A warning of the space ahead.
Floating away
By John Esther
According to several scientists, partisan politicians, Nobel Prize winners and the testimony of many people around the world — including one sad 7-year-old boy — if we do not drastically do something about climate change within the next 100 months or so, many countries and their citizens will be headed to oblivion. Many more people will flee to other lands.
Rather than regurgitate David Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth that starred former Vice President Al Gore, director Michael Nash’s documentary, Climate Refugees, puts the issue of climate change in terms of nationalist geopolitics.
The last drastic climate change occurred 8,200 years ago when there were no borders. Today, seawater is rising, and, as most people live by the sea, they will be forced to relocate.
An estimated 50 countries will disappear within the next 20-30 years, and “ground zero” is the impoverished country of Bangladesh, where 150 million Bangladeshi live at sea level. As the water continues to rise, what are nations going to do when 50-100 million Bangladeshi start fleeing to foreign lands? What can they do?
From there, Nash travels the globe visiting other nations going under, eventually winding up in the United States where we already have had our own climate refugees in the form of those thousands of Louisianans who fled their state during and after Hurricane Katrina.
Nobody is immune. Destroyed crops, lack of clean water, less land and an increasing human population leads to lack of resources for more people. Something will give.
Offering more empirical examples than Gore’s grand scientific proofs, Climate Refugees illustrates how climate change can no longer remain an abstract notion. We must look at it head on. Otherwise, the world will be facing by the multimillions those beautiful yet tragic human beings Nash captures in his splendid documentary.
There will be no charge for this Community Screening.
Recommened.
(Climate Refugees screens June 20, 2:15 p.m. Regal Cinemas)
