Abstrakt: | The paper addresses the issue of refugees in the broad sense of the term, i.e.
people forced to leave their homes and seek conditions for a normal life due to climate
change and to the excessive environment footprint left by humans. The numerous reasons
for this type of displacement include drought, the growing scarcity of natural resources
in seas and oceans, and the unfair distribution of water. These three climate
plagues are analysed on the basis of non-fiction literature – Wykluczeni [The Excluded],
which is a book of reportage by Artur Domosławski, Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns.
Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp, and Stefano Liberti’s South of Lampedusa. In
the public consciousness, migrations motivated by climate change and human interference
in the ecosystem have been functioning since recently, but they will actually become
the greatest challenge of our day and age. This is why the important role played
by humanities is to speak about them, to comment on their performative power, to
debate on potential solutions, and to trigger warning discourses leading to the development
of a habit of imagining “scenarios for the future”. Acts of imagination provide
the possibility to shape the world in an unlimited way and to play out in a virtual manner
some key social, cultural and political situations, in order to live well on an overcrowded
planet, where water, land and food may be lacking a few decades from now. |