Borders becoming an obsession

editor:	Gurmeet Singh

The modern world’s obsession with borders – not what happens within those borders, but the borders themselves – is pretty frightening. The Macedonian border with Greece is fast becoming one Europe’s most aggravated, as the route that migrants had used to get from Greece to Germany is shut down.

Macedonian police and border patrols are now using tear gas on migrants who attempt to break through the border. However, with strong winds, tear gas fumes actually stray into encampment areas, where over 12,000 people are stuck. The effects of tear gas on humans isn’t limited to mucous membranes, but it can irritate and damage skin, and since there is no specific remedy for it, people tend to experiment with home-made remedies when water is scarce, like at a border. So that’s ordinary people being sprayed with tear gas, because they’re at a border – not because they’ve committed any crimes.

More than 52,000 migrants are trapped in Greece, with borders to Balk countries closed too, and new arrivals will be deported to Turkey under the terms of last month’s Turkish-EU deal.

Meanwhile, at the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s third largest bleaching event has been taking place. This is where sea-level temperatures rise so drastically, that the coral expel their symbiotic algae, and if this continues for long enough, the coral die.

While aerial surveys suggest only the Northern parts of the reef were affected, scientists have struggled to determine a Southern boundary. Since nature is no respecter of our notions of borders and boundaries, we’re reminded it won’t do so just for the benefit of those who precipitated that destruction in the first place – us.

Borders and boundaries will only continue to plague our imaginations in the future – some will continue to be strengthened, with weapons, and others won’t appear, no matter how much we want them to. Plus the issues of migration and climate change have already been extensively discussed elsewhere.

But these two issues will only continue to fuel our future news – as climate change creates more migrants, borders will continue to be shut down. The solutions: help fight climate change, support migrants. That’s what you can do.