CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Forthcoming Migration Storm

Image by Sébastien Goldberg.

Climate change is the force behind the greatest migration storm of all time. It will be 500,000,000 or maybe 2,000,000,000 nobody knows for sure how many but as climate change worsens, the estimates go up. Scientific studies run the gamut of up to a couple billion homeless wandering the planet, forlornly looking for a home over upcoming decades.

This is the subject of Josh Fox’s newest film The Welcome Table, 2h 11min, HBO Documentary Films, June 2026. Fox is best known for his Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning 2010 documentary Gasland.

Decider, the pop culture web site for New York Post reviews “Stream it or Skip it” rates The Welcome Table “Stream it” … “A Striking and Memorable Documentary About People Displaced by Climate Change.”

The film is direct and to the point: “One out of every three people is forecast to leave home due to climate change. The greatest mass migration in human history is upon us. Governments know this is coming. They’re building walls and detention centers. Walls stand for racism, nationalism, fascism, dividing society into unequal separate sides. Walls build misunderstanding.”

Climate change impacts us all because in a very real sense, we’ve all left home, migrated without really knowing it. We’ve seemingly moved to a climate-changed planet. This is now home, a different planet, very different from any we’ve lived on. This is the general view of Josh Fox’s intriguing documentary.

Migrant thoughts: “What tells us we’re welcome? What is home?” serve as opening statements for what’s lost too easily, forgotten so soon. “Everything is changing. The steadiness that this world civilization is based upon is about to evaporate. The climate is changing beyond anything imaginable.”

Early in the film, a long shot of a lengthy wooden table in a green field at Bywater Levee, New Orleans is the testimonial spot for people to tell true-life stories. People (strangers) from every continent displaced by climate change meet for the first time to tell their stories at this long wooden table on a grassy knoll, wondering: “Where is home now?”

Husband-and-wife fire survivors from Paradise, California (2018). The massive fire consumed the equivalent of 800 football fields per minute, not per hour, but per minute! Eighty-five people caught in the inferno, died, real-life testament to an unforgiving climate that’s drier and hotter than ever before in human history. This is the current epitome of global warming’s destructiveness. Nothing is normal now.

Throughout the world, ‘common wildfires’ have evolved into ‘climate infernos’ that are foreign to human experience, as 22,000 displaced Paradise residents became modern-day refugees, overnight. Fires & storms everywhere and Rain Bombs coming out of the sky in Brazil kill 50 people, displace unknown numbers, landslides of mud erupt, forcing homeless migrants to foreign shores as hometowns are buried.

The........

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