89: Left and leaving

by

‘You could be in trouble if you get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time’

The Birds of California, 1923.

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For 22 years or so I lived in Arizona, where the summers sear into you the childhood memories of chlorine-stained hair, blistered skin, scorched feet, drinking out of neighbors’ hoses to fight off dehydration. It’s hotter there now on average, but when I was a kid we did break a record at 121 degrees in Phoenix and I remember I went for a bike ride that day because I was a dumb kid and I guess I wanted to see what it was like. You never really get used to living in that kind of heat and it always sucks in different ways, but it also becomes just part of life. 

When I first moved away I went to Portland, Oregon, not because I wanted to get out of the heat, but not not because I wanted to get out of the heat. The irony is not lost on me that the first place I escaped to ended up being ground zero for one of the worst and most eye-opening climate change-fueled heatwaves on record. That was a good reminder that when it comes to extreme weather, it’s the deviation that kills you. People can live in all kinds of fucked up places if we’re ready for it, but the one-teens when you’ve barely even felt 100 is a special kind of hell. It’s the change more than the climate.  

I kept moving after Portland and have now made a home in five cities. If my count is right that has included 15 different apartments and houses as an adult. I currently have family in five different states and friends in many more not to brag but I have friends. All of which is to say, even though I’ve been in Boston for some time now, I’ve lived a kind of rootless adulthood, largely at ease with packing up and going to new places. 

Even so, as I spend more and more time thinking about climate change, one of the things that I worry about the most, at least as it relates to my own personal experience, is where I should be living as things continue to get worse. It’s been bothering me for years, this feeling like if I make the wrong move or don’t make the right move I’ll get stuck somewhere I shouldn’t be. I’ve been thinking about this maybe a little more urgently ever since we got the news that the owner of the house where we rent an apartment is about to sell it. (#16 here I come!)

I don’t think I’m alone in this anxiety, and I feel like the pull between staying in a place and leaving a place is a deeply human one. The modern version of humanity was built around agriculture, a practice that requires a commitment to a place in order to gain a return on investment for the time you spent there. At the same time, few things define being a person than our sheer inability to sit fucking still. I’ve written before about a favorite passage from Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, where she describes our “Faustian restlessness.” 

I also think that when we are experiencing trauma, chaos, or uncertainty, that inner conflict strains us more than usual, like a macro version of fight or flight. When things get tough, something screams at us, should I dig in or should I take off? Marc Maron once said you can’t always run away from your problems, but sometimes you can. 

We saw this during COVID, when tons of people made cross-country moves at the most difficult time imaginable for a variety of reasons, but also, really, because they just had to get the fuck out of Dodge. I wonder how much of that will continue after the hellish June we had, flooding on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and the epic season of drought and wildfire it seems like we’re headed toward in the West. I wonder how many people, if not being forced to move, are just feeling like maybe it’s time to skip town. 

Control 

At the core of this urge I suspect is a way to feel a sense of control in times when we’re losing it. I think that was part of it during the pandemic. It led us to find something to grab on to and hold tight, whether that was where we were or where we went. 

During COVID and climate change alike, that sense of control is largely an illusion, of course. On some level, the decision of whether we should be going somewhere else is an arbitrary one, because in one way or another, we are all going to lose our home. Not necessarily the loss of literal brick-and-mortar or the loss of a hometown, but we are all losing the world we were born into, and with it the things that we associate with home, things that give us a sense of comfort and normalcy. The change of seasons we grew up with, the birds we used to see, the places we used to go swimming, the lobster in a vacation town. Even the sky will take on different colors than it used to, whether from wildfire smoke or sulfates we spray into the air.

Wallace-Wells writes about how what we’re entering is worse than a new normal, it’s “the end of normal; never normal again.” I often think of this part in the cli-fi novel The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, which is set in Thailand and describes spirits getting stuck in place because there is nowhere better for them to reincarnate: 

“Mediums all speak of how crazy with frustration the Phii are, how they cannot reincarnate and thus linger, like a great mass of people at Hualamphong Station hoping for a train down to the beaches. All of them waiting for a reincarnation that they cannot have because none of them deserve the suffering of this particular world.”

For climate refugees, the choice of where to go will not exist, because it will be made for them, with climate impacts making homes literally uninhabitable and economic insecurity forcing them to go wherever they can. There is a refrain among people working in climate change that there is no escape from it, that all of our lives will be disrupted so it’s in all of our interests to take action. That is absolutely true, and the failure to effectively communicate that early on was one of our worst missteps, as people in wealthy regions long assumed they would be insulated from harm. But we also know that, even if it will harm us all, it won’t harm all of us equally.

For example, even in places that are making a planned retreat, and even when that planned retreat is funded through buyouts, lower-income people experience worse levels of disruption. A recent study of flood relocation in Houston found that non-white and lower-income residents were more likely to be displaced, and they ended up moving three times farther from home on average, removing them from their social bonds and networks of support. “Neighborly bonds built over time can help with daily needs such as errands and child care; they can also help with community resilience when residents have to prepare for and rebound from the next disaster.”

What we’re likely going to end up with is a cleaving into two classes of mobility—those who can decide where they want to be (whether that’s staying or moving) and those are forced into the decision. 

Staying 

All of that is why, even as a person who has spent his adult life leaving places and going to other places, there’s something about the idea of an elective relocation in retreat from climate change that makes me feel queasy.  

I think like a lot of people with some amount of privilege, there is this kind of tug in the back of my head that says, just get away, run. Sell all your stuff and go as far north as you possibly can, find a little piece of land on high ground and clutch onto it like a lifeboat for as long as possible. It’s an occasional impulse that I feel ashamed of, the same way I feel ashamed of the white liberal urge to leave the country when it lurches in disturbing political directions. 

There’s something so childish about it, an abandonment, but also an impractical one. I once told my therapist that I occasionally get depressed and fantasize about running away to a cabin somewhere and just chopping wood or whatever. He said, do you honestly believe that if you did that, you would be happy. That you would be proud and satisfied with your decision? Of course, the answer is no. Even if you could, by some miracle, find a place to live that is safe from climate impacts, you’re still a part of what is happening. 

So over the past few years, I’ve come to this conclusion that the right strategy in terms of location and relocation during climate change is not trying to live in a place with the fewest climate consequences, but trying to find and/or build a community that has the capability to take what is going to hit it, and care for its people as it’s happening. I think of it as a form of staying and fighting, although for people like me that could very well mean moving somewhere different, just not doing so in retreat. It’s not really about moving or not moving. It’s about finding and devoting yourself to a place and people that you claim as your home. 

I know this might sound real hippie dippy doo, but one thing about climate change, whether in mitigation or adaptation, is that it kills by degrees. I did not mean that as a pun or a double meaning or whatever, but everything we do, every step we take to stop burning carbon and to make our communities more able to take the impacts of burning too much carbon, can reduce suffering. 

We’re seeing versions of this kind of social resilience I’m talking about in island nations, where after multiple hurricanes, people build networks of mutual aid through text or phone trees that allow people to help each other after storms before official services can respond.

When it comes to city heat, we are learning a lot more about how much it can vary. Vivek Shandas, a climate researcher at Portland State University who studies these variations, found that during the recent heatwave, the temperatures he recorded on the exteriors of buildings varied by up to 40 degrees. The heat island effect in cities is an oversimplification, he says, because some places within cities are 15 or 20 degrees cooler than others. Some of the factors that make the difference are within our control.

In areas of extreme flooding, green infrastructure, which refers to different forms of permeable landscapes, can cool temperatures in the summer and provide places for surges of stormwater to go instead of overwhelming streets and sewer systems. As landscape architecture professor Mary Pat McGuire writes about green infrastructure: 

By thinking interdependently with water, climate-adaptive rainwater design employs broad knowledge of regional ecology, soils, the seasons, and the land itself as a natural-systems infrastructure that centers community and ecological health.

Different than large-scale gray infrastructure—which is often planned top-down by wastewater authorities—communities are directly involved in determining where green infrastructure should be designed and implemented based on local needs and cultural preferences.

That extends to all kinds of local solutions, like renewable mini-grids, tree canopies, aggressive water conservation in deserts. There is actually quite a lot that’s in our power when it comes to livability during extremes. But it requires changing the way we live with and think about our surroundings. 

The huge problem looming over all of this is that none of these solutions is enough to “solve” climate change, of course, and without massive changes to our systems, we’ll cross certain thresholds that will make large sections of the globe practically impossible to live in. And some places are further along that path than others. That’s the part that’s so terrifying, and the part that always makes me reconsider my peace and love theory. At some point, you can adapt, you can build social bonds, but then a place can just literally run out of water. It can fall into the ocean. It can burn to the ground. 

So I don’t know. There’s no easy answers here fam. But it feels right to me that chasing a safe place is the wrong move, and a better one, a safer one even, is to find the people and places that are yours and fighting for them, and fighting against the forces that would one day make them uninhabitable. It won’t guarantee that we’ll stay out of harm’s way, but nothing will, and it might be a saner way to find control in a future where we are increasingly losing it.

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Links

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I don’t want to put the person who tweeted this on blast but this kind of shit is the most deranged climate change hero worship and it would probably make Greta Thunberg herself super mad. That is Captain Planet. What you are describing is literally Captain Planet and the Planeteers please grow up. #NoHero

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Listening

The eternal construction in the neighborhood has put Constructive Summer by The Hold Steady in my head for some time now.

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Speaking of Arizona, the last time the Phoenix Suns were in the NBA Finals was in 1993 and I was 15 years old and I wore this Suns hat that was like cream colored with the 90s logo and a purple suede bill and I bet I could get a lot of money for that if I could find it now. Which is to say that even though I haven’t been a big NBA fan in a while, I am very much enjoying watching the Suns in the Finals and between you and me I think they are going to win. I love Chris Paul and Devin Booker and Deandre Ayton and I know Phoenix has some problems but it has the Suns so please support them for me if nothing else. I ordered a new hat it should get here soon.

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