Climate issues have a direct link to refugee’s and migration. Some refugees are created when those in power fight over natural resources across the world. Take Iraq as an example, imperialist western countries overthrew one regime, and the new regime offered them attractive oil deals. Nafeez Ahmed summerises issues around this for the Guardian . There are also more and more people seeking refuge for the non- traditional ‘persecution’ reasons, but because they cannot grow enough to feed their families, or their home has been wiped out by a natural disaster. Climate Refugees is a documentary that was 3 years in the making and covered 48 countries.
I heard Naomi Klein spoke about the 2015 Paris Climate summit for world leaders, and how experts are summarising how we need to keep the world’s temperature rising to under 2 degrees, the leaders forecast countries could keep it to under 4 degrees, if they cut our usual fossil fuel diet, and focused on renewable / clean energy, but with the continuation of the worlds addition to gas and oil, we would raise the temperature around 8 degrees. The importance of reducing the earths warming is easily searchable online, NASA Global Climate Change has some info.
The oceans, where there’s overfishing, and pollution is underwater and mostly hidden. The Express recently report on a whale washed up on a Kent beach allegedly killed by plastic bags.
The meat industry is another kettle, human over population and commercial production is covered in Cowspiracy. Raising animals is responsible for climate change, rainforest destruction, water consumption (to feed cows water for 1 burger, is said to take 2 months worth of shower water).
Naomi Klein spoke about a solution to the energy crisis, in a passionate inspiring way, encouraging links between many social actors to sign up to the Leap Manifesto - ‘The time for energy democracy has come: we believe not just in changes to our energy sources, but that wherever possible communities should collectively control these new energy systems’.
Migrant’s and groups often focus on engaging with and integrating into host communities, but for everyone to live running a car, taking holidays on flights, eating meat and fish from the supermarket, as many in the west live, means definite shorting of human time on earth. The alternatives are all around us, in the West Midlands theres small scale gardening projects, like The Kushinga Community Garden and larger projects, like Ryton Organic.