ABSTRACT
In this chapter we turn our attention to discussion of the traumatised planetary system and the implications of this catastrophe for how we might understand the unhousing of millions and the increase in human mobility (migration) in context and as consequence of this increasingly inhospitable planetary environment. We highlight the global dominance of the post-Industrial Revolution, carbon-fuelled, capitalistic socio-economic model that has brought humankind to the very edge of an existential precipice. We interrogate the question of what happens to humans in the complex planetary system when, in the poet’s words, ‘things fall apart’ and ‘the centre cannot hold’. We deploy the Diogenes Paradigm here to explore relations of domination and fraught encounters between the minority in-group of the Global North and the dispossessed and displaced populations of the majority South. We argue that climate change, therefore, is profoundly a psycho-social problem in which unhousedness and unsettledness in and in relation to the Gaian home of our species threatens to displace us all.
