Depopulation + warming lands = climate migrant settlement zones

We need to stop viewing human migration as merely a political issue

Jim and Sara Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

Small but telling WAPO story describing the growing realization across the Rust Belt — and really the northern portions of the country — of the need for more people. Local US populations — mostly toward the north but across the interior and throughout rural areas — are diminishing in sort of an ink spot version of Japan’s and/or South Korea’s demographic makeover (babies disappearing, old people proliferating, population in general declining, community and economic life being slowly drained away).

Meanwhile, the climate across the US north grows ever more warm — or mild in winter terms.

In the 1960s and 1970s, I grew up in a small Wisconsin town of about 2,200. My mom spent many years working on the hospital board, struggling to keep it operating, because, once a small town loses a hospital, it is truly diminished. It matters a whole lot to be able to get to an ER blocks away instead of several towns over, and I have many memories of that facility from my childhood. My hometown (and my mom) eventually had to accept a state supermax prison (not the most desirably industry to attract) as the cost of keeping the hospital going. The supermax needed a local hospital to be able to care for its incarcerated population. Sort of a forced immigration, but it worked for Boscobel.