Dwelling on Earth: Ep3 Transcript
Dwelling on Earth
Episode 3: "Climate Migrations"
John Our: The last good year I caught cod fish, I think, was nine years ago. And ever since
then, the numbers have gone down dramatically.
Maddie Goldberg: T his is John Our. He’s a commercial fisherman in George’s bank, which is
off the coast of a town called Chatham, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.
JO: M y dad was a commercial fisherman, and I always went with him as much as I could, as
much as my mother would allow me. And then, when I graduated high school, I fished with him
for, I think, two or four years, and we fought all the time, father and son fights, and then I bought
my own boat, and then I built a new boat, and that’s the one I presently have now. I’ve been
doing it for over forty years.
MG: Wow. What’s the name of your boat?
JO: M iss Fitz, M-I-S-S F-I-T-Z. We keep it at the home port of Chatham, at the fish pier.
MG: Over the past several years, John’s catch has changed a lot.
JO: We used to catch large volumes of cod, get thirty to forty cents, and in the final years we
fished, we didn’t catch a lot of cod, we’d maybe catch a couple thousand pounds a day, but we’re
getting two bucks a pound.
MG: Since then, John says cod have all but disappeared from the waters off of Chatham. He
thinks part of it is a rise in gray seals, which hunt cod. But he says there’s another reason, too:
George’s Bank is getting warmer, and the cod are leaving. The cod have good reason to leave in
a hurry. Lots of things affect fish populations, but temperature is definitely one of them. And
climate change is raising the average surface temperature of oceans around the world, but
according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the waters off the
northeastern United States are warming especially fast. John has seen the changes up close.
JO: Growing up, we used to have winters where the fleet was frozen into the dock for two
months. I saw that when I was a kid. And now, if you have a cold spell or if you get a week’s
worth of ice or something, everybody is like, ‘Oh, this is the worst winter ever.’
MG: And with temperatures changing, what John sees when he pulls in the nets is changing too.
JO: And this past summer, we caught a tremendous amount of warm-water sharks that we’d
never seen before, like sandbar sharks, dusky sharks, a bullhead, we caught a bullhead one day.
We never saw that stuff, sharks that would never migrate this far north. Some things take
advantage of it and other things just don’t adapt well to it.
MG: One of the species that migrated into John’s area as the cod migrated out is lobster -- partly
because cod are one of the lobster’s main predators.
JO: With the lobster population, I have friends that have done extremely well the last ten years,
but they know in the back of their minds that things have definitely changed. The seasons have
become relatively shorter, their production has been down. It’s like a bad day at the stock market.
They went from a bull market to a bear market, and it’s not coming back up at all.
MG: John is concerned about the rest of his industry, too.
JO: The fleet is definitely getting older, and young people don’t seem to want to get into it as
much. For Chatham it’s still a viable fishery, but for a lot of ports, people are getting out of it.
MG: It can be risky to stake your livelihood on a species that might leave in a few years. And
the migrations don’t seem likely to end anytime soon; the fish aren’t the only ones moving.
Gretta Pecl: Even though I work on that, it kind of blows my mind that we’re living through the
largest redistribution of life on Earth for tens of thousands of years.
MG: That’s Professor Gretta Pecl.
GP: I’m an ecologist at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of
Tasmania, and I’m also the director of an interdisciplinary research center called the Center for
Marine Socioecology. And personally, most of what I work on is about the redistribution of
species--so looking at how our climate is affecting where our species live, what that means for
natural ecosystems, and then the humans that depend on those systems.
MG: In recent years, those systems have started to change -- we know that because Professor
Pecl and others in her field have been watching.
GP: We’re finding that at least 25% of plants and animals are already documented to be shifting.
So if you think that’s like -- obviously we haven’t looked everywhere, but where we have
looked, it’s at least 25% of species shifting and up to 85% in some cases. So that is a large
percentage of our life on Earth that is changing where it lives.
MG: That’s a lot of species to monitor. So Professor Pecl and her colleagues set up Redmap --
that’s the shorter name for the Range Extension Database and Mapping project. Using Redmap,
fishers, divers, and anyone else who knows a lot about Australian marine life can submit a photo
when they see something out of the ordinary, like a fish species outside its normal range. The
photo is reviewed by a scientist, and another data point is added to the map. Thanks to Redmap
and studies conducted around the world, Professor Pecl and her colleagues have noticed patterns
in the ways species are moving, at least on a large scale. And all those patterns point to climate
change as the driver.
GP: I would say that temperature is not the only reason species live where they live, but it’s an
absolutely huge overriding factor of why we find species in places that we do and where we
don’t. And all across the globe we have plants and animals in the Northern Hemisphere moving
north, and in the Southern Hemisphere moving south...
MG: Those trends make sense: Earth is coldest at the poles, so as the planet warms, species
should move toward the poles to stay in their normal temperature range. But Professor Pecl says
it’s a lot more complicated than that.
GP: So there’s a whole lot of extensions and contractions all over the world, but it’s happening
in a disjointed kind of way because some species can keep up with the climate, and other species
either overshoot it or can’t quite keep up. So it’s not a case of everything just moving nicely and
collaboratively and neatly all together down the coastline or across the mountain range; there’s a
whole lot of disconnections happening all throughout the planet in our ecosystems and our
trophic systems and that has all sorts of flow on implications for how these systems are
structured and how they function. It’s definitely a black box of lots of unknown challenges that’ll
crop up.
MG: As plants and animals move around the globe, Professor Pecl says that food resources,
livelihoods, and entire ways of life could be affected. And as climate change makes more of the
planet uninhabitable, people will be on the move too. I’m Maddie Goldberg.
Candice Chen: And I’m Candice Chen. In this episode, we ask what climate change will mean
for the people who live in the places where the planet is changing the fastest. If we continue
down the emissions path we’re on, a lot of people will have no choice but to leave their homes.
MG: In many cases, that’s a very dangerous position to be in. And even though climate change
affects the entire planet, not everyone bears the same burden.
CC: And for some people, climate migration is already a reality. Bigger wildfires, stronger
storms, intense heat waves, and other pressures have already displaced millions worldwide. We
wanted to talk to the people who study this reality, the people who think about its past and future,
and, most importantly, the people who are living it right now.
MG: Researching this episode, Candice and I read a paper about humans’ relationship to the
Earth’s climate over the last several thousand years. We talked to one of the paper’s authors, Tim
Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University.
Tim Kohler: I t’s just fascinating to think about the extent to which populations have favored this
fairly narrow temperature band from roughly, say, a mean annual temperature of 11 degrees to 15
degrees for a long period of time, going back to the mid-Holocene.
MG: The mid-Holocene, by the way, is about 6,000 years ago.
TK: And then there’s another sort of sub-mode around 27 to 28 degrees centigrade as well where
there are quite a few people, and that’s mostly the Indian subcontinent, South Asia.
I guess the interesting thing is that that goes back so far in time and that’s been so stable.
MG: Professor Kohler and his colleagues have found that humans have occupied this pretty
narrow temperature band on the surface of the Earth for thousands of years. So what happens
now that Earth’s surface temperature is changing so rapidly?
TK: W hat’s interesting but also, of course, disturbing about that, is that if you project into the
future, fifty years into the future, where that sweet spot will be located with respect to mean
annual temperature, you see that it’s going to move a lot, and it’s going to move more in the next
fifty years than it has in the last 6,000 years. And so the scary bottom line of the article is that
there are portions -- large portions, in the tropics -- of the Earth’s surface that will become hotter
now than -- hotter in fifty years -- than almost any place on the surface of the Earth right now,
and really probably well beyond the place where humans could comfortably live.
MG: That’s the projection if we stay on our current greenhouse gas emissions trajectory -- the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls this scenario RCP 8.5 and projects that, if we
follow this path, warming is likely to exceed 2 degrees Celsius. According to Professor Kohler,
because humans thrive at such a narrow range of temperatures, a change of two degrees could
displace huge numbers of people.
Bryan Jones: I think the single most important finding that perhaps most researchers do agree
on, is that it’s not often climate itself -- by itself -- that is driving people to move. Instead it’s
climate acting through some other factor.
MG: That’s Bryan Jones, a professor at Baruch College in New York City. He and his colleagues
built a model to predict which areas of the world will see the most migration due to climate
change. Professor Jones was quick to point out that there is a lot of uncertainty involved in
modeling something like this, when you’re using historic trends to try to make predictions about
a future that’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. He and his colleagues also had to disentangle
which of the factors that cause people to move are actually a result of climate change. Some were
easy: crop yields are clearly affected by climate, the average age of a population isn’t. Other
factors are a lot more complex.
BJ: Governance and instability -- these things are all tied to climate change, but acting through
various layers. Conflict is another really good example, right? Conflict can be tied back to
climate, but it’s a function of many, many different interacting components. It made it difficult
for us to really have a lot of confidence in the total estimate of climate migrants. This baseline
figure, while important, is not one that we want to ascribe too much meaning to, because there’s
a tremendous amount of variability.
MG: Instead, Professor Jones thinks it’s more important to focus on what he calls the “hot spots”
identified by the model: places where people are likely to be most affected by climate hazards,
and where the most people will be displaced. Some areas he highlighted are the southern deltas
of Bangladesh, which is already experiencing coastal erosion and seawater intrusion, as well as
the Sahel region in Africa, including the northern highlands of Ethiopia, which face worsening
droughts. If you’re interested in this model, check out a New York Times piece from this summer
that featured it. The article is by Abrahm Lustgarten, and it’s called “The Great Climate
Migration Has Begun.” As with any model, Professor Jones says it’s important not to
over-simplify or misrepresent the data. These kinds of projections can easily be used to
stigmatize or marginalize displaced people. And even though models of the Earth system can tell
us a lot -- believe me, Candice and I are Earth science majors, we’re obsessed with these kinds of
models -- they can’t tell us what it’s like to feel the effects of climate change firsthand. And we
wanted to talk to people who could.
MG: If you could just start by introducing yourself briefly…
Jason Morris: Y eah, so my name’s Jason Morris. I’m battalion chief for Cal Fire, which has a
contract for the town of Paradise.
MG: Paradise, California, was the site of the wildfire known as the Camp Fire, which broke out
in November of 2018. It was the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history, killing 85 people. By the
time it was 100 percent contained, almost all of the town was gone.
JM: So during the Camp Fire, I was chief of our dispatch center, so our 911 center. And so I had
five guys in there, and they took over twenty-four hundred 911 calls in less than twelve hours. It
was a very traumatic event, as you can imagine. This fire was moving at an acre a minute. So an
acre is the size of a football field. So in one minute, a whole football field was gone. It spotted
over two miles ahead of itself, which is unheard-of, that’s a brand-new record.
MG: Spotting is when the sparks or embers from a fire travel far ahead and start a new fire. And
that’s not the only record California wildfires are breaking. Recent research led by Michael Goss,
a researcher at Stanford University, finds that the number of dry, windy wildfire-prone days in
California has doubled since the eighties. Chief Morris has seen the effects.
JM: I’ve worked for Cal Fire for twenty-plus years. In that time, I’ve also -- you know, we
started off as seasonal employment out here, so you’re a seasonal firefighter because that’s when
fires are really hitting us. Nowadays, our fires are year-round. There is no season.
MG: There’s a broad scientific consensus that California’s epidemic of wildfires is due, at least
in large part, to climate change. Chief Morris has watched these shifts happen since he started in
1995.
JM: I’m telling you, I’m proof, right here, I’m telling you that our fires were not that big back
then. And they didn’t last for months on end. It’s pretty crazy. So the last ten years, I’m not
kidding you, the last ten years, we have literally said every single year, ‘This is an unprecedented
fire season.’ For ten years….So guess what? It’s not unprecedented anymore, it’s the norm.
CC: That new norm has destroyed homes, businesses, and lives. And in the face of these
catastrophes, people are choosing or being forced to move: according to a research group called
the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, over a million people in the U.S. have been
displaced by natural disasters every year since 2016. It’s not just wildfires; I took a look at
another way climate change can cause destruction: hurricanes.
CC: Scientists are still investigating the exact connections between climate change and
hurricanes. But many suspect that with global temperatures on the rise, hurricanes and tropical
storms will become more destructive. Warmer water has more energy to feed these storms, and
higher sea levels mean stronger storm surges. On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made
landfall in Puerto Rico. The category 5 hurricane devastated the entire island.
Andrea Rivera: I think I was like two months without power.
CC: This is Andrea Rivera, a junior at Harvard University who has lived in Puerto Rico her
whole life. Part of what made Maria so destructive was that it came just weeks after Hurricane
Irma.
AR: So we were kind of unprepared and we were kind of confident that it was going to be like
the same thing again, but it really wasn't. I was about two months without power, but some
people like six months after still had no power.
CC: It’s hard to imagine how a months-long power outage would feel.
AR: We were living like as a response to everything that was happening. We were adapting
constantly. And you can do that for a day, you can do that for a week, but when it comes to two
months living in that sort of like -- you're not sure if you're going to go to the grocery store and
find food, you're not sure if you're gonna have when you're gonna get water when you're gonna
get power back.
CC: Because of global warming, coastal areas are becoming increasingly threatened. Puerto
Rico is just beginning to see shifts in where people choose to build because of these evolving
risks. But of course, residents’ movement isn’t restricted to within the island. Especially
following Maria, larger questions emerge. Questions like: when your business is destroyed or
halted by power outages, when you can’t make money, do you choose to leave the island
entirely? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 4% of the Puerto Rican population
migrated following Hurricane Maria.
AR: I had a couple of friends, who like their parents moved to Florida because of this because
obviously, like a lot of people can't withstand a week without working. Other people can't stand
let alone like a month or two.
CC: But not everyone has the resources to move:
AR: I have an uncle that lives in Pennsylvania, and so my mom sent my grandmother to go
there, because she lives alone. And so my mom asked me, ‘Do you want to go?’ Because
obviously it’s easier. And I remember being really sad, and I was like, I don’t want to leave
home, especially not at a time like this, especially because I felt an attachment to here, even
though I was literally without power, without water. And I had the opportunity to go, thankfully,
which is a huge privilege, because a lot of people were stuck and they didn’t really have the
option. At least I had family in the U.S., where if I really wanted to go, I could’ve gone.
CC: In the end, Andrea decided to stay.
AR: But for me, it was just like, I just wanted to stay here and help in any way that I could.
CC: These months spent without power, shelter, or adequate care threatened both physical and
mental health. An estimated 3,000 people died from “storm-related incidents,” and more than
one fifth of residents reported a year later that they needed mental health services. According to
the American Psychological Association, more than 7% of school-aged children there meet
clinical standards for PTSD, about twice the rate seen in the general population.
AR: We have weak infrastructure and like more hurricanes like that's a recipe for disaster for
sure. I'm afraid that like if a hurricane like this would happen again like today or tomorrow, we
would basically see the same thing repeat itself.
CC: Puerto Rico's recovery has been slow -- as the island works to rebuild infrastructure, they're
also facing a long-standing debt crisis. Anticipating more hurricanes to come, some have left the
island, but it's no small thing to pick up and leave your home. And many people, including
Andrea, don't intend to.
AR: A lot of people ask me like having lived through this do you want to live in Puerto Rico like
you can live literally anywhere on earth and it's not going to be an issue. And I'm just like you
know home for me is where I grew up where I like literally been living my whole life. Even after
living in Boston -- I love Boston, I love the culture there as well -- but I could never compare it
to, you know, a home-made meal, going to the beaches that I’ve been going to for the last twenty
years, for me that’s like -- home. I don’t even know how you can describe that, it’s just a feeling
you get. It’s very hard to describe what, like, home is, but for me it was just that moment, you
know? When you have a chance to go somewhere else, but you realize this is where you want to
be.
CC: As people leave the places most threatened by climate change -- already dealing with the
loss of their home -- they face a world that can be incredibly hostile to refugees. The United
States is no exception.
Evan Taparata: S o, especially recently, you know, we hear words like "flood” and “horde” and
“tide” used to describe immigrants, and these kind of natural catastrophe-type words to describe
immigrants writ large. It's important to see that, you know, this kind of political rhetoric about
refugees and the “refugee crisis” is linked more broadly to these broader uses of language that
have been used over time to justify the exclusion of people in motion for all kinds of reasons.
CC: This is Dr. Evan Taparata.
ET: And I'm a postdoctoral fellow in Global American Studies at the Charles Warren Center here
at Harvard
CC: According to Dr. Taparata, political rhetoric can be dangerous.
ET: I mean, words like “crisis” -- just kind of inherently bring up all kinds of bad feelings. You
know, no one wants to have a crisis. No one wants to have to navigate a crisis. And, in some
ways, to frame the situation as a “refugee crisis” -- there's a way in which that can justify the
decisions that individual governments make to exclude refugees. They're full humans with full
lives and full worlds. And it's important that we think about how “refugee crisis” kind of denies
that, as a term and as a phrase as a concept for understanding the situation.
CC: And the last four years have seen a huge rise in the worst kinds of language.
[Donald Trump: “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.” “But we’re
taking people out of the country you wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t
people -- these are animals.”]
ET: For me, I think that people want to be home. And I think for many of the people, especially
when we think about refugees and asylum seekers, these are people who are leaving home not
because they want to, but because they need to. These are folks who've been thrust from the
thing that matters the most to many of us, and that's home.
CC: Dr. Taparata sees a very different kind of crisis forming.
ET: But if we cut that second “e” off “refugee,” then I think we could also have a conversation
about a “refuge crisis.” What I mean by that is a crisis of countries around the world to not do
their part and to not do everything they can to help refugees, and to extend aid to refugees, and to
open their countries to refugees. I think there's all kinds of actual legitimate crises, but I think
these stem more from, you know, the nation-states that can really do so much to resolve the
problems we're facing, but ultimately don't -- don't do as much as they can.
Ieva Jusionyte: We have always moved towards closing the borders and not really opening them
up, but the past few years of Trump administration that this has really reached the highest
intensity of denying entry to asylum seekers.
CC: This is Ieva Jusionyte, a Harvard associate professor in Anthropology.
IJ: T he president also is just the symptom of this discourse that's really popular, and one of the
reasons why it's popular is because it provides as I was saying simple explanations to very
complex problems. And it's also a signal in response to people's fears.
[Donald Trump chanting: “Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall!”]
CC: In 2016, the annual refugee ceiling was 85,000. Throughout the Trump presidency, that
number has steadily dropped. The 2020 ceiling is only 18,000. Denying refugees and immigrants
entry to the U.S. has been the political mainstay of the Trump administration.
IJ: I t is a very good political tactic to say that there is a threat and we can, if we build a border
wall, we can protect the country from it, and I think it's a very powerful political message. It's
easy to garner votes and it also intersects with other forms of insecurity.
CC: With these kinds of political motives in play, is there any way to make the U.S. more
empathetic, more open, to climate refugees in the future?
IJ: I t is really a matter of public perception, consciousness and understanding of what is with
this human community, and where do we draw that boundary between these are the people that
matter to us and these are the people that don't matter to us because they came from another
country because of the different skin color because of the different religion because they because
those are not the problems that we caused and now they're coming to us, like how do we expand
the mental limits of the community that we care about? And I think if we do that then a lot of
logistical questions -- legal and logistical questions, infrastructural questions. That's just a matter
of building and design and ingenuity. The hardest one is the hardest borders or the boundaries are
really peoples in people's minds. And I don't -- I don't know how to change that.
ET: The United States is also the nation that portrays itself as a nation of immigrants -- that
points to things like the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of our open arms to migrants. And
specifically, you know, if you read closely the text of the Emma Lazarus poem that's emblazoned
on the base of the Statue of Liberty, it's saying that we are specifically invested in welcoming
migrants who are oppressed and who are coming from, you know, tempest-tossed shores and
places and nations.
CC: This is Dr. Taparata again.
ET: That's always the challenge. The distance between, you know, that kind of celebratory
mythology of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants and what actually happens on the ground. But in
the case of climate change, it might be that we find ourselves in a place where our leaders are
talking about climate change not as something that will just send, you know, untold numbers of
people to the U.S. looking for shelter, but as something that affects all of us. It really does.
Climate change has no borders.