The Response

·S6 E20

Meeting mass migration with 'Welcome Tables' (not walls) with Josh Fox

August 5
55 mins

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Episode Description

The world as we knew it is no more. It sounds dark, trite, and reductive, but there's a truth in there that can't be denied.

All signs point to the global climate changing faster than most scientists predicted. In the news, we see stories about extreme heat waves causing tens of thousands of deaths, ongoing droughts impacting the global food supply, and the accelerated loss of polar ice caps. 

At the same time, for many of us, the reliability of the seasons we once had is no more. In my neck of the woods in Northern California, it was 80 degrees in February, and then it was so cold at the beginning of July that we had to fire up the woodstove!

And while the changing weather may be a mild inconvenience for some of us, it can be catastrophic for others, especially for those in the global south who have contributed the least to the climate emergency.

Many areas along the equator and in the southern hemisphere will become increasingly uninhabitable over the next 50 years, with one prominent study projecting that as many as three billion people will be forced to migrate to the Northern Hemisphere. That's roughly a third of the global population! 

Even if it's only the low side of that estimate, the migration of a billion people would completely transform every nation on the planet. 

For the 100th episode of The Response Podcast, we interviewed Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Josh Fox about the climate crisis, human migration, and how to welcome those coming rather than meet them with walls and brutal criminalization.

Josh's new film, The Welcome Table, is now available to watch on HBO Max.

About the guest

Josh is an independent filmmaker and founder and artistic director of International WOW Company. His films include AWAKE. A Dream From Standing Rock, How To Let Go Of The World And Love All The Things Climate Can't Change, and the award-winning Gasland and Gasland 2. 

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