Future Ruins: The World Tour
When climate change says, "Damn you all to hell!"
Interesting CNN story that features several quotes from a great climate-change source, the environmental journalist Gaia Vince (I know, that first name is almost too much). I quote her brilliant book Nomad Century several times in America’s New Map. She is, in many ways, a perfect source for the piece that posits future “dark” eco tourism wherein tourists visits places ruined by climate change.
Plenty of precedent for this, my favorite example being the Chernobyl reactor, where, tours are offered daily, along with a souvenir dosimeter.
If you skin is tingling throughout the tour, see a doctor.
So the CNN piece (“Environmental disasters and ‘dark’ tourism: The modern-day ghost towns created by the climate crisis”), starts off by referencing abandoned ghost towns of the American West, meaning those typically bypassed by later railroads and so withered on the vine of economic development — boomtowns gone bust.
Then Vince is pulled into the piece:
“We are going to see a movement – it’s already happening – where people are moving away from these areas that are most impacted by storms, by rising sea levels and floods, but also by constant fire, smoke inhalation – all of that,” says Gaia Vince, author of “Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World.”
She cites recent examples like wildfires in Hawaii, California and Australia, and floods in Bangladesh, as some of the latest triggers for population displacements.
“How many people are going to return to Lahaina in Hawaii after the fires there?” she questions. “I don’t think it’ll be 100% of the population that left. Some people will not be able to.”
It is, as I note in America’s New Map, a fabulous book.
Here’s where I leverage it best:
Vince describes the “four horsemen of the Anthropocene” as fire, heat, drought, and flood—all requiring enormous state resources to combat. Amer- ica witnesses their arrival throughout our Union, along with the pressures they generate among citizens to seek safer ground, often with government aid.
Vince points out that over half the world’s population is concentrated along the 27th parallel north in a belt that “has traditionally been the latitude of most comfortable climate and fertile land.” That band, lying within my definition of Middle Earth, sits just below the US southern border. With that sweet zone shifting tectonically northward every year, how can Americans believe a thirty- foot wall will block that global dynamic? As Vince declares, there will be two types of people in this future: those put on the move by climate change and those receiving them.
Nomad Century notes that “mass migrations this century will be dominated by people from the poor, climate-ravaged world moving to the richer world, countries whose wealth has largely been enabled by changing the climate.” In Vince’s judgment, this looming reality compels us to rethink the nature of the nation-state, elevating it beyond creed, race, and ancestry.
Agreed.
These United States have spent well over two centuries working on exactly such a model. Far from perfect but always perfecting, America is the world’s most successful exercise in suppressing—for good and ill—the primordial mindset that humans, in Vince’s words, “belong to a particular land and that it belongs to us.”
Finding Vince’s book was a big deal for me when plotting my own. I had these ideas that I knew to be true but I needed a deep dive from a genuine expert to confirm. On this point, it was about mass migration toward the North: I knew was already happening (undiagnosed) and would greatly expand, but I didn’t a solid singular source that put all that logic together until I bumped into her book.
As Vince is quoted by CNN, being forced, as a last resort, to abandon a homeland devastated by climate change is about as bad as it gets:
“They’re forced to leave their traditions, their network of family and friends, their ancestors’ graves, their language, all of that, because it’s become unlivable. That is very traumatic, it’s very difficult,” adds Vince.
Vince’s take on the broader migration estimates matches me own, which I find very validating.
More than 20 million people are forced to leave their homes due to extreme weather events each year, according to the United Nations. Researchers have projected that by the end of the century, somewhere in the range of 3 to 6 billion people will be “left outside the ‘human climate niche’” that best supports life.
“It doesn’t mean that 3 to 6 billion people will have to move, but it does mean a lot of people have to move,” Vince notes. This, she says, will disproportionality affect communities of color and/or those who are already facing poverty.
To me, that ultimate disproportionality is what I have dubbed Middle Earth, or that equatorially-centric band stretching 30 degrees north and south of the equator — home to a solid 5-6 billion come mid-century. No, they won’t all be put on the move, but many will be forced off the land — so to speak, and once they exhaust their efforts in cities ill-equipped to handle that influx, they’ll move a country or two over, and, when that fails, they’ll make the great trek north — on foot if necessary.
The CNN story goes on to name five spots you can visit around the world today that are essentially abandoned to nature, thanks to nature in the form of climate change. The one US spot? Valmeyer IL.
I know, that one surprised me too, although it is a familiar tale: place kept getting overwhelmed with floods and eventually moved to higher ground, leaving the old town in place.
And yes, you do get that vibe of life after humanity that has been explored in any number of movies and that one TV series Life After People.
So, the CNN piece got me thinking, when I read about the Panama Canal struggling to operate because a lengthy drought there had reduced its ability to command water for the locks, about how many places around the planet ultimately get abandoned. I mean, the Canal handles 5% of all sea volume traffic. It can’t be moved, so either it somehow adapts or “dies” in ruination.
Seems incredible, and isn’t likely to happen because of the sunk cost and strategic value, but imagine all the other places that don’t rank and are eventually left to decay. Imagine all the family vacations that someday could be built around such attractions.
Deadwood, South Dakota, meet Deadplanet, Earth.
My family and I once toured the Badlands of South Dakota — so rendered by time and climate and erosion, etc. If we now truly live in the Anthropocene, or the Human Epoch, then we’re certainly capable of creating vast badlands and I’m not just talking EPA Superfund sites but entire countries lost to the Industrial Age and the Great Acceleration triggered by US-style globalization.
So, imagine a future TV series based on climate-change ruination tourism, with each week featuring an abandoned zone rendered unlivable.
Imagine the cool tour T-shirt listing all the (literal) hot spots!
If Chuck Heston was still around, he’d be the natural host, would he not? Mr. Omega Man, Mr. Soylent Green, and Mr. You Damn Dirty Apes!
All these descriptions and explorations and books (like mine and Vince’s) have the same goal in mind: motivation.
And every little bit helps. Many stories must be shaped and told.
We need a Great Motivation, alright.
As I say in my book’s preface:
… the stories we now tell of globalization do not envision a happy ending, much less a way ahead. No surprise there: when creators abandon their creation, monsters abound.
My task here is to propose that happy ending, one avowedly cast from an American perspective. Your task, as reader, is to maintain an open mind as to its feasibility and desirability. If, as our politicians love to proclaim, America’s best days lie ahead, then we citizens cannot merely await that future but must craft its story lines—both foreign and domestic. Given our truly revolutionary achievements, we must not allow our currently flat trajectory to determine the upper bounds of our ingenuity and ambition, both of which the world desperately needs now.