Climate Refugees are Leaving the Farm Behind
When speaking at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford University last month, President Obama described Silicon Valley as one of the “great hubs of innovation and entrepreneurship.” Whether for software, sunshine or soil, California has always been a place to which people eagerly flock.
Woody Guthrie chronicled this fact in his folk songs. In the 1930s, after years of unsustainable agricultural production, golden wheat fields in the American Midwest were decimated by a severe, decade-long drought. Millions of acres of farmland turned to wasteland during the Dust Bowl, which prompted the largest migration in American history within a short window of time. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved off the Great Plains. Many of these “Dust Bowl refugees,” as Mr. Guthrie sang about, journeyed to California in search of economic opportunities and a better life.
The stories of these migrant farmers were also famously told by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath: “They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred.”
Tavis Ford