ON THE MOVE: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America, by Abrahm Lustgarten
It’s happening already, of course. You can see it in the blazes in California, incinerating homes and forcing residents to escape the terror of wildfires. You can glimpse it in Arizona, where droughts have pushed farmers to give up on growing crops and sell their fields to developers.
On the coasts, tides are rising, flooding vulnerable seaboard cities as a pervasive warmth expands ocean volumes and the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland melt into the water.
And finally, there are the heat waves: weeks of infernal temperatures that literally kill residents of Western states who venture too long outside. “The places around the world we think we can live in now,” Abrahm Lustgarten explains in “On the Move,” his fascinating new look at the population changes wrought by climate crisis, “will not be the same as the places where we will be able to live in the future.”
In a larger context, he warns, we may now be on the cusp of “the largest demographic shift the world has ever seen.”
Where will we go? When? And will we be welcomed? To answer these questions, Lustgarten gathers academic studies and examines models that simulate future migration scenarios; he then combines his insights with reporting.
He has personal experience to draw on, too. A wildfire-weary Californian, he lives in fear that underwriters could render his home worthless, or that the next conflagration could destroy his town. Should he move his family? With each passing year the question is becoming more difficult to ignore. He keeps a bag packed, water and flashlights at the ready, knowing that burning season means he may have to flee at any moment.
Climate-driven migrations will almost certainly become a widespread trend in coming decades — computer models indicate extraordinary temperature extremes for many parts of the Middle East and northern Africa. In the meantime, sea level increases and flooding will surely become a global phenomenon, too.
Lustgarten’s focus is on the United States, which allows readers to grasp the intricacy of migration scenarios by exploring catastrophes that are now becoming familiar to many of us. And yet: Migration is an enormously complex dynamic that goes beyond a spell of hot weather or floods. “Not everyone, of course, will pack up and go in the face of these changes,” Lustgarten concedes.
Some Americans will be too poor to move. Others will be reluctant to abandon familiar ways of life. What seems likely, based on previous migrations, is that younger people will be the first to uproot themselves.
At the start, the moves may not be extreme. Rural dwellers tend to migrate to nearby towns; those in towns shift to cities. And more dramatic moves — akin to the African American “Great Migration” in the first half of the 20th century, or those fleeing the Dust Bowl in the Depression — may come only later.
Lustgarten’s narrative sometimes bogs down with data and research arcana : Readers are frequently informed about the potential vulnerabilities of various states under various climate scenarios, as well as what a particular scholar may believe could happen to the American populace or agricultural yields.
What consistently enlivens the book are the author’s eloquent personal insights. His visits to Guatemala, especially, are astonishing as well as gripping, presenting an intimate understanding of why poor agricultural workers, beset by droughts and calamitous economic circumstances, risk everything to come to northern neighbors that greet them with hostility. For Lustgarten, this offers a test case for how the planet’s most vulnerable populations could respond in a climate emergency.
For those of us already living here, Lustgarten suggests that the decision to stay or go may depend on geography. For years, he points out, state and federal incentives have allowed Americans to settle in dangerous places — giving them cheap flood insurance if they reside in a flood zone, for instance, or offering subsidized or regulated home insurance policies even when they live in a wildfire area or near an eroding beach. Ending such practices could allow homeowners to evaluate climate risks more clearly, potentially hastening moves to safer places.
But flooding, heat waves and fires may lead to dramatic impacts in all Americans’ lives. “It’s going to hit every single person,” one scientist tells the author. “No one escapes.”
While reading, I sometimes wondered if Lustgarten should have further tempered the speculative nature of the migration models upon which his book depends. Tonally, he veers between confident future-casting and caveats that the shifts he’s writing about are merely predictions, the “threshold of discomfort” that will force a person to move difficult to ascertain.
Personal reluctance to moving, after all, combines unpredictably with external factors. We can’t be assured that interstate politics in, say, 2050, will allow for waves of relocation. And, if we succeed in reducing carbon dioxide emissions and avoid the worst scenarios for a warming climate, we may find that human ingenuity can lead us to adapt better to water shortages and rising sea levels (or excessive heat).
Even a massive volcanic explosion could cool things down, albeit temporarily; it’s hard to predict the future. In any event, climate maps and projected patterns mainly “seed the imagination,” as Lustgarten puts it, for what might transpire decades hence.
In that regard, this book should fill readers’ minds with possibilities. We know that many Americans are heading into a future that’s either too hot, too dry, too wet or too chaotic for comfort. And — if our current immigration disputes are any indication — too mean.
When Lustgarten travels to Michigan, he wants to investigate whether some Rust Belt cities, now diminished in population, have the historical infrastructure and capacity to regrow. It’s an exciting idea; whether the region would welcome millions of new arrivals is a bigger question. When he asks the sustainability director for the city of Ann Arbor whether she thinks residents are more concerned with climate change or newcomers, her response is telling: “The people coming in, without a doubt.”
With so much to fear, and so much work ahead to make our environment livable, the thing we seem most afraid of is … one another. As “On the Move” convincingly demonstrates, with all the heat and disruption coming our way, we’ll need to do much better than that.
ON THE MOVE: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America | By Abrahm Lustgarten | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 324 pp. | $30
