I, Climate Refugee
Don’t blink or you’ll miss the moment I become invisible.
It can be startling to see yourself become a statistic. I’ve been writing and speaking about the climate crisis for decades. I know that the world is on track towards 1.2 billion people being displaced by climate disasters by the year 2050, by far the greatest mass migration in human history. I’ve expounded at length on the moral responsibility wealthy high emitting nations have to those displaced from the front lines of the subsequent warming’s impact. I just wasn't expecting to become one of the climate refugees I was talking about quite this soon. Foolish me.
Around the globe, it’s becoming commonplace. It’s only in my personal experience that it’s unprecedented. Was unprecedented. Now I don’t have any trouble imagining it at all. Now I’m living it.
And I’m painfully aware that the version I’m personally living through is a convenient first world confident-I’ll-be-able-to-return-home-sooner-or-later displacement that growing multitudes around the world forced from their homes every year can only fantasize about. I still have to take the sinking feeling in my gut seriously, but in the global context, this is easy mode.
In the 20th century, the idea that “everyone will be famous for five minutes” was misattributed to Andy Warhol. In the…
