Consider This from NPR - One Uprooted Life At A Time, Climate Change Drives An American Migration

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Margaret Elysia Garcia tried hard to rebuild her life in Greenville, California after it was devastated by a wildfire in 2021.But the difficulty of life there — power outages, mud slides, razed streets she could barely recognize — eventually it all became too much. She left her home there and moved to Southern California.Jake Bittle's new book, The Great Displacement: Climate Change And The Next American Migration, argues that stories like this are becoming more common. From drought-hit farms in Arizona to flooded coastlines in Virginia, it's a close look at the way climate-fueled disasters are forcing people to move.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

For two decades, Margaret Alicia Garcia called Greenville, California home. She loved it. We come from all walks of life. We found our way to the mountains. And we live side by side, you know, hippies, ranchers, self-proclaimed rednecks. And we just all make this beautiful place our home. That's Garcia talking with me back in 2021. We reached out to her because she had just published a eulogy for that beautiful place in a column for Plumas News. She writes those columns under her married name, Meg Upton. In 2021, Greenville was largely destroyed by the Dixie Fire, still the second largest on record in

California. When we caught up with her this week, she told us that even now, with most of the debris cleared away, Greenville is still almost unrecognizable. People talk about all the time about how it's hard to remember what was where, even remembering like, oh, I lived on this street because we have no markers of anything. After the fire, Garcia did make it back. It was her daughter's senior year of high school. She lived in a tiny house for a few months then at her mom's place, which survived the fire. But lots of people didn't return.

Before the fire, Greenville had a lot of older folks, retirees. It's like their families are finally like, okay, enough's enough. You're not living in the mountains anymore. So we lost the bulk of our elderly population. Then there were the people who didn't have anywhere to come back to. Plumas County did not have a lot of open housing in the first place. And then the fire took so much that there literally is no open housing. Still, the town is trying to rebuild. Buildings are going up. Businesses are starting to come back.

Riley's Beef Jerky, that was a big one for us last year. Their business had burned down, and they bought in a new location, and our gas station is back. Garcia still uses we and us to talk about Greenville, but this year she decided to leave again with no plans to return. A lot of us did not quite process the trauma as quickly as we thought we did. And I just remember about five or six times, and one time I was on an airplane and I started smelling smoke,

which apparently is a big thing with fire survivors. Like you get anxious or tired, you start smelling smoke. And I was like, I can't, I can't live this way. She's still writing her column from afar, but just until the paper can find someone else to take it over. Garcia's got a new job in Southern California. She says she's only now realizing just how difficult life was after the fire. The power going out for a few days or there's a rock slide, mud slide from there being no trees on the hillside and so you can't get to work or you can't get mail. I mean, those are inconveniences. But if you put that together with, you know, just the emotional trauma of being there,

it's really hard. Consider this. Climate change is making disasters like the Dixie Fire more common. Whether wildfires or hurricanes or flooding, the result is a massive American climate migration. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Tuesday, February 28th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time

mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Wildfires in California are just one of many climate-fueled disasters that are uprooting people from the places they call home. There are drought-hit farms in Arizona, flooded coastlines in Virginia. Jake Biddle visits many of these places in his new book. It's called The Great Displacement, Climate Change, and the Next American Migration. So displacement is an interesting word choice in the title, and you open the book by explaining why you picked that word, even though climate migration

is becoming the more common term. Why do you consider this a displacement? Right. So migration, the word to me tends to imply an intentional movement from point A to point B. You know, somebody no longer wants to live where they do. So they get up and they choose to move somewhere else that's better. And what I found was that in the United States and in other places, what's happening as climate disasters get worse is something much more chaotic. People tend to want to stay where they are for as long as they possibly can.

In many cases, they find it devastating to leave behind the place that they are from. But more than that, they also don't really move very far. They don't really know where they're going. And they often don't necessarily stay to the place that they move for a long period of time. So I think that because climate change exerts so much economic pressure, and because the movements that follow these disasters are so chaotic, you can't really use the word migration as we tend to think of it. And so I was trying to find a word that sort of captured that chaos or that sort of frothy nature of the movement after these disasters. And I felt that displacement, that was a more accurate term. I think a lot of people imagine this to be something that happens

elsewhere. You know, climate change is displacing people in Bangladesh or in the islands of the South Pacific. Did you have a hard time finding examples of people experiencing climate displacement in the U.S.? No, I didn't have a hard time at all. And indeed, the reason why I wanted to do the book was because I felt that there were a lot of people out there who had moved in the aftermath of disasters, but whose stories we just didn't tend to tell. All it took was to sort of go to the places where there had been disasters a few years earlier and start talking to people. And it was very easy to find dozens and hundreds of people who had ended up slowly migrating away or just not being able to make it back after a storm or a big fire. As I said, the book sort of hopscotch is all over the country. What was your starting point? Where did you begin? I started in Houston, I had worked on a story about a federal government flood buyout program in the city of

Houston, where basically the government would buyout program in the city of Houston, where basically the government would buy out homes that had seen repeated flooding, knock them down and give people money to move somewhere else. And there was a sort of range of outcomes here that I thought was really fascinating. Some people thought this program was exceptionally effective, that it helped people get out of places that were prone to flooding again and again. Some people thought it was really not great. The government would give people a stipend to move, and they would basically not check on what happened to them.

And a lot of them ended up moving into places that were just as vulnerable as the neighborhoods that they left behind. So this was a nationwide program. I wrote about it in Houston, but it sort of opened up this world to me. All these people who had tens of thousands of people every year who had moved after disasters, and we really just didn't know what happened to them. Even though the patterns of displacement are chaotic and unpredictable, there are certain consistent themes. Like you say, climate displacement exacerbates income inequality. And one place that's really apparent is Northern California. You write about the Tubbs fire,

which roared through Santa Rosa. What happened after that? So California was already experiencing a housing crisis, as everyone knows. But the city lost upwards of 4,000 housing units to the fire. And that took this already pretty severe housing crisis and just supercharged it to the point where wealthy people who had lost their homes were able to bid higher and higher and higher for rental apartments that were available. And in many cases, they actually took away rental apartments from people whose leases were expiring. So some people ended up doubling up with their parents. Some people moved as far away as Kentucky and only came back years later. But it was just

kind of chaos. And the farther down you were in the income ladder, the less able you were to find housing in this sort of really severe post-disaster crunch. And a question that comes up a lot is who's left holding the bag? Like, is it up to the federal government? Is it up to the homeowners? You describe in Norfolk, Virginia, where rising seas are flooding neighborhoods, that it's like people are passing around a stick of dynamite hoping not to be the person holding it when it explodes. So when the reality of these situations, whether it's flooding or drought or what have you, when that finally becomes undeniable, like who do we put the onus on? How is our country answering that question? Right. So right now we sort of have a partial and incomplete answer to that question,

which is that the amount of money that gets doled out each year is nowhere near equivalent to the amount of damage, right? So the difference is usually made up by the homeowners and by the renters. The government and insurance companies don't distribute enough money to make up that difference. cost of these excessively damaging disasters, whether that's through having to leave and exert themselves to find more affordable housing or having to dig into their savings to protect the life of their mortgage and make sure their house is actually worth something. These are inevitably challenging, difficult situations with answers that are not easy, but were there scenarios that you thought that was handled really well? People wound up in a good place after that policy was implemented? Yes, there are a few of those. There's not a ton. So during the Obama administration, the federal government handed down a bunch of money, about a billion dollars, to sort of do a pilot program for different, what they called resilient

strategies, different ways of adapting to climate change. And in an African-American neighborhood of Norfolk called Chesterfield Heights, which had seen, you know, really, really frequent flooding from high tide events, from storms, the city was able to spend upwards of $100 million to create this park that would absorb tides, to create these really beautiful berms along the water that would sort of stop storm surge from happening, and also to fix this really outdated stormwater system that really wasn't handling rain events very well. And it went from a neighborhood where property values were going to decline, and nobody really wanted to move there because it was just, it was so vulnerable to flooding. And it went to a neighborhood that now has some of the best infrastructure in the city, and certainly is going to be resilient in the coming decades to the rising sea levels that

are happening off the coast of Virginia. We're at the beginning of a trend that will only accelerate. So what does the future look like? I mean, how many Americans are likely to be forced to relocate because of climate change? Where are they likely to go? Can you paint a picture of what the US might look like decades from now? Yeah, it's really, really difficult to know with any certainty what the US will look like decades from now. But I think what we can say with certainty is that people will continue to lose their homes, you know, hundreds of thousands, probably on average each year, that's already, you know, a pretty good ballpark estimate of the number of people whose homes get damaged or destroyed by a climate disaster each year, that's already, you know, a pretty good ballpark estimate of the number of

people whose homes get damaged or destroyed by a climate disaster each year. So you could imagine a situation where from the coast or from the hottest parts of the country, the parts that are most prone to wildfire, people start to move towards cities that tend to be a little more temperate while not being so far away that they're unfamiliar, right? So some demographers predict that people might move from Miami, say, to Orlando or Atlanta, or people might move from Houston to Dallas, but it will be very messy. You know, it won't be a coherent march northward. It will be a lot of churning and back and forth, and then eventually these trends might emerge over the decades. Jake Biddle is the author of The Great Displacement, Climate Change, and the Next American Migration.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.