The Great Migration was one of the most significant and most rapid mass internal movements in history—perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers, it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group—Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles—to the United States. For Black people, the migration meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base in America and finding a new one. Wiki
With the climate emergency, internal migration milestones will likely be shattered in the years and decades to come. We are not prepared for what is coming.
Between 1915 and 1970, over five million African Americans (and many poor whites) moved north to the industrial midwest, now known as the rust belt, to escape poverty and the racism of segregation in the southeast United States. The Great Lakes region was an economic powerhouse due to good-paying jobs and affordable housing. From the start of the American revolution to 1910, ninety percent of black folks lived in the south and were the majority at one time in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, according to Wiki.
The primary cities where southern migrants, both white and black, were drawn to were Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Chicago, and many others in the region. (These cities had some of the most filthy industries in the world. Over the past few decades, the area began to decline, but they still retain a manufacturing base that burns fossil fuels that pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere).
Human migration slowly reversed yet again when black citizens gradually returned to the south as the economy in the north started to decline.
Climate change will generate ongoing migrations due to drought, wildfires, flooding, hunger, and mighty wind storms. This is crystal clear at the southern border as central Americans move poleward.
Those who can afford to leave are beginning to do so not so much because the ferocity of the climate crisis has impacted them personally yet. Instead, the handwriting is on the wall in many areas losing access to fresh water.
A new dustbowl is in the beginning stages while humidity and heat have become unbearable without air conditioning.
From California to Florida, the search for a better life in a livable region to call home is on the rise. As Bachman-Turner Overdrive sang — You ain’t seen nothing yet.
A Redfin poll found that half of the people moving today are doing so because of climate change. Only the folks in the mid-west were less likely to move over habitability concerns.
In a perfect world, the Great Lakes region would be an obvious choice to relocate. Freshwater is abundant; it is above sea level, cold winters and cool summers, housing is cheap, while opportunities for recreation and cultural activities can’t be beaten.
But it is not that simple with climate change. The Climate Resilience Toolkit reports that changing rainfall patterns will be devastating to agriculture and to the water stores that are one of the largest in the world and which contain 84% of the fresh water in North America.
Increasing humidity will elevate wet-bulb temperatures in the region. Heat and agricultural runoff will combine to make a toxic soup of local lakes and rivers that will not support aquatic life.
No place is truly safe as the ferocity of climate crisis has only just begun. Climate Change is a threat multiplier; all hell could break loose at any time.
Joel Brammeier of the Alliance for the Great Lakes writes in Bloomberg:
You can’t call the Great Lakes a climate refuge if the people already here are the ones seeking refuge. Before we spend more time and energy imagining that people might return if things get bad enough elsewhere, we’d be well served to turn our gaze inward to the communities that are under water stress right now. Nearly half a million people around Lake Erie lost access to safe drinking water in 2014 due to agricultural pollution. Some 10,000 people were evacuated from flooding homes in central Michigan in 2020, in the face of a storm that is supposed to only happen once every 500 years. Thousands of homes in the Detroit area — including my father’s — got socked with flooded basements from extreme storms this summer. Even cold Lake Superior, with its tourism-dependent economy, is now experiencing blue-green algae blooms in the heat of the summer. These stories are repeating in communities across the region, and just keeping pace with the cost of providing safe and clean water and sanitation is increasingly unaffordable for lower income Great Lakes residents.
The Great Lakes, like every part of the country, has to be part of a national climate strategy that supports people already living here to adapt to climate change while aggressively mitigating root causes.
To be a climate haven means to work with nature and people. It means that all levels of government and the private sector have to step up to make this a haven for everyone who lives here already. The infrastructure, governance and incentives for economic development we swore by during the 20th century are no match for the impacts of climate change or the inequities in how people are experiencing them, which often fall along lines of race and wealth.
The fact that we do not yet face widespread inundation or fiery cataclysms means changes today can have real impact for generations.
I get these questions regularly and am both encouraged and dismayed by them. Encouraged because it suggests that the message about climate risks is finally getting out and people are beginning to reflect on the personal implications of those risks. Dismayed by the realization that the climate crisis is going to produce two classes of refugees: those with the freedom and financial resources to try, for a while at least, to flee from growing threats in advance, and those who will be left behind to suffer the consequences in the form of illness, death and destruction.
And I can’t answer them. Decisions about where to live, when we’re lucky enough to have the ability to choose, are deeply personal – a function of family, friends, jobs, wealth and idiosyncratic preferences about community, health, environment and yes, climate and weather. But, from the point of view of a scientist, certain facts about our changing environment are now glaringly unambiguous. Sea levels are rising and risks from coastal flooding and storms – already extremely high in some places – are growing fast. Rising temperatures are already causing more extreme heat events, which have always been lethal and are becoming more so. Wildfires are increasing in frequency, intensity and duration in many parts of the world, threatening communities with death and destruction and causing severe air pollution for millions. The severity of both droughts and floods are on the rise in some regions, with consequences for water availability and quality and public health.
How bad will it get? I don’t know because I don’t know how long our politicians will dither before finally dealing with the climate crisis. I don’t know because there are natural factors that could slightly slow or, more likely, massively speed up, the rate of change, causing cascading and accelerating disasters faster than we can adapt. But we know enough now to invest in reducing the emissions of climate-changing gases and to begin to adapt to those impacts we can no longer avoid. These changes are coming and the costs, especially to those left behind, will be beyond anything our disaster management systems have had to deal with in the past.
We desperately need the 3.5 trillion infrastructure bill signed into law, I don’t see a way we can ever adapt without the social safety net and green infrastructure it would provide.
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