Anna Badkhen on Failed Migrations Amid Climate Crisis and Colonial Greed

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

In this narrated essay for our ongoing series on migration, Anna Badkhen asks: When does a journey begin? As she encounters people traveling north of the Ethiopian capital who are looking for a means of escape, she considers failed migrations and the impossibility of escape when the forces of climate catastrophe and colonial greed combine to trap the world’s most vulnerable populations.

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Anna Badkhen is a writer and essayist who has spent most of her life in the Global South. Author of six books of nonfiction, her latest essay collection is Bright Unbearable Reality. Anna is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility, among others. She has written about a dozen wars on three continents. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Common, Scalawag, Guernica, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. Badkhen is a contributing editor to Mānoa Journal.

Alexander Bee is a photojournalist who was born in India and grew up in a coastal city of Normandy. Since working for the United Nations agency for Migration in Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Djibouti, he has developed a passion for documentary photography. Strongly humanitarian, his work focuses on contemporary social issues.