Refugees, Nomads, Wanderers—A World on the Move
with Mark Adams
We are all immigrants if you go back far enough—some forced, some by urgency, some by choice. American citizens and many others enjoy the liberty to travel for family, vacations, or mere whim. Of all the things we take for granted, this freedom of movement is such a deep entitlement that the experience of refugees and immigrants is incomprehensible to us. In the spring of 2019, Mark Adams, artist and cartographer with the National Park Service, took a volunteer trip to assist refugees on the Greek island of Lesvos. He brought back friendships, stories, and landscape images of his journey—and an appreciation for the lives of ordinary Afghans, Syrians, Iranians, and Africans, made extraordinary by their forced journeys. Mark will share his reflections from entries he made on that trip in sketchbooks and a journal, and will discuss the increasing need to add the effects of changing climate to the disruptions of war and oppression driving human and animal migrations. The future could see a quadrupling of people on the move looking simply for security, food and livelihoods. Plants and animals are already shifting their ranges northward with the seasons, and the USDA has changed their plant hardiness zone map to a dynamic one, last shifting zones in 1990 and 2012. Join us for another look at a world on the move.