I don’t pay enough attention to the nature around me. But this time of year nature is hard to miss.
I live about half a block from Lake Monona in Madison, Wisconsin. Along our stretch of the lake is the lovely Yahara Park and Yahara River. There are a bunch of different animals and birds and fish and insects around — seeing a kingfisher grab a fish while kayaking was a summer highlight.
It’s migration time and everyone’s on the move. Canadian geese flying in their cool Vs. The majesty of sandhill cranes. And the drone of huge flocks of tundra swans taking a moment to rest and eat right near my doorstep before they continue their journey some 1800 miles north.
That is my migration experience here, in Madison. In Ghana, the migration experience is very different.
I volunteer for the NGO Developing Radio Partners in Africa. Specifically, I am advising a group of young journalists in Ghana as they create a radio/podcast series on climate change. For them climate change has forced a mass internal migration. A drought in the North has not only dried up rivers and wells but has caused a massive loss of pollinating bees. Some farmers are laboriously self-pollinating their fields by hand, but many are migrating from the farmland of the north to the cities of the coastal south.
A monarch butterfly on the milkweed in my front yard on its way south feels natural. Almost glorious. A young herder in Ghana, whose well has dried up, desperately taking dying livestock south feels wrong, unnatural.
Climate change migration is hitting the most vulnerable first. But they won’t be the last.
— Charles