Climate change and migration

“Climate change and migration” shows that migration is a complicated phenomenon that is well documented in literature and film, and while it has many causes, forms, and effects, migration has been both a result of climate change and, at times, its cause. This article will show that how we conceptualize the topic of “climate change and migration” across a broad spectrum of cultural forms is crucial to how we understand and deal with the many issues that climate change will cause for global populations. To see the topic simply as a matter of American national security—as, for instance, some of Barack Obama’s comments have intoned—is to perpetuate the patterns of history that have favored unequal development and the production and maintenance of what Amitav Ghosh has called “disadvantage in terms of both wealth and power” (Ghosh, 2017, p. 110). To see nature or climate solely as the cause of migration, similarly, is to misapprehend the roots of the issue. Comparative analyses reveal interconnections of real political, economic, and environmental problems with fictional renderings of solutions. Film and literature show more starkly than news media how shortages and want are the result of a scarcity of democracy and of an extractive ethos that both relies on and maintains global inequities. “Climate change and migration” brings together data that questions the ideology of continual growth, limitless possibilities, and infinite resilience that has put the finite resources of the planet into jeopardy. Scholars in the Humanities have much to offer, both in producing narratives that popularize in concrete terms abstract knowledge about climate migration and in calling mainstream media to task for its failings and inaccuracies. The complexities and nuances of the topic of “climate change and migration” require honesty and a firm commitment to avoiding rarefied theorizing that lacks contact with material realities.