Environmental Displacement Quotes

I think we should be prepared, given environmental and political change for large-scale migration. If sea levels rise and 200 million people in Bangladesh and 300 million people in Indonesia need to move, and the entire Chinese seaboard, New York City - that's going to be huge.

If you manage to stop the timber industry from cutting this forest, they'll cut that forest. If you stop oil drilling here, they'll go drill there.

As William Gibson says, the future is already here but it's lumpy. It's unevenly distributed. Some people are already living this, the ones on low-lying islands off the coast of India are being swept away, you know, it's already happening to some people. We happen to be very lucky so far.

People don't actually stay still, you know - when their area is a disaster, they go somewhere else, right? And that's just a natural human impulse.

I chose to document the lives of people living in a remote village in Alaska called Shishmaref because there we can literally see how climate change is affecting their homes, livelihoods and ultimately their lives.

The latest computer modeling I've seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as "environmental refugees."

Obviously, not all migration relates to global warming, but the correlation is higher than most would think.

If there are more and more environmental refugees, they are going to end up on your doorstep too.

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.