In DC, Activist Tent City Evokes Plight of Climate Refugees

by Emily Gertz

categories: Activism, Climate Security, Drowning Nations, Environmental Justice, Humanitarian Relief, International Action

Published August 20, 2009 @ 07:26PM PT

Above: Video about climate refugee tent city action in Washington DC, Aug. 2009

Young climate activists built a settlement of tents and tarps near the State Department on Monday, and lived in it for 24 hours.  Their goal was to dramatize the plight of climate refugees: people who have been uprooted from their homes and livelihoods by the environmental degradation caused by global warming.

A banner propped up next to the huddle of tarps propped up on sticks urged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to "recognize and protect climate refugees at COP 15," the international climate treaty meeting in December.

"Climate change is not only a great opportunity to create jobs and new prosperity. It is also an urgent crisis that is already impacting many individual human lives and perpetuating current injustices," writes activist Julie Morgan, who put herself "in the shoes of people displaced by climate change for over 24 hours" by living in the makeshift settlement.  She was joined by several fellow members of DC Action Factory, the group that's been spending the summer staging creative actions in support of strong, effective climate action by the US.

Our action gave us a brief taste of what it would feel like to be Katrina refugees forced to leave their flooded homes ... Sudanese refugees who have no choice but to flee from the violent Darfur conflict, which has it’s [sic] roots in drought caused by climate change ... Alaskan villagers forced to relocate as the permafrost that used to support their houses thaws..

Morgan acknowledges that with easy access to cold water, coffee, food, and air-conditioned shops to duck into for a break, she and fellow activists weren't at anywhere near the loose ends of real refugees.

But the modest discomforts of living displaced for just 24 hours gave her a dawning perspective on the experience of those with no end in sight to their forced migration.  "It was hot, exhausting, and uncomfortable. I lay on my back awake on the pavement at 4:00 am and longed for my bed at home or even a light blanket to protect me from the early morning chill," she writes.

The tent city action was also a "wake-up call," she says, shifting her perspective on climate activism out of the heady heights of Capitol Hill, federal legislation, and international diplomacy, and into the sometimes-devastating impacts the unstable climate is having on the ground.

"Putting myself in the shoes of those forced to leave their homes due to flooding, contamination, drought, melting ice and war," she writes, "was crucial in bringing my focus to the individual and community level where climate impacts are felt."

This year saw the world's first widely acknowledged climate change population movement, when the 2,000 - odd Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea evacuated their homes and farms for good.

As Change.org Immigration blogger Dave Bennion noted recently, the International Organisation for Migration thinks there will be 200 million people uprooted by global warming by 2050 (when population is expected to be around 9 million people).

The recent report “In Search of Shelter, ” by the United Nations University, the charity CARE and Columbia University, names the likely “hot spots” of climate-driven displacement as: the dry areas of Africa; river systems in Asia; both the interior and coast of Mexico, as well as the Caribbean; and low-laying islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.  (Which we blog about here under the rubric of "Drowning Nations.")

And forced migration due to climate change is also seen as a growing threat to national security.