Floods in Tennessee and New England this week. Next week, floods and drought somewhere else.
What’s it going to look like when people start to move primarily because they’re so exposed to climate risk where they are? I suspect it looks like right this minute, which is “slow, incremental and invisible in the daily news cycle”. I think it looks like Black migration to the North after Reconstruction: you can see it if you’re in it, you can see it if you sift the data, you can see it after it happens. I think it looks like leaving the Dust Bowl: visible once enough people started doing it.
How many times will people keep coming back to a place where they’ve lost property and lives because of climate? Katrina was a test for that. The last few years of rainfall in Houston have been another test of it.
You can hear it in the aftermath interviews that people in the sites of floods give: can we come back after this? After the last two? After the last five? You can hear it in the befuddlement of people who lost property and family even though their home seemed well up above a creek or river: what has changed to make that water reach out for us, when it never has in living memory? Or so often?
You can add up the questions that will tip people to leave. Do they have anyone who will take them in somewhere else? Is that somewhere else safer or better than here? Is there a job waiting somewhere else? A business opportunity? Is what I own worth anything? Is an insurance check coming that will give me enough money in the bank to make the move?
We should be clear: those questions are going to leave some people where they are even when the waters rise up again and again, or drought burns everything down. If there’s no one anywhere else, is there at least an SUV or a truck to sleep in, for a 21st Century Okie? A tent to pitch on land that’s unwatched or unprotected, long enough to find a living situation? No and no? Then people are staying. Some people stayed South, stayed in the dust. Ghost towns didn’t empty out entirely one morning: sometimes a few people stayed for decades. There are a few households left in Centralia PA even though the earth underneath their feet is on fire all the time.
How will people answer whether there is better than here as the entire world’s climate changes? The Okies knew the dust wasn’t blowing in California, even if they didn’t know all else that was waiting for them. Black Southerners knew there wasn’t cotton being picked in Chicago, even if they didn’t know all else that was waiting for them. But where could you go where you know there’s no flood coming? Where there will still be water? Where the heat won’t kill you? Wherever that is, once we’re sure of it, if we ever are, the rich will buy it first and put up whatever walls they can, visible and invisible. Otherwise, folks know they might be just like the people who left New Orleans after Katrina to go to Houston and found themselves underwater again there.
Even when people in a place leave it, know it’s empty of value and possibility, somebody will move in: the addict looking to hide, the truly desperate looking for a place to hold onto. Folks from all over the world bought abandoned houses in Peoria by auction just because they were cheap. People who leave home and hearth to search opportunity and fortune have been abandoning where they were born for generations. People who stay because they’re stubborn, or stay because they fear being a stranger somewhere else more than they fear fire and flood where they are? They are already in places that are dying, struggling, lost. What tipping points do they have?
We’ll know when the world is truly on the move when the anonymous hedge funds and limited liability companies that have snapped up property all over the world stop wanting anything in South Florida or the Gulf Coast or Tidewater Virginia. When the fossil fuel companies quietly pack their South Louisiana bags one night and put a lock on the chain-link fences of the refineries. When the University of Miami can’t hire young faculty because there’s no future in being there. When Philadelphia starts thinking about where to build a replacement airport. When the skyrocketing price of water in Phoenix makes the next wave of retirees choose somewhere else instead.
When all that starts to show in the data and the news, on some nearby tomorrow, you might think the people living by the creeks and in the advancing deserts and under the newly blazing suns will already be in motion. But I think we’ve seen this week, in most weeks, that they very likely can’t, and soon enough, there will be so many of them that nobody dare ask what might change that can’t to can, because there will be hardly anywhere for them to go that would make life safer.
Image credit: "Flooding" by U.S. Geological Survey is marked with CC PDM 1.0