked at three different scenarios: the “expected,” a 1.3-degree Celsius temperature rise by 2040; the “severe,” a 2.6-degree Celsius rise by 2040; and the “catastrophic,” a 5.6-degree Celsius rise by 2100. Every projection of climate cataclysm underscored the threat of massive immigration coming to the United States. In the “expected” scenario, authors John Podesta—the 2016 campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton and former chief of staff to Bill Clinton—and Peter Ogden, from the Center for American Progress, a self-described nonpartisan educational institute, said that a world of intensifying heat, reduced water availability, and severe weather will result in increased “border stress” both in the Southwest and in the Caribbean. The flow of displaced people, in their highly clinical words, will “generate political tension.”17

In the severe scenario of a 2.6 degree Celsius rise by 2040, the “border problems” overwhelm U.S. capabilities “beyond the possibility of control, except by drastic methods and perhaps not even then,” wrote Leon Fuerth, former security adviser to Al Gore. “Efforts to choke off illegal immigration,” he continued, “will have increasingly divisive repercussions on the domestic, social, and political structure of the United States.”¹⁸

In a later interview with journalist Gwynne Dyer in the book Climate Wars, Fuerth commented that “Governments with resources will be forced to engage in long, nightmarish episodes of triage: deciding what and who can be salvaged from engulfment by a disordered environment. The choices will need to be made primarily among the poorest, not just abroad but at home. We have already previewed the images, in the course of the organisational and spiritual unravelling that was Hurricane Katrina.”¹⁹

The catastrophic scenario envisioned a world heated up 5.6 degrees Celsius by 2100. More than 100 nations will be “consumed by internal conflict, spewing desperate refugees, and harboring and spawning violent extremist movements,” wrote Sharon Burke of the Center for a New American Security. Burke projected that, at that point, governance and infrastructure would become overwhelmed by the sheer mass of refugees crossing borders, “and in some cases armed or extremist groups migrating into their territories.” A “volatile mix” involving millions of “desperate people looking for safe haven” will overwhelm states, Burke said, and addressing this “will likely involve inhumane border control practices.” The countries of the Global North will become “aggressively isolationist, with militarized borders.” Burke added that the imposition of martial law was a possibility, gated communities would be more commonplace, and “the level of popular anger towards the United States, as the leading historical contributor to climate change, will be astronomical.”20

Even if all participating countries hit the emission goals they pledged to achieve during the Paris Agreement of December 2015—and that’s a big “if” (especially considering both its unbinding nature and the fact that the Trump administration has now backed out)—the Earth will still continue to warm and the biosphere will still experience severe destabilization. According to the above projections, arguably based on elite hyper-anxiety, nations of the world will be somewhere between between “border stress” and “beyond the possibility of control.” Given the nonlinear progression of global warming and all its uncertainties, the likelihood of civilizational catastrophe is higher every day.

Climate scientist Kevin Anderson, who is known for not having flown for 10 years, calls the 2015 Paris Agreement a “triumph,” on one hand, because limiting warming to a two-degree Celsius increase is “an obligation rather than a target.”²¹ According to scientists, 2°C would result in a manageable intensification of environmental crises. Beyond that, all bets are off. Many island nations are insisting that 2°C is not safe, that temperature rise needs to be kept at 1.5 degrees Celsius. Otherwise, they say, they will be swallowed whole by the oceans.

The Paris obligation, Anderson says, at least creates a standard to which governments, businesses, and wider civil society can be held accountable. But then he puts his own praise in context. He claims that the “remainder of the 32-page document has no meaningful substance in delivering temperature obligations.”22

In fact, it is not even close. According to Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan, even if the Paris Agreements are met, the Earth’s living systems will experience a temperature rise of 3.5°C by 2100.²³ Anderson says that when you do the math, the allowance for greenhouse emissions is much “in excess of what is safe.” He says that in order to reconcile this discrepancy there must be an anticipation of the “successful roll-out of highly speculative negative emissions technologies—technologies that do not exist yet, and may never exist.”²⁴ But what we can be sure will exist is severe border militarization, required to counter much-anticipated social destabilization. Again, a 3.5°C increase is well above the “severe” scenario Fuerth projects above, and borders will impose severe methods of control.

No matter how the issue is approached, immediate and drastic change is required to prevent global warming from becoming a force that overwhelms human civilization and exceeds our collective ability to manage it. By immediate, I mean right now. By drastic change, I mean massive lifestyle changes for people in the United States, and not just an expedited phase-out of all gas-powered vehicles, but an immediate restructuring of corporate America, industry, travel, environmental protection, and lifestyles based on consumerism, disposability, and convenience. Hitting zero emissions by 2025 means implementing intensive change right now. This urgency will only intensify while Trump and Pence are in power, and accelerated climate change prevention cannot be expected to begin in the United States until they are out of office. To top it off, the Paris Agreement is not set to go into effect until 2020 anyway, after another 200 billion tons of greenhouse accelerant will have defiled the atmosphere.

Climate journalist Eric Holthaus says unless the globe enacts the above drastic changes immediately, a 2°C temperature rise is unavoidable. It is therefore reasonable to think that by 2040 we will arrive at the threshold where all potential triggers will be pulled, and the trajectory of civilization becomes irreconcilably altered.

In her book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein writes that if things stay the same, it won’t be the “status quo extended indefinitely.” Klein predicts a sort of evolving situation of “climate-change-fueled disaster capitalism—profiteering disguised as emission reduction, privatized hyper-militarized borders, and, quite possibly, high-risk geoengineering when things spiral out of control.” The status quo is now developing into this scenario, as weapons and surveillance businesses make a mint selling products to governments that clearly seem to prioritize militarization over prevention.

For this reason, it doesn’t even matter if any of these threat forecasts are actually true, a new military and homeland security platform is already moving forward, anticipating and preparing 30 years in advance. “Over the next 20 years, worries about climate change effects may be more significant than any physical changes linked to climate change,” according to the 2008 report Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, written by the National Intelligence Council. Indeed, this center for strategizing in the U.S. intelligence community reports that “perceptions of a rapidly changing environment may cause nations to take unilateral actions to secure resources, territory, and other interests.”25

However, in Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World, scholar Gregory White writes that “securitizing climate-induced migration not only fails to solve the problem, but is also imprudent, because it enhances security against a non-threat.” Not only that, he says, but the threat narrative “sets in motion a counterproductive, spiralling security dilemma and saps energy away” from the earnest search for real solutions to the ecological crisis before us.²⁶

UNPRECEDENTED BOOM PERIOD: FORECAST TO THE FUTURE

When the dark-gray surveillance ball rolled on the blue carpet in the Phoenix Convention Center, it was hard to tell exactly what it was. It had two cameras on either side of its “head,” which was covered with small domes that looked like miniature ears. Like a “chameleon,” the cameras could look at two different places at the same time, boasted the manufacturer, GuardBot. It had forward motion and backward motion; it could do 360-degree turns; it could travel off-road, on sand, on snow; it could swim. It was originally meant for NASA to explore Mars, but now the company’s smiling vendor—impeccably dressed in shiny black shoes, pressed black pants, and a white button-down shirt—was explaining that his company had other ideas. These rolling potential robotic Border Patrol agents, another GuardBot employee explained to Cronkite News, could one day police the U.S.-Mexico divide, even in packs of 10, 20, or “maybe thirty.”27

Similar to the scene at the Milipol convention in Paris, all around him were other robots: small tank-like machines cruising on the carpet, medium- and small-size drones (it’s difficult to get the Predator Bs, the type of unmanned aerial systems deployed on the U.S. border, into the room.) They call it a Border Security Expo, but here was the crystal ball, here was the future, here you could see what the U.S. border—and increasing swaths of the interior—may look like in 20, 30 years, the ever-evolving “gates, guns, and guards.” The dystopian futures foreseen by George Orwell and William Gibson have come to life in the matrix of high-definition surveillance, anti-ballistic towers, FLIR operational war rooms, acoustic technology, and crowd-suppression capabilities. The weapons of the authoritarian future have arrived, and are charging head first into climate change.

In other words, the GuardBot is not a tech nerd’s fantasy. If deployed, its purpose will be to pursue, arrest, and possibly even fire weapons at people. Israel has already deployed “robo-snipers” in its operations against Palestinian communities and has made a series of “auto-kill zones” that use remote-controlled machine guns, motion sensors, and drones. Barbara Opall-Rome of Defense News reported in 2007 that “initial deployment plans for the See-Shoot system call for mounting a 0.5-caliber automated machine gun in each of several pillboxes interspersed along the Gaza border fence.”28

Also, on the South Korean side of the heavily militarized divide with North Korea, two Samsung-made, machine gun-wielding robots have surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice-recognition capabilities. They have grenade launchers that can target and kill people up to two miles away. “Automated machine guns capable of finding, tracking, warning and eliminating human targets, absent of any human interaction already exist in our world,” wrote Simon Parkin in the article “Killer Robots: The Soldiers that Never Sleep.”²⁹

Down the hall from the exhibition hall, Mark Borkowski, from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Technology Acquisition and Innovation, is pacing in front of the podium, clenching a pamphlet that is the agency’s 2020 vision plan. Borkowski—wearing a tan jacket, white button-down shirt, and bow tie—is the guy you want to convince if you want to get a contract for your technology, if you want to sell a GuardBot or surveillance camera. Borkowski talks about people crossing the borders. He talks about technologies that will help him find terrorists. He carries himself with a certain pride. He is a rocket scientist and a mathematician and he makes sure the audience knows this. He talks about technologies that will help him find hidden weapons of mass destruction. “Innovation is highly visible in the 2020 plan.” He is looking for the next great border technology, the equivalent, he says, of the iPhone. He uses his daughters’ iPhone as an example. “We didn’t know we needed it until we saw it,” he said. “Now we can’t live without it.”

Two years later, Borkowski discussed the Trump administration’s January 2017 executive order on border security and its definition of “operational control.” “‘Operational control’ shall mean the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.” The emphasis on “all” was Borkowski’s. Instead of expressing the impossibility of stopping all illicit entries across U.S. borders, which include international airports, Borkowski doubled down. He brought up a term that he said came to him when he was soaping himself in the shower 10 years before: “persistant impedance.” CBP now had a definition for it: the “continuous and constant ability to deter or delay.”30 What they previously did on parts of the border, Borkowski said, they would do for the entire border under Trump.

Behind Borkowski’s words loom a budget and a political will that dwarf those of the pre-9/11 U.S. border enforcement apparatus. He is in command of a technology budget for the largest law enforcement agency in the United States, with a budget that only seems to grow and grow. The 2017 CBP budget, at about $14 billion, is almost equal to the combined budgets of the FBI, DEA, U.S. Marshals, and ATF, which come to about $15.7 billion. If you add ICE’s $6 billion budget to that of CBP, there is $20 billion for border and immigration enforcement, a twelve-fold increase over the INS annual budgets in the early 1990s. The Trump administration is poised to pour in much more.

And even though Borkowski always mentions the limits of U.S. spending, the vendors that pack that room all know the forecasts. They know that the global border security market is in an “unprecedented boom period.”31 Vision Gain wrote that the global market was close to $24 billion in 2014 and will continue to grow exponentially, because of a “virtuous circle” that will continue to drive spending for a long time based on three interlocking developments: “illegal immigration and terrorist infiltration,” more money for border policing in “developing countries,” and “maturation”³² of new technologies. The way Vision Gain lays it out, it sounds like a scientific projection for the climate-changed future. Another marketing firm, Sandler Research, projects that the border security market will grow 7.89 percent from 2015 to 2019. Its analysts say that borders not only “safeguard” national security and sovereignty, but also “economic prosperity.”³³ And the broader global security market is poised to almost double between 2011 and 2022 ($305 to $546 billion), though the Milipol stats are more optimistic, indicating that $500 billion mark had already been surpassed. According to Homeland Security Research, the drivers of such markets include “cross-border illegal immigration, organized crime, smuggling of goods & narcotics, and terror.”³⁴ Newer forecasts even have begun to include “climate-related natural disasters,” a phenomenon that increased by 13 percent in 2013, making the “natural disaster preparation and responses” market poised to pass the $150 billion level.³⁵

As these numbers show, worldwide budgets for border security are growing fast. In Europe, for example, budgets for its border guard FRONTEX jumped 67.4 percent between 2015 and 2016 and are “expected to grow to an estimated €322 million [US$359 million] in 2020,”36—50 times what it was in 2005. As the report “Border Wars: The Arms Industry Profiting from Europe’s Refugee Tragedy” exposes, this has “led to a booming border security market,”³⁷ and the same industries selling weapons in the Middle East and North Africa, fomenting unrest and displacement, have also been “key winners of EU border security contracts.” And, like the private industry sitting in that conference hall watching Borkowski, “the arms and security industry helps shape European border security policy, through lobbying” and “regular interactions with EU’s border institutions.”³⁸

And now market forecasts are contemplating the Trump effect. Not only have stocks surged for construction companies—such as Martin Marietta Materials, Vulcan Materials, and remarkably the Mexican company CEMEX—on the hope that a massive border wall is in the works, but Homeland Security Research forecasts significant growth between 2017 and 2022 partly because “Trump promised, throughout his campaign, a tough fight against Islamist extremism at home and abroad, and to invest in law and order.” The forecasts also mention “European terror and migration crisis” and “climate warming-related natural disasters growth.”³⁹ In February, investors were betting on Israel companies reaping “a windfall” from Donald Trump securitization spending plans.⁴⁰ Companies such as Elbit Systems, Magal Security Systems, and Check Point Software Technologies “have seen their share prices soar since Trump’s election victory on Nov. 8.”41

Everything is moving fast, like clouds gathering into a rotating super-cell. Even 20 years ago the Predator B unmanned aerial drones—large, pilotless, mosquito-shaped planes—might have still seemed like things from the pages of science fiction. So perhaps would an Israeli company—such as the stock-soaring Elbit Systems—that has invented a semi-sentient fortified “smart wall” capable of detecting human movement and touch. The company is now building a series of high-tech surveillance towers that are able to see night and day for a distance of up to seven miles. These towers are able to work in tandem with one another, in tandem with the drones, in tandem with the more than 12,000 motion sensors implanted along the 2,000-mile Mexican border. Twenty years ago, the idea of studying locust wings to develop miniature surveillance drones, or a robotic kiosk to detect if a person is lying, might still have seemed like things from a Ray Bradbury novel. Now even an amateur weather forecaster can see what’s on the horizon. Although more barriers will surely populate the U.S. borderscape in select places, Donald Trump does not need to spend billions on a bricks-and-mortar wall when there is much more sophisticated technology available to weaponize the region.

On page eight of the strategic vision pamphlet in Borkowski’s hand, under the subtitle “Innovation,” is discussion about the commitment to innovation to make the paramilitary organization more “agile and adaptable.” The text talks about the evolving “global challenges” and “leveraging science, technology, and corporate innovation to ensure optimal capabilities development for peak performance.” On page 21, graced with a picture of a blue-striped Predator B drone with a CBP agency insignia, it underscores the dedication to bringing more technology to the border enforcement regime as an “invaluable force multiplier to increased situational awareness.” It talks about “securing the homeland” with information gleaned from “biometrics, mobile surveillance systems, radiation detectors, ground sensors, imaging systems, and other advanced technologies.”42

• • •

Dave Gratton and Scott Carpenter of the EyeSite Surveillance company leaned back in their chairs in their Phoenix, Arizona office. Through the window behind them, I saw plane after plane taking off on that hot September afternoon. Behind them was a sign that laid out the layered strategy of their overt perimeter surveillance security system. Like a border zone, the “layers of protection” included, the sign explained, deterrence, detection, assessment, and apprehension. They too were at the Border Security Expo that April, near the GuardBot display, listening to the words of Mark Borkowski. There they promoted their covert technologies, or “concealments,” as they are known. They are one of many companies turning cacti, or some part of the natural world, into organic surveillance camouflage.

Gratton described how EyeSite was an “American dream company” started in “Scott’s garage.” Gratton talked at length about how he had arrived at that Phoenix office “the legal way” after being born and raised in Australia. They talked about a booming security market. They talked about how after 9/11 people were okay with being on camera, and mentioned that there were 26,000 security cameras in London alone. Gratton said that there was now “downsized privacy” and “upsized security.” Like many in the so-called security sector they have had success. In this world there is a stark division between “good” and “bad,” and the “bad guys run in packs.”

If you take the future projections of the homeland security market and place them side by side with future climate projections, you can really begin to see the future come into focus inside the crystal ball. You see superstorms and surveillance cameras, droughts and drones. You see a warming planet with degraded landscapes, and now you see cacti filled with cameras like the ones they were describing at EyeSite.

The San Antonio company TimberSpy has even taken it a step further. They create fake cacti and tree stumps from artificial plastic used at Disney World. The barrel cactus can be stuffed with surveillance cameras. They have rockcams, perfect for desert arroyos, to see passing border-crossers. But clearly TimberSpy’s speciality is tree stumps. Perfect, according to Kurt Ludwisgen, for patrolling the deforested “Montana border.” There is the smaller “scoutout,” which can carry cameras and transmitters. And there is the seven-foot “lookout” that can either be a “robustly equipped surveillance unit”43 or fit an entire Homeland Security agent can fit inside. As Elizabeth Kolbert described in her book The Sixth Extinction, there have been five major mass extinctions of life on planet Earth, and the sixth is happening now, right before our eyes. It is, Kolbert writes, a “truly extraordinary moment.”44 On U.S. borders, this vast loss of biodiversity, is being replaced with surveillance equipment that looks like the natural world.