With each new federal administration, energy priorities shift. With the election of Donald Trump in 2024, one of his administration’s key promises, enforced by an executive order on January 20 this year and as promised in Project 2025, was to try to ramp up oil and gas drilling in the continental U.S. A key location for increased extraction? Alaska, the remote northern state that always seems to be at the tip of the tongue when the expression “drill, baby, drill” is uttered. 

But despite the fervor from the administration, recent lease auctions for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge failed to find a buyer. Other locations off the shore of Alaska are more likely to see increasing oil production, and some, like the massive Pikka Project on the north slope of Alaska, are already underway. 

One person who knows Alaska as deeply as anyone can who doesn’t live there is writer and explorer Jon Waterman.

“I suppose I’ve taken 50 or 60 different trips and expeditions to Alaska,” he says. 

His new book, Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid the Arctic Climate Crisis, reminds us, in beautifully rendered prose and photos, of the beauty of Alaska, and what’s at stake as the land, wildlife and peoples feel the pressures of climate breakdown and increased oil and gas production. 

Waterman writes: 

The sea ice has melted away as storms erode shorelines and flood villages. Forests are slowly on the move north along with animals new to the Arctic. The permafrost has begun to thaw, and lakes have disappeared as riverbanks and mountainsides droop like frozen spinach left out on the counter. 

The book tracks his most recent visit into Noatak River in Gates of the Arctic National Park, and what he saw that was so drastically different from his first visit 39 years ago. 

How would you describe the climate crisis in Alaska? 

The sea ice is what makes travel safe for the people in the summertime. Sea ice is what allows the polar bears to hunt their seals. And it controls the temperature of the Arctic.

The tree lines have begun to move north. The permafrost is thawing. It’s a whole cascade, like dominoes knocking one another over as the Arctic continues to warm. In fact, Alaska has warmed four times faster than the rest of the Earth.

And in your view, what’s different about this climate change compared with others from the long history of our planet, which you write about in the book?

The difference with the last 150 years is that it’s happened so quickly. And it’s the Anthropocene. Humans have caused this change, and that’s never happened before.

Can you tell me more about the melting permafrost? What are the impacts of that on the far north? 

As that permafrost thaws, the microbes begin to eat all this plant matter and that releases carbon dioxide gases. But it also releases methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas. And this could equal one of the largest triggers of greenhouse gases, because there’s so much methane and carbon stored in the ground that is abruptly thawing in many places.

On hillsides and mountainsides throughout the Arctic, it’s now very common to see what looks like landslides. These are recent thermalkarsts thawing. Downstream of these thermalkarsts, they’re just pumping tons of mud and silt into the river. And that affects the local villagers because they can’t fish. And then even more importantly, it affects all the aquatic life from the fish on down to the microbial life.

And what about the wildlife? 

The lengthening seasons and the lengthening summer have changed the migration patterns of many animals, birds and most notably, caribou. The caribou herds equal food security for many of the people in the far north.

Most of the herds are in a drastic decline. And this is broadly attributed to habitat loss and to climate change, because the warming of the Arctic causes another phenomenon called greening of the Arctic. The last time I went to the Arctic, I was amid the western Arctic caribou herd. And that herd used to be half a million strong. The latest census puts them at 152,000. 

Beavers have come to the Arctic. Beavers were never found in the Arctic prior to 1980. And in just this one portion of northwestern Alaska that I traveled through, through aerial photography, they counted over 11,000 new beaver dams in Arctic Alaska. Red foxes have begun to move north of tree line. There are more moose, and salmon are beginning to spawn in places they’d never spawn before as the waters have warmed.

You visited several Indigenous villages throughout Alaska and in other parts of the far north. What are some of your observations from them? 

The first time I was alerted to the changing north was in 1997. I was in a hunting camp in the Beaufort Sea in Canada, and an elder told me that they were starting to see robins and bluebirds, which they’ve never seen in their village before. And they’d just started to see salmon, and they were having mosquitoes come to their village. And I guess it was a breezy place, and it it stopped being breezy.

They used to have sled dog races on the 4th of July. They could no longer hold sled dog races in the summertime, because there was no longer any snow in the summer. It had gotten so warm. 

As a writer who has written books on the national parks, on Denali Mountain and others, what drew you to nature writing? 

I’ve always been an environmentalist at heart. I read the works of Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey and Peter Matheson and realized that nature is defenseless in that it doesn’t have a voice to speak for itself.

This issue of climate change is just the one grave environmental issue, perhaps the greatest of them all, right up there with overpopulation, that we need to be alert to and that we need to make the public aware of.

Your most recent trip was with your son. Looking to the future, what might people see a hundred years from now in Alaska? What are your hopes? 

Alaska has always been perceived as the last frontier, and I think that’s still true today. And I would hope it’s true a century from now. Thanks to Jimmy Carter and the Alaska National Interest Lands Claims Act that he signed in 1980, we have an enormous amount of protected wilderness and public lands in Alaska.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to speak up for it and defend it. But I think that I’m optimistic and hopeful about the future of Alaska, because of all its protected wildlands.

The post ‘Into the Thaw’: Jon Waterman on a Changing Alaska appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Burning Earth is Yale history professor Sunil Amrith’s fifth book, and his first that focuses his academic eye on the climate crisis. 

“As a citizen and then as a parent,” he says, “the climate crisis just became unavoidable in my mind.”

His first books, notably Crossing the Bay of Bengal and Unruly Waters, focused on the history of migration and ecology in Southeast Asia. The Burning Earth takes a global tack, covering the history of the climate crisis from hundreds of years ago, when the Industrial Revolution ignited the mass commodification of natural resources, to now, with the elimination of CFCs and recent climate tech. He sees history through the lens of human needs and desires, and specifically, the luxurious wants of a small slice of elites. 

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. 

“The desires of a small elite, and the violent pursuit of inequality through empire, has turbocharged our impact on the planet,” Amrith says. As he writes in the prologue: 

I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place. 

What is the main focus of the book?

The core question in The Burning Earth is really: How much is human freedom dependent on the destruction of our planet? I do not think that human flourishing necessitates the sheer and irreparable harm that we have done to our planet. I think a lot of that has been driven more by the desires and the consumption of a small elite amongst human beings. 

You write about need, want and desire and how it relates to the climate crisis. How have those base human traits contributed to the climate breakdown? 

I see two long-term paths towards our climate crisis. One is the story of human need. Food and shelter account for a significant part of our impact on the planet — the search for food and shelter, both of which are still very unequally accessed. And that is a long-term story, that the search for food contributes not just to greenhouse gas emissions, but overwhelmingly to biodiversity loss.

The second story we need to tell is that for at least 500 years, the desires of a small elite, and the violent pursuit of inequality through empire, has turbocharged our impact on the planet. It is the vast and disproportionate resources consumed by those with wealth and power in the world. Their identity has changed over time. For several hundred years, it was mostly Northern Europeans. And now that group of people is certainly much more distributed across the world. 

You write in the book that elites looked at groups of people who are close to nature as being less human. 

I think one of the questions we ask ourselves as we face this climate breakdown is, how did we ever come to believe that the health of the planet didn’t matter to all of us? And yet I think that there has been a period in global history where proportions of people around the world have acted as if it wasn’t true – that we could disregard the health of rivers and forests and simply consume at any rate we chose. That is a mentality that I do also associate with a mentality that imposes a hierarchy on other human beings. 

If you look at, for example, the early colonization of the Americas, the language that the Iberian colonizers used to talk about Indigenous people is very often: they are close to nature. They are not fully human like we are. That legitimizes plunder and exploitation and violence, but it also legitimizes mass deforestation and extraction. 

Was there any way, historically, to stop the inevitable march towards our climate crisis? 

The motivations that are driving people to want to expand their lifespans, to improve the conditions and the security with which their families live – I never want to lose sight of those kinds of baseline human aspirations. 

There are deep human dreams which you can see shared across cultures to simply want one’s descendants to have a better life, to want one’s family to continue. I do see that there is a progression in human beings’ ability and power to mold their surroundings, to make those surroundings more hospitable or more habitable for the human societies.

Then there are parts of the story which I think weren’t inevitable. There was nothing ordained about plantation production, for example, which is a very particular kind of cultivation which has to do with exploiting nature as quickly as possible for rapid gain. I think that is a very specific kind of innovation. 

I think there are technologies that could have had multiple different kinds of uses. And what we’ve tended to see is that their use has been towards maximum extraction. 

You write about silver mining and sugar plantations. How were these some of the earliest environmental catastrophes?

There’s no question that silver mining in the Americas was an environmental catastrophe, and we now have archaeological and genetic evidence that suggests just what a catastrophic impact that had on the health of workers. It was the use of mercury in extracting silver that was so devastating to both the landscape and above all to people’s health. That silver is at the root of what becomes a global economy. 

One could probably make the argument that no single crop has caused greater harm than sugar both to human beings and to nature. Sugar began as a very, very rare luxury. It was treated as one of the fine spices in medieval Europe. And it’s only when you start to get large-scale plantation production combined with the social and economic transformations of early modern Europe that it becomes an item of mass consumption. 

What effect did large scale steel and iron production have?

It’s largely a 19th century story. The age of industrialization coincides exactly with the fossil fuel era, because if we begin with coal in the second half of the 18th century, we start to see widespread use of coal first in England, then in northwestern Europe and in North America. 

I think what changed more than anything else is scale – both the scale of resources that are needed for factory production, and the scale of impact that can be had. I think the story of the railroads is a classic example of this. One of my favorite works of environmental history is Bill Cronin’s book Changes in the Land, which shows how the city of Chicago really reshapes the entire American Midwest. And it does so through the rail lines. Suddenly, Chicago’s markets and exchanges become accessible. And that hastens the destruction of forests, that hastens the expansion of wheat production and monocrop production. And I think we see similar stories all over the world, which is what happens is that as people can travel further, as goods can travel further, you start to get global markets for commodities. And that pushes forward the commodification of nature, the idea that this is not a forest, this is timber, that shift in mentality. 

You describe how the “war machine” is a mechanism of climate destruction. 

That is the part of the book that was the biggest surprise to me. I did not expect that I would conclude that of all the forces driving climate breakdown, warfare is possibly number one. I think the two world wars came to strike me as being pivotal transformative moments, not just because of the scale of resources which went into both of those wars, but also because of the scale of destruction that those wars then made possible, culminating in atomic weapons by the end of the second world war.

Military emissions are not counted in most of our climate targets and most international contributions that have been agreed to. The best estimate we have is that military missions account for about 5% of greenhouse gas emissions, but that is a guess because we don’t know.

You write about the data project of 1957 and 1958, one of the first climate data projects. Tell me about the through line between that and the sheer amount of data we have now. 

This is the International Geophysical Year, and it was this year that the Mauna Loa Observatory was set up in Hawaii, which is, to this day, sort of the gold standard that we have for measuring cumulative concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 2008. Ken Dewey / University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Natural Resources

This data came during the height of the Cold War. This project is drawing in countries from both sides, drawing in countries that don’t necessarily get along. This is the data that first makes us aware that we are living through a period of unprecedented climate change.

With the acceleration the amount of data today, does it not seem to reason that more data would help our imperiled planet? 

More data is undeniably important to climate scientists as they make projections and formulate their models. But more data hasn’t necessarily led to more consensus. More data has not necessarily changed the overall narrative about climate change. I think the data is essential, but I’m not sure that we’re at a point where more data is going to change more people’s minds. Those are political questions, those are cultural questions, and those are much harder to shift.

Why won’t more – and better – data change more people’s minds?

Firstly, I think in the U.S. more than anywhere else, there has been a politically motivated skepticism of that data. We know that the fossil fuel companies have been directly involved in promoting that sort of distrust all over the world. We’re in a broader populist moment of distrust of expertise. That is one reason why I think more data won’t necessarily change people’s minds.

Another is that data is complicated, and the way in which climate scientists and other earth scientists think about uncertainty doesn’t necessarily translate very smoothly into broader general consciousness. 

And finally, the data is sometimes on a scale that is just unfathomable for all of us, so detached from our everyday lived experience, that I think we need more translation. And maybe that is where a creative artist, or a novelist like the great Richard Powers, have had more impact on shifting people’s awareness and consciousness perhaps than more data. 

As an educator at Yale, how did researching and writing this book change what you bring to the classroom? 

I’ve been teaching environmental history for about 15 years. And there are classes I’ve taught where the questions students have raised, the projects they’ve done, the conversations we’ve had in the classroom have just stayed with me. So, it’s not just what I bring to the classroom, but really what I get from the classroom that is translated directly into this book. 

I think we need to bring the environment into everything, not just into environmental history, but I think we need to be thinking about these questions across our humanities curriculum. I mean, in that sense, that’s partly what I was trying to do with The Burning Earth, which was to say, let’s not separate the environmental story from perhaps more familiar stories about the rise and fall of empires, about unfree labor, about migration, about global transformations. And I think more broadly, that’s what I would love to see happen, which is a kind of weaving in of the more-than-human, the planet, the ecology into how we study literature, into how we study philosophy. 

Might one of the hopes of this book be for people to look at the world around them and to realize that everything that’s made here possibly comes from a place of environmental destruction? 

I would love readers of The Burning Earth to make connections between the material that I present, especially that which is most unfamiliar in their everyday lived experience. My aspiration is not to make people feel guilty. Quite the opposite. I want to give readers the impression that everything is interconnected. 

This is about looking at choices with a sense of hopefulness that that means that a shift in consciousness or new forms of collective action can bring about change and perhaps even bring about change quite quickly. 

As a historian, any predictions for the future? 

I think we are living through a period, you know, just this decade, I think, of such unpredictable change that I think there are so many different trajectories that could lie before us, some of them terrifying, and some of them more hopeful.

The post ‘Everything Is Interconnected’: Author and History Professor Sunil Amrith on Facing the Climate Crisis appeared first on EcoWatch.

Eddie Ahn has been an environmental justice attorney for more than 15 years. In his work as the executive director of Brightline Defense, he and his group have ensured that the offshore wind, building decarbonization and increase in electric vehicles happening in California will benefit underserved and low-income communities in the region. In recognition of his efforts, he was inducted into the California Energy Commission’s Clean Energy Hall of Fame in 2021, and had a tree planted in his honor in Sacramento.

^{Eddie Ahn’s author photo}

More recently, Ahn became a published author. His graphic novel Advocate: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice tells many stories, including that of his family’s liquor store business in Texas, his journey away from that future and into the world of nonprofits, and even a detour into his time as a poker player. But much of the text focuses on his environmental justice work. “I’m trying to explain nonprofit work and even what it means to work against something as catastrophic as climate change,” Ahn told EcoWatch. 

^{An excerpt from Eddie Ahn’s new graphic novel}

Are you trying to demystify what nonprofit work is? And what might you say are some of the more unrecognized aspects of environmental justice and climate work?

I did want to use the medium itself as a storytelling vehicle to explain this career. You know, the nonprofit world is very hard work. It can be a lot of repetition. It can be a lot of menial tasks. But I’d like to think in trying to do all those aspects of work, that one becomes intimately connected to the notion of labor, what it means to serve communities.

A lot of what I do at Brightline is extremely lean. I think one theme in the book is essentially my cheerfulness around work, being willing to do it all and then of course, recognizing there are limits to that, too, that one person can only do so much as well. And there’s a larger reflection in the book about not needing to be superhuman as well.

How rewarding is your nonprofit work for you?

I hope the reader gets a sense that even the joy of discovering different communities, of getting to learn different stories, different perspectives, it’s not common in a lot of other jobs. I’ve been able to, for instance, talk with Doctor Espanola Jackson, the community leader who’s represented in the book, who worked in Bayview – Hunter’s Point for a very long time, and that she was generous, you know, to spend time with me.

She took me under her wing and then essentially shared a lot of stories in her own experiences. She was extremely generous with her time, in other words. And, yeah, I don’t think that happens in a lot of other occupations. That is the joy – to be able to meet different community members and then, be a part of their lives in ways that one would normally would not be able to be. 

Would you tell us how important locality and community is to you, and how that’s reflected in the book?

One thing I really wanted to heavily represent in the book is a sense of place, and that’s why I think comics was a unique medium to try to explore environmental justice. A lot of maps are featured in the book that give the reader a sense of, where are we? The expanse of the Bay area, public transit systems, those are all aspects I wanted to literally draw out and so that the reader can be a part of it. There’s a certain kind of Tolkienesque joy you get from it, too. That’s where we’ve been and this is where we’re going, that sense of a journey as well. 

There’s a phrase in the book – “I believe in empowered communities, sustainable environments.” Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

I’ve always tried to avoid getting into a rut of feeling like I have to fix everything or solve everything. I think of the broader arc of what needs to be done to even address climate change.

It does require a lot of communities working in collaboration with each other and essentially getting on the same page to address something as widespread and catastrophic as the climate change that events that are happening now. To empower communities really comes from a sense of giving communities the tools they need to try to address environmental issues and equity issues for themselves.

The sustainable environments portion was really trying to look at aspects of those solutions and then figuring out, okay, is this really a sustainable solution? I’ll give you an example. One subject matter we work on a lot is offshore wind. This is about wind turbines that are being proposed, off the coasts of the United States, but potentially on the Gulf and Great Lakes. The hope is that it’s not just building technology for technology’s sake. Are we connecting these turbines to the right kind of grids? Are we making sure that the hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to flow through these projects, can local communities even share in those benefits, whether it’s jobs or community benefits? Part of it is trying to look at it with that equity lens at the end of the day, and then pushing the envelope around, how can we do better?

Going back to the empowered community’s piece, we should always be trying to understand what local communities want and then honoring that to some degree. Trying to understand, here are the gaps that exist in local communities, and here are the needs that can be addressed, the introduction of this new technology. I do think there’s a broader issue in the environmental movement of feeling disconnected from the solutions that are being proposed.

You’ve worked on three different regional commissions in the San Francisco area. In the book, you mention how hard it is to make decisions, even in the context of climate change, on these commissions. How so? 

One of the things I’ve had to learn as a commissioner is to consume lots of information. Particularly around something like transportation, where the policy pieces are very complex. The gist is you can get lost in the sea of information. I think if there’s one good thing out of my legal training that I can talk about more and more nowadays is that it did prepare me to consume lots of lots of information and parse it quickly. 

Could you tell us about the electrical box art that you created that you mention in the book? (Ahn’s vinyl wrap art is on 10 electrical boxes throughout San Francisco.)

I’ve been surprised they’ve lasted this long. They survived a lot of climate change events like bomb cyclone storms, heat waves and wildfire ash.

What would you say is the best way to tackle climate change? What’s the strategy from your point of view? 

Well, it is a huge question. I think it’s a question of scale, it’s a question of timing and urgency. You can, in theory, organize all the people and all the different government agencies and communities to work together. But if you get there in 50 years’ time, it’s probably too late. Given the way climate change events are happening now, it seems to be that’s where we’re headed. It’s tough to be an optimist. But getting people more connected on the ground to what’s happening at the federal government is key to address these issues.

Part of it is just a humbling realization that there’s no single solution to it all, whether it’s a piece of legislation or a key technology, there’s no magical solution that will ever solve something like this. 

For example – my father, as you know from the last chapter, has been going through a series of health issues that aren’t clearly defined. It just seems like a regression into a worse and worse state. But you do what you can, you manage the situation to and if that’s as good as it gets, you make your peace with it.

I hope that’s not the case for climate change. I’d like to think we can get to enough solutions and ideas that can get us to a much better state than where we’re heading toward. And that’s why I continue to do the work that I’m doing right now.

The post ‘My Cheerfulness Around Work’: Speaking With Environmental Justice Attorney and Graphic Novelist Eddie Ahn appeared first on EcoWatch.

“Coal is the heart and soul of modernity.” Orville Schell is talking about the long history of coal mining, as represented in a major section of the exhibit “COAL + ICE” on view in New York City through August 11. Schell is vice president of the Asia Society, where the exhibit is mounted, and coal was the exhibition’s catalyst. 

^{Craig Thompson}

Back in the 2000s, Schell and Susan Meiselas, this exhibit’s co-curator, had been collecting coal mining documentary photographs from China in the 2000s. When they first visited the coal mining areas, Schell was stunned by the landscape before him. “It was completely defoliated, the sky was gray, with piles of coal everywhere,” he says. “It was an invocation of what happens when coal is king. The river was polluted, the air was polluted.” 

But after collecting images of the coal industry in China, Schell connected with a mountain photographer who had ascended Tibet numerous times. “He kept saying that the glaciers are melting.” The melting glaciers are having an undeniable impact on the rivers, and the people, living downstream. After Schell saw firsthand these two major environmental catastrophes, COAL + ICE was born. 

“The coal was the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, a kind of metaphor for fossil fuels, and the Tibetan plateau, the third pole, was the ice part of it,” Schell says. COAL + ICE was first mounted in 2011 in Beijing. And one of those photos from that time is mounted here. 

“He’s a Chinese coal miner named Song Chao from Shandong Province,” Schell says. “His uncle was a photographer for the new China news agency, so he could get his hands on a camera, and he started shooting portraits of his workmates. And they’re stunningly beautiful.”

^{Song Chao} 

Coal has historically been the highest emitter of CO2 on Earth. Today, China leads the way by a large margin – in 2023, according to Global Carbon Budget data, the country emitted 8.25 billion tonnes of CO2, a number that continues to grow. China currently accounts for about 60% of the world’s coal use, while the country undergoes the dichotomy of increased coal plant approvals and a massive investment in solar and wind power. The exhibit contains a powerful section of video and images that shows the scale of coal production in China, with a nod to American history as well. 

^{Craig Thompson}

Since the first show in 2011, sections have been added. The first was a series of photos on consequences – hurricanes, flooding, and fire – and more recently, a section on solutions was added. 

^{Craig Thompson}

In one powerful section at the Asia Society, Gideon Mendel’s photos are presented on four panels. Mendel is a photographer who traveled around the world to where floods had occurred. He followed people home after the deluge, as they were wading home and as they got to their doors. His images show the powerful aftermath of the floods. 

^{Craig Thompson}

^{Craig Thompson}

Clifford Ross is an artist who shot hurricane waves, both on Long Island and off the coast of Portugal, at the famous Nazare shelf. He discovered that “the artist, namely me, who thought he was photographing nature… wasn’t just photographing nature, but nature stirred and shaken by man’s intervention.” 

^{Clifford Ross}

But the solutions section of the exhibition attempts to shed some positivity on the subject. One of the images is by James Stillings, a photographer who used planes and drones to fly over renewable energy projects. “They’re kind of strikingly beautiful, and sort of designed,” Schell says. “You get a sense of the scale of it. You get a sense that we know exactly what to do, we’re just not doing enough of it.”

^{James Stillings}

An installation called New York, 2050: A Possible Future shows “what New York could look like in 2050, with ocean levels a couple of feet higher,” notes Schell. 

^{Craig Thompson}

^{Craig Thompson}

The show has been around the globe, to Delhi, Copenhagen, Paris, Aspen, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Shanghai. 

“We thought maybe visually, we could get to them,” says Schell. “It’s an effort to try to present the climate challenge in ways that are not truly didactic in written form. Once you get people into the tent, they do become engrossed in it. You just hope to wake them up a little.

“I think we all feel deeply discouraged. But on the other hand, we also know we need to do something.”

COAL + ICE is showing through August 11 in New York City at the Asia Society. For more information: https://asiasociety.org/new-york/exhibitions/coal-ice

The post COAL + ICE: An Expansive Climate Breakdown Exhibit appeared first on EcoWatch.

A 2022 report from the International Panel on Climate Change observed that more than 3.3 billion people around the world are “highly vulnerable to climate change.” And more than one billion people could be exposed to “coastal-specific climate hazards by 2050.”

Here in the U.S., the Census Bureau calculated that 3.2 million adults were displaced or evacuated due to natural disasters of all kinds in 2022. And while climate migration is not easily measurable, as there are multiple factors involved, it is no doubt happening. 

Investigative reporter at Politico Abrahm Lustgarten delved into the topic of U.S. climate migration in his new book, On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. Seeking to understand what climate migration might look like over the next few decades, Lustgarten used data and reporting from places across the country such as New York City, California, Arizona, Chicago, Texas and the Gulf Coast, the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, and from abroad in places like Guatemala and Africa.

Dense with facts and using modeling from Rhodium Group, a climate and economics research provider, to try and predict future migration patterns in the U.S., Lustgarten concludes that climate change migration depends on what happens next in the world of carbon reduction, politics and several other factors, resulting in a book analyzing “a portrait of American society transformed.” 

Here are excerpts from a recent interview with Lustgarten. 

^{Abrahm Lustagarten author photo by Seth Smoot}

What are the most pressing short-term environmental threats that you write about? 

Wildfires, coastal flooding, increasing heat, drought and water scarcity. I also collected some associated data on diminishing crop yields, change in wet bulb temperatures across the country and the economic implications of all of those things.

How was 2020 the tipping point, as you called it? 

Instead of it being a sort of a scary far off in-the-distant-future idea, 2020 was a year where we were reading about smoke or hurricanes or flooding every day. Just a moment where the country seemed to grasp what we’re coping with. 

What did your reporting tell you about who was going where?

The broad thesis of the book is that we will see a future projection of a movement of population from the South and the most extreme areas affected by both heat and sea level rise towards the North, which according to the specific risks that I mapped is the least affected part of the United States. We see current migration that’s sort of unmeasurable coming out of those high-risk areas already. People leaving Florida, people leaving the Gulf Coast, people leaving wildfires in California, anecdotally leaving heat in the Southwest, but it’s very difficult to measure.

Some of the things you write about are the economics of this migration. Tell me generally how disruptive it’ll be.

People move in response to the climate in slow steps and they go the shortest distance possible. It’s more likely that the rural places around them in those states kind of empty out over time because people will seek the support of those urban environments, that urban tax base, the facilities, the school systems, all of the services that are available. I could imagine an American Southwestern Texas that becomes islands of large, relatively wealthy cities, even in a sea of a much emptier rural expanse. 

The second way to answer that question is, what’s the risk for places that are in decline? And this is a pessimistic scenario that universally all of the economists that I spoke with warn about, which is just what happens to a community that loses population for any reason. And it’s the same as what you see in the Rust Belt cities after the 1970s, what you see in post-boom coal towns and things like that. As some people leave, the businesses and the business community shrinks, storefronts might disappear, you have less revenue for the town, city, etc. That government can do less, which self-perpetuates this cycle, right? Your potholes don’t get repaved, and your schools don’t get fresh funding. More parents look at those schools and say, well, this sucks. And it is really hot here. 

Do you think these kinds of economic impacts in certain areas might make people fully aware of the reality of climate breakdown? 

I really think climate migration will happen in the United States, not because people say it’s too damn hot and I want to leave, or we think it’s going to flood and we’re going to move, but when it starts to affect people’s personal economic resilience. It ultimately will be economic-driven migration, which is catalyzed by climate change. It’s inevitable that when those kinds of things happen in culturally conservative parts of southern Louisiana or east Texas, that those people are not going to be hitting the streets complaining about climate change, but they’re going to be saying, “I can’t insure my home any longer. I can’t make a living any longer. Farming just doesn’t work anymore, and we’ve got to move someplace where we can take care of our families and make ends meet.” And a great example of that, of course, is the insurance blowback in Florida.

I wanted to ask you about wealthy people. Do wealthy people have a leg up in this whole situation? There’s been some land grabs up in Wyoming a little bit, and I think in Montana. Do you see that being magnified? 

Wealthy people have an added layer of protection for all the obvious reasons. Interestingly, it’s actually kind of upper middle-class folks that are most likely to move, but wealthy people who might be the most protected because they have either the means to own properties in multiple places at once, or to move more spontaneously when they want to. There’s been a movement towards snatching up land in Wyoming or Montana, you know, or even in the Great Lakes — the data is very hard to pin with certainty to climate migration, but it appears to be part of the same kind of trend. Bill Gates is now the largest landholder in the United States, and he’s been buying up thousands of acres in northern Michigan, for example. 

Might there be a new era of climate-migration boom towns, like the gold rush? 

A lot of that upper Midwest and, you know, along the Canadian border, is rural and quite remote now. What if those cities grew dramatically and became the transportation corridor between the thriving metropolis Pacific Northwest and the Great Lakes region? That’s a far-fetched scenario, but one that’s possible. A place like Fargo — what the data says about Fargo is that its winters will be shorter and not as cold, and its summer seasons will be longer. And the data suggests that the crop yields in Fargo will likely increase while they decrease in other parts of the country. Fargo is the type of place that could see a relative improvement in its environment, a milder climate with probably increasing opportunity for agricultural activity. Which could lead to some kind of boom. 

What might the abandoned places be like? Will any human ingenuity be able to make those places livable? Will it just be the very poor who will live there and can’t escape to go anywhere else? 

It’s a dark question and a dark image, right? There’s a chapter in the book that looks as an example of this to a place called Ordway, Colorado. It’s a farming community that was very prosperous, but as a result of losing its water over the past 20 years or so has experienced a spiral decline. The people left and the schools shrunk in size. It’s an interesting sort of test case that shows us what the future might look like in other places that you’re asking about. There are people that love living there and will remain there and find their homes and their land beautiful. But, you know, as a community, it’s hard to say that it’s thriving. The people that I talked to there feel very sad about what they’ve lost and not particularly hopeful about the future of their community. 

In places like Africa or Central America, in your reporting have you seen that a lot of people there are leaving because of climate migration? 

My top line conclusion is I think we’re entering a new era of permanent, very high levels of global climate change migration all around the world. One very influential piece of research has looked at the human habitability niche around the world. And it models that about a third to one half of humanity will be displaced from this kind of ideal habitat in within the next 40 years. We’re talking about two to three billion people on the planet as potential migrants. 

I spoke with migrants in El Salvador who, you know, wanted to leave because they’re experiencing gang threats in the city of El Salvador, but wanted to go home to their hometown in the mountains, but couldn’t because climate change had wiped out the coffee crop there. Climate change was rarely the primary driver but was always a present factor in these people’s decisions.

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