Project Mushroom Update, Migration and Climate Change, Gaia Vince’s “Nomad Century:…”

PROJECT MUSHROOM UPDATE

They did it. The folks at  Project Mushroom, A community platform for justice and action on an overheating planet, made their Kickstarter goal of $200K! According to the email The Climate Daily got from them, over 2340 people chipped into back this project, thus helping it reach its funding goal. Project Mushroom was organized by Eric Holthaus — a journalist and climate scientist who has spent his career focused on climate justice and equity. We’re also working with ex-Twitter employees who want to continue their work of bringing a safer, better online experience into the world.

After it’s launch in early November 2022, Project Mushroom is now the largest Mastodon project with climate justice as a priority — and one of the fastest growing in the English language. More than 10,000 people signed up for our waitlist in our first 48 hours.The site will offer at least four types of creator services: Newsletter hosting/publishing; Live events hosting (audio, video, in person, and creator support); A curated Mastodon-based social media network with paid moderators; Onboarding assistance for your followers to join you

Why does Project Mushroom matter to us? One because a it’s time for better self-governance in social media + truth-telling + journalism that’s not run by billionaires. And secondly, because Project Mushroom is doing this for us.

DEEPER DIVE:KickStarter, Project Mushroom Newsletter

MIGRATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that the greatest single impact of climate change could be on human migration—with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding and agricultural disruption. Since then various analysts have tried to put numbers on future flows of climate refugees—the most widely repeated prediction being 200 million by 2050. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) wrote those words in a comprehensive report – in 2008.

The term “climate refugees” has been used since 1985 when UN Environment Programme (UNEP) expert Essam El-Hinnawi defined climate – or environmental – refugees as people who’ve been “forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of marked environmental disruption.” While the scientific argument for climate change is increasingly confident, the consequences of climate change for human population distribution are unclear and unpredictable. With so many other social, economic and environmental factors at work establishing a linear, causative relationship between anthropogenic climate change and migration has, to date, been difficult. This may change in future. 

That’s why Amar Rahman, Global Head of Climate Change Resilience Services at Zurich Insurance Group, believes the definition should apply to a much broader range of people, namely “anyone who has been impacted by disruption in their society that could somehow directly or indirectly be related to short- or long-term change in the environment.”  Whoa. Why does a better understanding of the real impact of climate migration on all of us matter to us? Because experts argue climate change refugees need access to the same protected status offered to other refugees such as those who have escaped conflict.  Governments and legal bodies must reframe conditions caused by climate change as a threat to human rights and recognize the deadly threat that climate refugees face – even if that threat is not always as immediate as the dangers faced by refugees fleeing war.

DEEPER DIVE: Migration & Climate Change, Climate Migration Podcast, Zurich.com

“NOMAD CENTURY: HOW CLIMATE MIGRATION WILL RESHAPE OUR WORLD,” BY GAIA VINCE

The United States is experiencing historic migrant surges at its southern border. Southern and central Europe are experiencing migrant surges from central and Saharan Africa, too. Why? Climate change. Rising temperatures and increasing loss of arable land on the African continent and in Central and South America are forcing tens of thousands of people from their ancestral homes annually. This trend will only continue. So in order to help as many as people prepare, cope and understand its implications, Gaia Vince wrote Nomad Century, Transcendence, and Adventures in the Anthropocene. 

Vince is an award-winning science journalist, author, broadcaster and speaker. In her reporting, Vince documented global migration has doubled in the past decade, on track to see literally billions displaced in the coming decades. In Nomad Century, she asks, “What exactly is happening, Vince asks? And how will this new great migration reshape us all?” And that’s why this book matters to us, bigly! According to the publisher, the book is a deeply-reported clarion call, Vince draws on a career of environmental reporting and over two years of travel to the front lines of climate migration across the globe, to tell us how the changes already in play will transform our food, our cities, our politics, and much more. Her findings are answers we all need, now more than ever. 

The Guardian wrote of Nomad Century…, “Gaia Vince’s new book should be read not just by every politician, but by every person on the planet.” Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future, wrote, “This book is a rather astounding addition to a growing body of thought that suggests the twenty-first century is going to include, and even require, lots of human migration―and that handled correctly, this could be part of a good adaptation to the climate and biosphere crisis we are now entering. What Vince gives us here is some cognitive mapping to understand the situation and see a way forward.” 

DEEPER DIVE: Nomad Century, Gaia Vince, The Guardian