August 29th will be the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and I’m sharing a timely exchange between Emily Atkin (HEATED) and Louisiana native Colette Pichon Battle (Taproot Earth):
A CALL TO MERGE THE CLIMATE AND IMMIGRATION MOVEMENTS

As Atkin states at the outset:
Hurricane Katrina is widely remembered as the most expensive hurricane in U.S. history. But it was also the country’s largest-ever climate migration.

More than 1.5 million people were forced from their homes after Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans underwater and demolishing Mississippi’s coastline—and at least 40 percent were not able to return home.

Houston, TX, September 3, 2005- A giant message board helps people locate friends and loved ones at the Reliant Center. Thousands of displaced citizens were moved from New Orleans to Houson in a FEMA organized bus program. Photo by Ed Edahl/FEMA

What we’re currently seeing from the authoritarians is merely a preview of the mass-scale of atrocities in store as we head deeper into ecological collapse. We desperately need solidarity on ALL fronts, and that includes forging alliances with people all around the world. I highly recommend reading this article/interview in its entirety, and am sharing an excerpt that feels especially pertinent in this moment.

EA: You’ve called for abolishing borders altogether. Can you explain how that’s a climate policy, and how that relates to Hurricane Katrina?

CPB: Katrina was one of the largest climate migrations in the U.S. ever seen. Folks were displaced to all 50 states and several countries.

As someone who worked in immigration law, I watched that whole process of people being displaced, the title of “refugee” being put on citizens, and recognized that the conversation around climate migration is broader than immigration into the United States. This is going to be about people having to move out of harm’s way either for a short time, or for a long time. So we’re going to have to figure out dignity in movement when it comes to people being able to move across borders.

Borders are political. This is a question around your human right to traverse a political border to get out of harm’s way. When we talk about the movement of money, borders don’t seem to be a problem. Dollars don’t getting held up crossing the border, but people do. If there’s a free flow of money, why can’t there be a free-flow of people?

These are the kinds of philosophies and thought leadership that we’re trying to put in play, and it’s all part of a reparative approach to the climate reality. Because a lot of people are in a vulnerable situation, not of their own making, but because of a very long history of colonization, domination and extraction. They deserve their human right to migrate. They deserve their human right to remain in their home. They deserve the human right to return to their home. This is what we’re asserting at Taproot.

Thank you for reading.
#WeAreTheStorm
Free Palestine!
Solidarity!