Klimat – konflikty – migracje. Scenariusze przyszłości

• Main Author: Magdalena Ochwat
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Silesia Press 2020-07-01
• Series: Postscriptum Polonistyczne
• Subjects: migration; climate refugees; reportage; climate change; engaged humanities; Polish language and culture education
• Online Access: https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/PPol/article/view/9418
• ISSN: 1898-1593; 2353-9844

The paper addresses the issue of refugees in the broad sense of the term, i.e. people forced to leave their homes and seek conditions for a normal life due to climate change and to the excessive environment footprint left by humans. The numerous reasons for this type of displacement include drought, the growing scarcity of natural resources in seas and oceans, and the unfair distribution of water. These three climate plagues are analysed on the basis of non-fiction literature – Wykluczeni [The Excluded], which is a book of reportage by Artur Domosławski, Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns. Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp, and Stefano Liberti’s South of Lampedusa. In the public consciousness, migrations motivated by climate change and human interference in the ecosystem have been functioning since recently, but they will actually become the greatest challenge of our day and age. This is why the important role played by humanities is to speak about them, to comment on their performative power, to debate on potential solutions, and to trigger warning discourses leading to the development of a habit of imagining “scenarios for the future”. Acts of imagination provide the possibility to shape the world in an unlimited way and to play out in a virtual manner some key social, cultural and political situations, in order to live well on an overcrowded planet, where water, land and food may be lacking a few decades from now.