21st Century survival environmental migration

Dust bowl migrants leaving for California

This is part one of a two part mini series-find part two here

Environmental migration has been occurring since humans began walking the earth seeking food, water and companionship. Migrations are due to either a sudden crisis or an evolving long-term depletion of resources and imminent species extinction if they did not leave the region seeking a more hospitable, life-supporting environment.

Historically, environmentally caused migrations have not been encumbered as populations relocated and were welcomed by other communities and countries. Population centers were not overcrowded like they are now, and there were still sparsely inhabited global regions. 

The Irish Potato Famine from 1845-1849 recorded as many as 2 million refugees who fled the country when the main food supply was struck with a blight killing the potato crops.  Subsequently one million died of hunger or disease before they could get out of Ireland. The refugees emigrated to the Britain, United States, Canada and Australia.

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The Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and Arkansas is another example of environmental migration. It was the result of drought and poorly managed and overused agricultural land. Drought first hit the region in 1930. By 1934, it had turned the Great Plains into a desert that came to be known as the Dust Bowl. In the 1930s, farmers from the Midwestern Dust Bowl states, especially Oklahoma and Arkansas, began to move to California; 250,000 arrived by 1940, including a third who moved into the San Joaquin Valley, which had a 1930 population of 540,000. During the 1930s, some 2.5 million people left the Plains states.

These two environmental migrations were different, but they are alike in that the émigrés were mainly the poor and subsistent farmers. Even so, they were not turned away by the receiving regions, and each migration convergence had a long lasting cultural, political and social impact on the regions in which they become citizens.  

Supplementing food to the Irish during the famine was complicated by British politics at the time; therefore, refugees immigrated to receiving countries with resources to support the influx. Dust Bowl migrants, however, received a mixed welcome in California as jobs and a better life were not in abundance in the promised “land of milk and honey.”  Still, rural, agricultural regions in California became home to those displaced by the Dust Bowl.  In 1940, over 40 percent of those who moved to the San Joaquin Valley from the Dust Bowl were farm workers, according to the Census. However, many joined the military or found jobs in factories, so that only 25 percent of Midwestern migrants remained farm workers in 1950.

In the 21st century the world’s poor in densely populated areas are also the most at risk for environmental destruction and extreme weather events as a result of climate change, including coastlines and flood-lines. Climate change threatens areas already suffering from extreme poverty.

"The issue of equity is crucial. Climate affects us all, but does not affect us all equally," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told delegates at a climate conference in Indonesia, according to a World Vision report in 2012.