Hostile environments, climate justice, and the politics of the lifeboat

This article explores how migration and ecological crises need to be addressed together by examining the most common analogy to emerge in critical and creative responses to the relationship between climate breakdown and global mobility - that of individual nation-states as lifeboats. To demonstrate this, I analyse the ways in which John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) reveal how dystopian fiction is able to stage, satirize, and confront the stark premises of the nation-as-lifeboat analogy. Lastly, by placing Wright’s depiction of the confluent experiences of environmental refugees and Aboriginal Australians in dialogue with the perspectives of Native American (specifically Potawatomi) scholars, Kyle Whyte and Robin Wall Kimmerer, I demonstrate how debates about mobility, climate catastrophe, and interspecies relations need to be informed by Indigenous science and storytelling.