Video: Climate Refugees Trailer
By DOROTHY SPEARS
12 August 2011 During the shooting of his 2010 documentary Climate Refugees, the Irish-American filmmaker Michael Nash visited nearly 50 countries in about 18 months, interviewing politicians, scientists, health workers and victims of floods, cyclones, hurricanes and droughts. His conclusion was that short- and longer-term changes in climate are causing vast numbers of people to abandon their jobs, homes and countries to seek better lives elsewhere, or to simply survive. (Jeffrey Gettleman’s recent coverage of the Somali refugee crisis in The Times has offered some vivid and disturbing examples, although Somalia’s troubles are also inextricably linked to political turmoil.) Mr. Nash poses a basic question: what will become of the millions of people whose lack of access to food and clean water leads them to take increasingly desperate measures? What type of strains will huge migration put on resources in more developed countries? Will this dislocation eventually, as the retired Navy vice admiral Lee Gunn told Mr. Nash, pose a threat to Americans’ national security, too? By focusing on the consequences of climate change rather than its scientific causes, some experts suggest that Mr. Nash succeeded in circumventing a divisive political debate over global warming and the extent to which human activity contributes to it. “Whether it’s man or nature causing the climate to change, we still have to deal with islands going under water and people running out of food,” Mr. Nash said in a telephone interview. Daniel Shepard, an information officer at the United Nations who specializes in sustainable development, said of the film, “All of this green stuff is as economic and social as it is environmental — and the movie does a good job of showing that.” Mr. Nash’s approach has clearly resonated. Screenings of Climate Refugees are booked through next year at universities across the country, the filmmaker said. Typically, the screenings are accompanied by a question-and-answer period led by university professors from a range of fields including anthropology, environmental law, environmental science, global economics and, at the University of Texas at Austin recently, national security. […]
