You had me at real estate
Where the three most important things this century are: Relocation,! Relocation! Relocation!
As I say in the book and brief, “climate changes everything.”
As humans, we’re only at the beginning stages of comprehending the profound nature of the planetary change we’ve triggered. We question it, we deny it, we joke about it … until your sorry ass is caught up in one of the billion-dollar disasters that arrive with greater frequency and ferocity by the year.
We think it’s a weather thing — and it is.
We don’t think of it as a migration thing. In our self-absorption, we blame it all on the allure of living in America, which is full of allure alright, but that ain’t the driver.
We see the people but do not hear the story.
My hat is old, my teeth are gold.
I have a bird I like to hold.
My shoe is off, my foot is cold.
My shoe is off, my foot is cold.
I have a bird I like to hold.
My hat is old, my teeth are gold.
And now my story is all told.Dr. Seuss, One fish two fish red fish blue fish
The story is long and boring: this family has tilled this soil for generations, but the rainfall just isn’t there anymore, and so the farm fails. Father goes to the city, leaving behind elderly parents and spouse and kid. He seeks work and sends back what money he can. But he is one of so many attempting the same. When it becomes clear City A won’t do, or maybe he runs afoul of criminal elements in his search for informal work, he tries the next country over.
It’s only when he feels like the obvious nearby targets are exhausted that he contemplates the Journey full of danger, but, by that time, he feels like he has no choice, because it’s time to man-up and provide the only escape he can see.
Africa's demographic/climatic collision
The Christian Science Monitor (where I scored my first-ever published article in 1989!) put out this excellent piece that transmits — at a very human level — how climate change is already stressing out lower latitudes (here, Tunisia in North Africa).
And so they come North, going through whatever money they might have had and throwing themselves on the mercy of the American court, which ain’t offering a whole lot right now, because we don’t see the longer and wider causality here; we just see the “loser” and his “dependents” at the border, looking like raggedy-ass hobos.
They’re just here for the government money and to steal our jobs!
What drives them? Something so big and inescapable and profound and powerful that they’re willing to put up with all the friction that this tectonic force generates as it propels them all the way through that 1,000 mile trek across dangerous terrain and/or dangerous waters.
Nope, climate change has nothing to do with this, and you’re stupid and soft for insinuating that, which is why we need to erase all those references from the public record. No mention, no climate change. Drill, baby, drill and screw your sad attempt to prevent American greatness.
Species the world over are being relocated poleward and up in elevation. Their logic is extremely simple — natural as can be: I move to where it feels right and I leave from where it no longer feels right.
Climes are being relocated — also largely poleward. They now produce crazy outcomes that we didn’t even seem to have words for until recently.
I grew up with tornados. I never heard of a derecho until about a half decade ago.
de·re·cho
/dāˈrāˌCHō/
noun
US
a line of intense, widespread, and fast-moving windstorms and sometimes thunderstorms that moves across a great distance and is characterized by damaging winds.
Now, derechos regularly threaten the corn belt, so much so that scientists are working to generate shorter corn stalks that deliver the same bushel/acre rate but aren’t so vulnerable to being flattened by high winds.
A word I never heard of until recently, and it’s now so important that scientists are working the issue for the long term — or until Musk reclassifies it all as “fraud” involving that-which-shall-not-be-mentioned-in-government-records.
Burn the witch! Burn her!
Same thing with “atmospheric rivers” — nowhere in my universe and now a regular headline in my Google news feed.
An atmospheric river is a long, narrow band of moisture in the atmosphere that carries water from the tropics to higher latitudes. They can bring heavy rain and snow, which can cause flooding, mudslides, and damage to property.
Something to consider: change that is altering our language faster than our government can effectively respond. That speaks either to the speed of the former or the sheer incompetence of the latter — or both.
Who knows? Maybe these terms will be banned by the Ministry of Truth.
I mean, what’s not clear enough about doubleplusbadstorm?
Finally, and of most immediate note, humanity is being relocated by climate change. The conversations we have today about Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Nordic countries and Russia … those largely one-way dialogues all migrate to unspeakably dangerous ideas that, in our understanding of history, launch us right back to the imperial/colonial era of the 19th century, full of “races.”
Can’t you just feel the White Man masculinity fully unleashed!
Why must it be like this? Because it was like that before and humans can’t imagine something different — despite its standing right in front of us in the two great examples of states uniting to socialize risk, aggregate market power, and extend freedom of movement and business such that great wealth and technologies are generated.
There is the United States model, which we projected upon the world after two World Wars.
I know, I know, what a disaster American-style globalization turned out to be! Generating more wealth and reducing more poverty in five decades (1950-2000) than the preceding five centuries of European colonial rule.
Big fucking ripoff if you ask me!
So, if we have new problems that arise from all that success, then all we can do with our puny brains (barely tickled by AI) is to replicate wrong answers from the past: such as tariffs and trade wars and bold threats of imperial takeovers.
Because … that’s the best we can manage in both vision and action: a sad, brain-dead repetition of the past.
Worse, we now blame the EU, that other great example of integration through free association, for Russia’s return to 19th century imperialism.
We made them do that! It’s all OUR fault! Especially after the horrors of Russia-gate and what poor old Vlad had to suffer through in combination with Trump!
It doesn’t get any stupider than that, with Jeffrey Sachs as the poster boy of that doubleplusdumbthink.
Yes, yes, integration bad, White Christian nationalism (to include the Russian Orthodox version) very very good.
Again, we reach for the past when we cannot comprehend — much less accept — the future staring us in the face.
Below is a good article worth reading, despite its tendencies to oldthink and oldsay. The underlying logic is, shall I say, well grounded.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS: The Coming Age of Territorial Expansion; Climate Change Will Fuel Contests—and Maybe Wars—for Land and Resources
Let me dig in …
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