On the Move
Climate brittleness and displacement are having far-reaching impacts on all our lives. The crisis is just beginning. (A book review.)
On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America
by Abrahm Lustgarten
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; March 26, 2024)
Changes in nature become changes in our lives. Extreme changes undermine our lives. As our lives are undermined, we find ourselves under torque, forced to act. For hundreds of millions of us, the action we’ll be driven towards most strongly is movement: simply going somewhere where things are better, heading towards relative safety. A planet in the throes of discontinuity means a planet of people on the move.
“Despite all the talk about the climate crisis,” Abrahm Lustgarten writes in his new book, “we’ve scarcely begun to consider what is expected to be one of the largest impacts: the next great human migration.”
If you want a one-volume guide to why many millions of Americans will soon be driven into motion, looking for safety and opportunity on a world in chaos, this is it. Indeed, I think it’s likely the best overall account of coming climate migrations yet written1.
Lustgarten begins with a section (“The Change”) summarizing the “enormous pressures” bearing down on us, especially in places that are brittle and doing little to prepare. Pretty much all the ground covered in this section will be familiar to regular readers here, but Lustgarten does an unusually good job unpacking these threats, in two ways.
First, he moves through a variety of the major threats with a brisk, clear approach. You obviously won’t find as much depth here as you will in the best of what I think of as the “impact books” — books like The Heat will Kill You First, The Water Will Come, Fire Weather, or The Sixth Extinction — but you get instead a solid overview of the systemic nature of these threats as an interlocking whole. Heat, storms, floods, sea level rise, wildfires, farm loss, water scarcity, loss of insurability, climate justice… it’s got it all.
Second, and even more effectively, Lustgarten makes the decision to lean heavily on the work of the Rhodium Group, a front-of-the-pack climate intelligence company, They’ve done excellent work (in conjunction with the Climate Impact Lab) mapping projected dangers and losses. Their maps illustrate the book. Though in discontinuous times every approach to prediction has its limits, the consistency of Rhodium’s perspective and output makes a complex story more easily grasped than would a collage of maps and studies from a wider variety experts.
His next section (“The Move”) then starts to unpack the process of displacement, to explain why so many people are likely to find themselves on the move. How many? “The models suggestion that over the next fifty to seventy years, at least 13 million Americans — and perhaps as many as 162 million [emphasis mine] —could move in responses to changes in their climate.”2 Most of the book is centered on the American experience of crisis displacement.
Regular readers of these letters will know the basic outlines of the crisis here. As climate and ecological systems shift, the tolerances for which places, homes and infrastructures were previously prepared are exceeded. Sometimes that means catastrophic disasters and sudden failures. More often, it means the erosion of needed systems and services, interuptions and expenses for which we’re unprepared, the gradual loss of capacity to prepare for (or respond to) quickly worsening problems. As the extent of the danger becomes clear and costly risks must be acknowledged, endangered places will lose economic value, perhaps suddenly. Brittle assets will crash. People with fewer means will be increasingly caught in what I call brittleness traps, where those who’ve waited too long (or had too little to start with) find themselves without the resources to leave, even as things fall apart. As these problems worsen, less endangered nearby places will feel an undertow of spreading economic and social impacts. Competition for the safest, most advantaged places will become intense.
Lustgarten does a great job of running readers through the crisis dynamics forcing Americans out of endangered places. He harkens back to earlier — now almost forgotten — eras of mass-migration here, from the Dust Bowl to the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the South. He also notes that we are still building at headlong speeds in some of the most obviously endangered places in North America.
We’re in a slow-motion national crisis, somewhat moderated by wealth and natural abundance, and silenced to some extent by denial and predatory delay. Lustgarten skillfully explores the scale of the economic damages we face. He does an excellent job, for instance, of explaining the brittleness bubble, and why (if unaddressed until it implodes) it could lead, in the words of Jesse Keenan, “to a total public financial collapse.”
Obviously, climate migration is not limited to Americans. Indeed, he notes that studies suggest by 2070 one in three people on the planet will find the places they live unmanageable. That epic global displacement will have major impacts on lives everywhere. And, as a forerunner of the experiences many Americans (and people in other wealthy countries) face, there’s much to learn from their experience.
This is the section where Lustgarten really delivers, not only analyzing how ecological collapses drive the multitudes, but empathizing with how individuals process trauma and weigh options. He never loses sight that a migration of millions is made up of a multitude of individuals making complicated choices.
“Any one person’s decision to move is exceedingly complex. The wrenching choice to leave family and land and heritage is rarely tied to any one single cause. Wars and violence drive migration today more than any other single factor, as people seek safety and peace. The aspiration to work toward a better life is another dominant pull. But each of these is also entirely dependent on the natural environment. Is there water? Can framing provide enough income to send children to school? Have failed crops pushed villagers into the hands of drug lords or gangs? Are people competing over arable land or food? Poverty, hunger, desire, conflict, corruption, trust in leadership, the availability of medicine, technology, ambition, even transportation all play critical roles in drawing people away from their homes. As parts of the planet grow increasingly inhospitable, a changing climate plays an ever-larger role in the decision to migrate.”
He delves into discussion of what mass-migrations mean, especially in the poorer parts of the world. He’s done the on-the-ground reporting and it shows, as he reveals how the planetary crisis is unraveling life in places like Guatemala, Bangladesh, Syria, and the Mississippi Delta. The landscapes he sketches and the people whose stories he tells are effective at keeping what can feel like surreal transformations grounded in the reality changing around us now.
It really works to his advantage when he considers what obligations wealthier, less climate-exposed nations have to the millions of people who face turmoil that is, to at least to some extent, of our making. He handles gracefully the complex questions of climate justice, international cooperation and conflict, and national security worries.
Billions are in for harder futures than that, and Lustgarten doesn’t shy away from the horror and injustice now unfolding, and the impacts it will have on us and our own politics. He writes, “violence in some form and some places is probably inevitable. ‘People [he quotes John Kerry saying] are going to move to places they think they can live. They’ll fight over the places they want to move to… for waterholes, for a homestead... You will have a massive pushback by people in various countries that can amount to genocide.’”
That violence will come home, eventually. A harsher world will (I believe) inexorably create a harsher America. How we choose treat those who are desperate will shape how we treat each other, and we have fewer and harder choices left than we like to think. We are shedding options every day.
Lustgarten’s third, short section (“The Arrival”) touches on the implications of the lurching economic and demographic transitions ahead. He briefly addresses the need to decarbonize the economy, the need to ruggedize cities even as they grow rapidly, and the need to migrate and evolve whole industries (for instance, agriculture). It’s good work, again bolstered by use of the Rhodium Group’s findings.
I found this part the least satisfying. That may be simply because many of the concerns I find most pressing — cultural engagement with discontinuity, societal and personal ruggedization, crisis foresight and strategy — are only glimpsed here. We know a lot now about the kinds of solutions we could embrace, but you won’t find much analysis in this book of our remaining collective options. Nor will you find much information here to help you figure out what you personally ought to do, now that the wolf has slipped its chains3.
In fairness, a fuller treatment of not just why we’re moving but where we’re going (and what we’ll be trying to do when we get there) would’ve doubled the page count here. It’s probably work enough for one book to attempt to explain what’s set all this madness in motion.
And, to be clear, this is an outstanding book. For those who are working to navigate discontinuity, and want a starting point for understanding just how massive that discontinuity is, you could do a lot worse than picking up a copy of On the Move (now available for pre-order).
A REMINDER: I’m offering the next season of my Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization this spring. Registration is now open!
Classes begin February 29th. Subscribers can save 10% using this special early-bird discount code, good until Friday, February 23rd:
COUPON CODE: RUGGEDIZEMYLIFE
To get your 10% discount, go to this link, enter the above Coupon Code at checkout, and then click “APPLY” to adjust the total.
https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=18593954&appointmentType=58913956
(Enrollment closes on February 27th. Space is intentionally limited.)
Disclaimer: I am briefly portrayed in the book, so I’m not a perfectly neutral observer.
(Obviously, there’s huge uncertainty in any numbers like these, but I think it behooves us to assume mass-migrations like nothing this nation’s ever seen are building now. It’s even smarter to understand that the global scale of displacement is potentially an event unlike anything we’ve seen in millennia, if ever. The low-bar estimates we see — assuming highly unlikely levels of successful climate action (accompanied by collossal payments to poorer nations for climate ruggedization, sustainable development, and humanitarian relief) — are still staggering. Applying the precautionary principle to both the limits of realistic action and the potential intensifying effects of multiple simultaneous systemic failures — assuming that as things fall apart, the chaos doesn’t just add up, but multiplies — gets us to scary, transapocalyptic scenarios, real fast.)
This is the focus of much of my work, these days, and its omission seems to me to be glaring. Again, not an entirely neutral reviewer.