America is on fire, says a climate writer. Do you have to run?

IN MOTION: The overheated earth and the uprooting of Americaby Abraham Lustgarten

Of course, it’s already happening. You can see it in the fires in California, which are burning down homes and forcing residents to escape the terror of wildfires. You can glimpse it in Arizona, where drought has prompted farmers to give up growing crops and sell their fields to developers.

Tides are rising on the coasts, flooding vulnerable coastal cities, while pervasive heat is expanding ocean volumes and melting the great ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland into the water.

And finally, there are the heat waves: weeks of hellish temperatures that literally mean death for residents of Western states who spend too much time outside. “The places in the world where we think we can live now,” explains Abraham Lustgarten in “On the Move,” his fascinating new look at the population changes caused by the climate crisis, “will not be the same as the places where we will live. can live in the future.”

In a broader context, he warns, we may now be on the cusp of “the greatest demographic shift the world has ever seen.”

Where shall we go? When? And are we welcomed? To answer these questions, Lustgarten collects academic studies and examines models that simulate future migration scenarios; He then combines his insights with reporting.

He also has personal experiences to draw from. He’s a wildfire-weary Californian living in fear that insurers could make his house worthless, or that the next fire could destroy his town. Should he move his family? With each passing year, the question becomes harder to ignore. He keeps a bag packed, water and flashlights ready, knowing that the burning season means he could have to flee at any moment.

Climate-driven migrations will almost certainly become a widespread trend in the coming decades – computer models indicate extraordinary temperature extremes for many parts of the Middle East and North Africa. In the meantime, sea levels are rising and flooding will certainly become a global phenomenon.

Lustgarten’s focus is on the United States, allowing readers to understand the complexities of migration scenarios by examining catastrophes that are now becoming familiar to many of us. And yet: migration is an enormously complex dynamic that goes beyond a period of warm weather or floods. “Of course, not everyone will pack up and move in the face of these changes,” Lustgarten admits.

Some Americans will be too poor to move. Others will be reluctant to give up the familiar way of life. What seems likely based on past migrations is that younger people will be the first to uproot themselves.

The movements may not be extreme at first. Rural residents often migrate to nearby cities; those in the cities are shifting to the cities. And more dramatic movements – similar to the African American “Great Migration” of the first half of the 20th century, or those fleeing the Dust Bowl during the Depression – may not come until later.

Lustgarten’s story sometimes gets bogged down with data and research arcana: Readers are often informed about the potential vulnerabilities of different states under different climate scenarios, as well as what a particular scholar might believe could happen to the U.S. population or to agricultural yields .

What continually enlivens the book are the author’s eloquent personal insights. His visits to Guatemala in particular are both astonishing and poignant, providing great insight into why poor farm workers, ravaged by droughts and disastrous economic conditions, risk everything to come to northern neighbors who greet them with hostility. For Lustgarten, this provides a test case for how the planet’s most vulnerable populations might respond in a climate crisis.

For those of us who already live here, Lustgarten suggests that the decision to stay or go may depend on geography. He points out that for years, state and federal incentives have allowed Americans to settle in dangerous places — for example, offering them cheap flood insurance if they live in a flood zone, or offering subsidized or regulated home insurance policies even if they live in a flood area. area with wildfires or near an eroding beach. Ending such practices could allow homeowners to assess climate risks more clearly, potentially hastening moves to safer places.

But floods, heat waves and fires can have dramatic consequences for the lives of all Americans. “It will affect everyone,” one scientist tells the author. “No one escapes.”

While reading, I sometimes wondered whether Lustgarten should have further tempered the speculative nature of the migration models on which his book is based. In tone, he moves between a confident prediction of the future and caveats that the shifts he writes about are merely predictions, the “threshold of discomfort” that will force one to make difficult-to-determine moves.

After all, personal unwillingness to move is unpredictably associated with external factors. We cannot be certain that interstate politics will allow waves of relocations in, say, 2050. And if we manage to reduce CO2 emissions and avoid the worst-case scenarios for a warming climate, we may discover that human ingenuity could lead to better adaptation to water shortages and rising sea levels (or excessive heat). .

Even a massive volcanic eruption could cool things down, albeit temporarily; it is difficult to predict the future. Be that as it may, climate maps and projected patterns “above all capture the imagination,” as Lustgarten puts it, for what might unfold decades later.

In that regard, this book should fill readers’ minds with possibilities. We know that many Americans are facing a future that is either too hot, too dry, too wet or too chaotic for comfort. And – if our current immigration disputes are any indication – too mean.

When Lustgarten travels to Michigan, he wants to explore whether some Rust Belt cities, now dwindling in number, have the historic infrastructure and ability to grow again. It’s an exciting idea; Whether the region would welcome millions of newcomers is a bigger question. When he asks the city of Ann Arbor’s sustainability director if she thinks residents are more concerned about climate change or newcomers, her answer is telling: “The people coming in, hands down.”

With so much to fear, and so much work to do to make our environment livable, the thing we seem to fear most is… each other. As “On the Move” convincingly demonstrates, with all the heat and disruption coming our way, we’re going to have to do much better than that.

EN ROUTE: The overheated earth and the uprooting of America | By Abraham Lustgarten | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 324 pages | $30