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Tomgram: Jane Braxton Little, Climate Migrants in a Hell on Earth

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Uh-oh, my city's sinking. I'm not kidding! According to a new study, New York City, my hometown, is all too literally going down, thanks to those vertiginous towers, including the Empire State Building, constructed on land some of which was sandy and is now giving way. All those Manhattan skyscrapers and the like weigh an estimated 1.68 trillion pounds, writes the Guardian's Oliver Milman, "roughly equivalent to the weight of 140 million elephants." And mind you, this is happening at a moment when the seas and oceans globally are both overheating and rising in a disturbing fashion. Since 1950, the waters around my town have risen approximately nine inches (something that became all too apparent when Hurricane Sandy hit it in 2012).

Sooner or later, to put this in the context of Jane Braxton Little's piece today, some New Yorkers will undoubtedly become climate migrants. And we'll hardly be alone. This planet is on edge. At one point last year, one-third (yes, you read that right!) of Pakistan was underwater, thanks to floods the likes of which had never been seen before. (And Pakistan wasn't alone. Just check out Nigeria or Australia if you don't believe me.)

This year, Canada is experiencing wildfires of an historically unprecedented sort. And none of this, eerily enough, can be considered out of the ordinary anymore. In fact, a new study in Nature Sustainability suggests that, by late in this century, if we human beings don't get a handle on climate change by truly bringing the fossil-fuelization of this planet under control, up to one-third of us could find ourselves living outside what its authors call the "human climate niche" -- that is, in areas where human life could be unsustainable. Imagine that.

No wonder some experts are already suggesting that, in the decades to come, the climate emergency could turn more than a billion of us into migrants on a planet becoming too hot to bear. My old friend and TomDispatch regular Braxton Little has already experienced this reality in an up close and personal fashion. As she wrote in her first piece for this site, she found herself a climate refugee when most of her town in northern California burned to the ground in the devastating Dixie fire of 2021. With that in mind, let her introduce you to the world of climate migrants that could someday simply be the world for all too many of us. Tom

Looking for Home in an Overheating World
If Emissions Continue, Will We All Be Migrants Someday?

By

Greenville, CA -- Pines and firs parched by a three-year drought had been burning for days on a ridge 1,000 feet above my remote mountain town. On August 4, 2021, the flames suddenly flared into a heat so intense it formed a molten cloud the color of bruised flesh. As that sinister cumulus rose above an oval-shaped reservoir, it collapsed, sending red-hot embers down the steep slopes toward Greenville in a storm of torched trees and exploding shrubs. It took less than 30 minutes for the Dixie fire to transform my town's tarnished Gold Rush charm into a heap of smoldering hand-hewn timbers and century-old brick walls.

Minutes earlier, the last of the nearly 1,000 residents had bolted, some in shirts singed by flames. We fled with what belongings we could take in the face of a fire few believed would ever destroy our town. I was among the evacuees, escaping with a hastily assembled truckload of journals and notebooks, shoes and shovels, laptops and passports. We scattered in the sort of desperate diaspora that has become ever more common in towns like ours across the West.

The Dixie fire left more than 700 residents of Greenville and its surroundings homeless. (While my office in town was demolished, my home on its outskirts escaped the flames.) Displaced by wildfire in a forest both poorly managed and dried by a warming planet, we burned-out residents joined America's swelling ranks of climate migrants. Many of us found temporary shelter in neighboring small towns. Others went to Reno or Los Angeles, Idaho, Missouri, or Kentucky, where relatives and friends were ready to offer at least temporary safety.

My neighbors in Greenville, Indian Falls, and Canyon Dam weren't the only victims of climate-driven fires that summer. Near Lake Tahoe, 100 miles to the south, the Caldor fire crossed the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains, destroying more than 1,000 structures and forcing the entire city of South Lake Tahoe to evacuate. Nor were wildfires the only all-American calamities caused by our rapidly warming planet that year: Hurricane Ida pummeled Louisiana and Mississippi with 150-mile-an-hour winds; a crippling megadrought of a sort not seen in 1,200 years gripped the Southwest; and an unprecedented heat dome in the Pacific Northwest drove temperatures to 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49.5 degrees Celsius).

Think of the destruction of my adopted hometown as a parable for what the next century of climate change holds in store for this country, as Jake Bittle makes all too clear in his book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. By the end of 2021, one in three Americans had already experienced some kind of weather disaster driven by climate change and last year alone more than three million Americans lost their homes to climate disasters.

These days, it's the sort of heartbreaking tale told around the globe, one that will, it seems, only worsen into the distant future. By 2050, it's now believed that between 31 million and 72 million people across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America will be displaced due to water stress, sea level rise, or crop failures, according to an estimate in the most recent report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unless we dramatically curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the years to come, scientists predict that, by century's end, climate-change-caused events will affect every last one of us.

Where will we go to find safety from fire, floods, and extreme storms then? How long will those of us uprooted from our homes have to stay in evacuation sanctuaries? Will we ever find home again?

"Unpredictable, Chaotic, and Life-Changing"

The term climate migration has an orderly, almost bucolic ring to it, evoking as it does the age-old seasonal treks of caribou, wildebeests, and other charismatic species. In human terms, it suggests coastal residents dealing with flooding by simply moving inland and continuing their lives, or forest dwellers relocating from burn scars to places where the risk of wildfire is much lower. Unfortunately, in the years to come, count on one thing: climate migration will have a far less peaceful ring to it.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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