"When you've seen land being lost 30 feet at a time, in an hour, then it starts scaring you."
That's Dennis Davis of Shismaref, Alaska, just one of the 25 million people around the world who are facing the extreme consequences of climate change on a very real and present level. Michael Nash's documentary, Climate Refugees, spotlights these people and their communities, which are literally crumbling before their eyes.
The issue of climate refugees is just beginning to enter a wider discourse beyond the communities that are directly impacted, due to films like Nash's. The film has been making its ways through the film festival circuits, showing at the Sundance Film Festival last month, and most recently at the Boulder International Film Festival.
According to Big Green Boulder, Nash and his crew traveled for 18 months filming in Bangladesh, the Tuvalu islands in the South Pacific, India, Texas, China, New Orleans, Sudan and Chad, where rising sea levels, droughts, and coastal erosion, among other things, are forcing residents to migrate beyond their homelands.
Nash told The Daily Camera why he felt compelled to tell their story:
The human face of climate change really is an untold story and the very reason I felt the need to investigate. When I started this journey three years ago, there was very little data on climatic migration. There seemed to be a vast amount of spin on both sides of the climate change issue. I wanted to move beyond the politics and dig into the truth of whether our climate was really changing and if it was, how was it affecting humans? What I found was mass climatic migration. Victims forced to relocate, unable to live on the land, either from short-term or long-term climatic changes. Our changing climate seems to be all about water: too much in some areas and too little in others.
WATCH the Climate Refugees trailer: