Americans Are Becoming Climate Migrants Before Our Eyes, Echoes of 1930s Dust Bowl Exodus
'Americans Are Becoming Climate Migrants Before Our Eyes,' By Alex Domash, The Guardian, Oct. 2, 2020. -Excerpts:
In November 2018, I traveled with a caravan of thousands of Central American migrants as they marched across Mexico towards the US border. While some were seeking refuge in the US from gang violence or political persecution, many others were looking to escape something much more subtle: climate change. The Trump administration decried these climate migrants as “invaders” and attempted to build a wall to keep them out.
But today, as much of the western US burns, and the country looks on in horror as San Francisco suffocates in an orange cloud of ash, we see that the US way of life is also gravely threatened by climate change. More than 8,100 wildfires have burned over 3.9m acres in California this year. The fires have killed 30 people, destroyed more than 7,500 structures, and displaced thousands in the state. Meanwhile in Oregon, half a million people were put under an evacuation order.
The message from the visceral scenes unfolding in the western US is clear: climate displacement isn’t something that happens only outside of our borders. It has already begun in the US, and we can no longer turn our backs on the more than 20 million climate migrants worldwide.
When the Dust Bowl ravaged the United States in the 1930s, a mass exodus of 2.5 million midwestern farmers migrated towards California. These climate migrants, just like the ones today, were derided as “aliens” and “undesirables”. The state of Colorado even deployed its militia for 10 days to stop the migrants from entering. Ultimately, this act was deemed unconstitutional, as it was declared that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states”...
Read More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/02/climate-change-migration-us-wildfires
- 1936, Texas Panhandle, Dust Bowl.