Climate Wars

To show how this works, Welzer returns to the events we file under other headings, and asks whether the file is complete. Rwanda, 1994, is remembered as an ethnic genocide — Hutu against Tutsi, an eruption of tribal hatred. Welzer does not deny the ethnic dimension. He argues it was riding on something the standard account leaves out. Rwanda in the early 1990s was among the most densely populated countries in Africa, its soil exhausted, its farms subdivided past the point of feeding a family, its coffee income collapsing on the world market. The land could no longer hold the people who lived on it.

In that pressure, ethnicity became the instrument for a sorting that was, underneath, about survival and resources. Killing a neighbor freed a plot of land. The machete did the work that scarcity had made thinkable. Welzer is not reducing the genocide to a fight over farmland — the ideology, the propaganda, the state machinery were all real and all necessary. He is pointing out that the material squeeze supplied the desperation the ideology then organized. Strip out the exhausted soil and the collapsing incomes, and the account is missing its fuel.

The second front Welzer identifies is the border, and here his argument turns to the wealthy world's own conduct. Climate change hits hardest the places that did least to cause it — the low-lying deltas, the semi-arid belts, the regions already living at the edge. The people who lose their land there will move, because that is what people have always done when land fails. The question is where they will go, and what the destinations will do to keep them out.

Welzer's grim forecast is that the rich democracies will respond to climate migration not by opening but by fortifying. He writes before the largest waves reached Europe, but he sees the logic already taking shape: the border becomes a militarized line, the sea becomes a moat, and the drownings become a cost that the receiving societies learn to tolerate as the price of order. The violence here is not a war between armies. It is the slow, administrative violence of exclusion — the decision, renewed each year, that certain people may be left to die outside the wall so that life inside it can continue unchanged.

Step back from the specific conflicts and a single mechanism runs through all of them: triage. In every scenario Welzer describes, someone is deciding who gets protected and who gets written off. The genocide sorts neighbors. The border sorts arrivals. The redirected river sorts nations upstream and down. Climate change does not invent this sorting — it forces it into the open and makes it constant. The comfortable question of the twenty-first century is not whether we will make these decisions, but whether we will admit that we are making them.

This is where Welzer's psychology matters more than his climatology. His real subject is how ordinary people come to accept the unacceptable, one small normalization at a time. Nobody chooses catastrophe. They choose the next reasonable step, and the step after that, until they arrive somewhere they would once have refused to go — and by then the arrival feels like common sense. He calls this a shifting baseline of the permissible. What was scandalous becomes routine. The drowned migrant, the closed camp, the redirected water: each enters the background of normal life so quietly that no one can point to the moment it became acceptable.

The heat wave of 2003 killed its tens of thousands and then receded into the record books, remembered as weather rather than warning. Welzer's book asks us to read it the other way: as an early, mild instance of a world where the environment stops cushioning us and starts sorting us. The dead of that summer were the old, the poor, the isolated — the people a stressed society protects last. That order of vulnerability is not a detail. It is the pattern the coming decades will run at larger scale.