As drought, sea-level rise, and other human-caused "natural" disasters increase, the numbers of climate refugees, migrants, and displaced people will swell from currently tens of millions, to the hundreds of millions.

How do we understand this problem? What are its human dimensions? What ethical questions does it raise? What should we do about it?

Climate change and its implications are often considered too big, too complicated, too distant, indeed, "unimaginable." Students in Dr. Allen Webb's Literary Interpretation class at Western Michigan University will attempt to use the human imagination, especially the literary imagination, to begin to understand the experience of climate refugees and the issues they raise for our common humanity. 

There are more refugees now than at any time in human history, and the number of environmental or climate change refugees will be increasing.  Estimates for 2050 range from 200 million to 1 billion.  Although becoming a refugee, migrant, or displaced person is increasingly the result of climate change caused by the richest countries of the world, "climate refugees" do not have legal status -- the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was composed before the threat of climate change was widely understood.

We can gain some understanding by examining the experience of climate refugees in the past, for instance the 3.5 million dust bowl migrants from the American heartland in the 1930s.

So far, most of us have failed to understand climate change, and as Bill McKibben has said, it is largely a failure of imagination.  Cli-fi literature can help us think about what may be coming.  

 
Of course, we also need to listen to refugees themselves, study what is happening, examine political rhetoric. And consider how approaches such as building walls demonize victims, undermine cooperation, and fail to solve problems.

 In his effort to understand relations and responsibilities between people, Robert Frost once wrote,

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.