At the point where we are, it is almost a platitude: summer is no longer so much the season of rest, of generalized slowing down, as that of the chain of catastrophes, of eco-anxiety, of social relations which tense in the oven of the cities.
This week the planet experienced its two hottest days on record. On Monday, it averaged 17.01 degrees on earth, surpassing the record of 16.92 degrees, set in August 2016. The new record was broken again twenty-four hours later, when it was 17 .18 degrees on average on the planet on Tuesday. It wouldn’t have been this hot on the planet for tens of thousands of years.
There is no doubt, from devastating forest fires to lethal heat in North Africa and China, the degradation of our living environments is more and more visible and more and more brutal.
On this subject, the results of a study published in May in the journal Nature Sustainability suggest that if we continue to follow the current warming trajectory — which points us to a 2.7 degree rise in global temperatures by the end of the century — 22% to 39% of the world’s population could be stuck in a hostile living environment. Billions of people could, within a few decades, face extreme heat, famines, droughts, suffocating pollution, to the point where exile will become unavoidable. The end of the century might even be too distant a horizon, when by 2070, 19% of the Earth’s surface might be too hot to be inhabited.
We must take the measure of such projections. We can already see how people are treated who flee from regions of the world affected by climatic precariousness and the socio-political crises that it generates and complicates. What will happen when hundreds of millions of people are evicted from their homes, from their communities that have become uninhabitable?
Even on a small scale, our political choices say a lot about the efforts we are prepared to make to ensure that everyone can live in dignified conditions. Take accommodation with us. As of July 4, 494 tenant households across Quebec were still homeless. This number would in reality be higher, since it is only a question here of households who have requested temporary accommodation or support. It is almost certain that there are homeless tenants who have fallen entirely through the cracks.
The Popular Action Front in Urban Redevelopment reminded us this week: without structuring measures to meet the housing needs of the population, and more particularly those of low-income tenants, the situation will continue to deteriorate.
It is obvious: the 1er July is now the date on which, year after year, we tighten the screws on tenants. Each relocation increases the risk of incurring too expensive rent, residential precariousness, hidden homelessness. Each time July 2 appears on the calendar, the tenant class finds itself a little more impoverished. Like a sadistic game whose rules are dictated by the whims of real estate speculation and regulatory negligence.
One can imagine what it must be like to find yourself, at the end of this first week of July, without accommodation, suffocating in the extreme heat. The heat wave is fortuitous, of course, but it adds a layer of hostility to a situation that is already very lacking in humanity—a deliberate, planned inhumanity.
The mood, it will be understood, is not one of altruism. It’s even quite the opposite, when we seem much more comfortable with control and repression than with mechanisms of solidarity.
Take the recent statement from the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) regarding police arrests. On June 22, he announced that despite the publication of a new report showing that in 2021, indigenous, black and Arab people had been disproportionately stopped by the police, the imposition of a moratorium on this practice does not was simply not possible. Despite the clear discriminatory effects of this practice, despite its lack of legal basis, despite the recognition by the head of the SPVM, Fady Dagher, of the existence of a problem of systemic racism in police interventions, there is no question of to renouncer.
The message has the merit of being clear: the desire for control outweighs the rights of citizens, and the risk of further stigmatizing vulnerable populations. If this does not surprise anyone coming from the SPVM, we will even underline the ease with which Valérie Plante accepted this position.
Nothing to do with the climate crisis, nothing to do with the housing crisis, you might say. Unfortunately, the spontaneous adhesion to control and repression measures is perfectly combined with the planned deterioration of the socio-economic situation of a growing part of the population. And this alloy traces the contours of our future, in a world that is less and less habitable.
Columnist specializing in environmental justice issues, Aurélie Lanctôt is a doctoral candidate in law at McGill University.