“People are moving to Duluth, Minnesota, for one particularly big reason,” CNN reports in a new video for its Project Planet series. “Is anywhere safe from the climate crisis?” the story asks, answering that some say Duluth is “the new ‘climate refuge.'”
The eight-minute video starts getting Duluthy around the 2:30 mark. It features interviews with Duluth Mayor Emily Larson, UMD environmental science professor Erik Brown, self-professed climate refugee Jamie Beck Alexander, and former Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa chairwoman Karen Diver, who asks the seemingly obvious questions:
“If you’re coming for the clean water, can we still promise you clean water with 50,000 or 100,000 more people? Can we promise we’re going to have a quality school or an adaptable economy that meets everybody’s needs?”
Diver sums the climate safe-haven notion up thusly: “Don’t kill the thing you love.”
Reuters and the New York Times reported on Duluth as a climate-change refuge in 2019 following Harvard University Graduate School of Design lecturer Jesse Keenan’s presentation on the subject at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Our Climate Futures Conference.
