Environmental Refugees

In a way this is a continuation of an earlier post, the one linking to Bill McKibben's piece on Sucker's Bets. What Marcia Ellen sees in her crystal ball may well come to pass, but it won't stay that way for long, which is exactly what McKibben is talking about. No matter how well-fortified the new NOLA might be, how wealthy and white and Republican the inhabitants, unless all that humankind has built along the course of the Mississippi River is unbuilt, unless the barrier islands and wetlands along the Gulf shores are re-established, unless people leave this entire fragile area to be reclaimed by the forces of Nature, the Ultimate Storm will still blow across the burning Gulf waters to lay it waste again.

I don't know if anyone read McKibben's article, but buried within it was yet another article - a paper presented last May in Prague by a Prof. Norman Myers of Oxford University, titled "Environmental Refugees, an Emergent Security Issue." In it I read this paragraph:

All in all, the issue of environmental refugees promises to rank as one of the foremost human crises of our times. To date, however, it has been viewed as a peripheral concern, a kind of aberration from the normal order of things--even though it is an outward manifestation of profound deprivation and despair. While
it derives primarily from environmental problems, it generates myriad problems of political,social and economic sorts. As such, it could readily become a cause of turmoil and confrontation, leading to conflict and violence. Yet as the problem becomes more pressing, our policy responses fall ever-further short of measuring up to the challenge. To repeat a pivotal point: environmental refugees have still to be officially recognized as a problem at all.

Myers was talking mainly about the developing world in this paper. Much of his research was first done ten years ago. Yet how accurate his comments are today. And how surprised he must be to see his predictions coming true, not in Haiti, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, but right here in the world's most prosperous country. We clearly see that we are experiencing environmental refugees, what many of us don't realize is that, without enormous and immediate changes to our energy, development, water resources, logging and myriad other policies, they will not be our last.

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