- [Announcer] Thank you for joining us for The Great Climate Migration with Abrahm Lustgarten and Sonia Shah, moderated by Ted Alvarez.

Before we begin, thank you to our Science and the Environment Track Sponsor, UBS.

We'd also like to thank our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

- Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Ted Alvarez, the Science and Environment Editor from Crosscut.

I'm very excited to have a conversation today about The Great Climate Migration with Abrahm Lustgarten and Sonia Shah.

Sonia Shah is an award-winning science journalist, an author of books such as the "Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond" which I'd like to point out came out in 2016.

Her latest is "The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move".

Abrahm Lustgarten is a Senior Environmental Reporter at ProPublica investigating climate change and our response to a rapidly shifting environment.

He's the author of a three-part investigation for the New York Times magazine about global human migration and climate change and he's currently writing a book, his third, about this topic.

But of course, living in unique times where so much upheaval has put this really to the front of our minds, I know I think about it every day here in the Pacific Northwest, which I think a lot of people in this country see as a climate-resilient oasis, although that might be up for debate but still it's felt personally by so many up here.

So I think that's a great place to start.

Abrahm, Sonia, thanks for being here.

- Pleasure being here.

- So, it's interesting to me that when we talk about human migration, especially in the context of climate change, it's this global phenomena that will drive changes that I think we can scarcely imagine and that you guys are doing the great work of taking us through that.

But I think the origin stories for both of you about why you are interested in this are intensely personal.

So I was wondering if you could take us through that a little bit and I'll start with you, Sonia.

- Sure.

I mean, for me, I'm the child of immigrants.

My parents came over from India in the 1960s and I think I very much internalized the idea of migration as anomalous.

I always felt that my own presence in North America was somehow sort of out of place, that I couldn't really fit in exactly in North America but also couldn't really fit in when I went back to India to visit relatives.

So there was this sense of this long distance act of migration that my parents committed that it really kind of put me out of place somehow.

And I think that contributed to really my whole career arc as a journalist, which has been looking at the disruptive effects of people, animals, microbes, sort of moving in new ways.

I've written a lot about infection disease outbreak, which is all about that, "Pandemic", which is all about that too.

So, I started to look at migration as migration around 2015 when the so-called migrant crisis was happening in the Mediterranean and lots of Syrian and Afghans and Africans were trying to make their way into Western Europe and getting stuck in the Mediterranean Sea and in Southern Europe.

And I went there thinking that this would be a disruptive sort of catastrophic thing, especially for public health, which was what I had been reporting on for years before that.

And what I found was really just the opposite that the people who were moving into these new places were actually often healthier than the host populations they joined, which is a well-documented phenomenon called the healthy migrant effect.

And it actually makes sense when you think about it for even a second because migration itself requires resilience and good health.

Like it's just really hard to do otherwise.

So, it made me start thinking, well, why did I immediately kind of reflectively consider migration as a kind of a problem, kind of a crisis?

And I realized that that was a very kind of conventional understanding of migration.

We talk about when we see people moving around, we kind of immediately use the term migrant crisis, right?

Like we don't really first stop and think, well, is it life saving for those people?

Is there absorptive capacity where they're going?

Does it contribute to the resilience of the societies they leave behind?

We don't really look at that whole picture.

We just kind of immediately sense, oh, something's out of place, this is a disruptive thing.

Migration is happening and it's somehow kind of a crisis or a catastrophe in some way that we can't fully articulate but we kind of reflexively understand as sort of negative.

So I wanted to start kind of investigating where that idea comes from and how that will play a role as we enter this era of massive climate change where we know that our wild species, they need to move.

We know that they need to move into new places in order to survive the changing climate and a lot of them are already doing that.

80% of wild species that have been studied from all different (indistinct) are moving into new places, usually moving north and into the heights in sync with the changing climate.

And I think we can see some signals of that happening among people too.

People are moving in new ways and in new places and in new ways and into new places and I think what I wanted to try to look at in my book was whether this is something that is a crisis that we need to prevent somehow or could this be part of the solution to the crisis that we're facing with climate change.

- And so Abrahm, I was really struck by your essay, when the wildfires got so bad in California and have been for several years now, it sort of brought everything home that you've been researching and reporting on to roost.

I'm curious, did you have a personal motivation when you began this project or was that when it all kind of like came back down on you?

- Yeah, the personal motivation, the personal connection really came through the reporting of the project.

It began with just this curiosity about many of the issues that Sonia was talking about and what would environments effect be on where people choose to live, like how would people begin to respond to climate change?

We often talk about climate change in terms of changing environmental conditions or the science of it or the temperature of it or the amount of precipitation with a lot less about how we live with it or how we're going to live with it.

So it started out of a curiosity with that and a real kind of analytical approach, this idea that we could maybe quantify it and I tried to do that through some modeling but even behind the modeling, there's this sort of reporting curiosity of, could we break down like the human decision-making?

Can we try to figure out how does environment actually inform when does an individual person decide to go, to move, to pick up and change their lives?

So that's where this sort of personal part came in, it was a several part project for me and the first was really globally focused.

But in the midst of that, of course, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and we've been dealing with wildfires and sometimes that's been an immediate threat and sometimes it's been a more distant threat where we just sort of suffer from bad air quality and smoke.

But it happened over two seasons over the course of my reporting.

And so the first, it was sort of this light bulb that had gone off and I was about six months into reporting.

And I'm like, oh, my discomfort is a form unequal to many other people's experience around the world.

But there's a form of environment influencing my thinking about where I live and in my own context of privilege and ability and living in United States and all of that, it was still sort of provoking the same questioning that was exactly what I was asking villagers about in Guatemala which is like, what's your threshold?

How do you experience the environment around you?

When would you decide to make a change or how much can you live with?

And do you like it?

Do you not like it?

And that became for us in California, for me, it just became an evermore sort of pressing question as my project was delayed through COVID.

And I found myself in January of 2020 or September, I think, publishing the second part of my series, which was focused on American migration.

And I was right in the thick of it just kind of living that question at that point.

So yeah, it became very personal and in a way that helps me understand the reporting better but not in a way that drove that reporting or was the reason why I chose this project.

- Yeah, another thing that I think you both do really well, in both your series and the book is you take all of this data and all of the science and sort of trace how it's moving across landscapes and countries and beyond borders but then to really make those stories land, you have very personal stories.

These very personal narratives and encounters and interactions with real people on the ground who are experiencing this migration right now.

I'm wondering if one particular story for those who are maybe less familiar with the book and the series leaps to mind where you met somebody on the ground who may be challenged or changed your perception of migration and I'll start with you, Sonia.

- I mean, almost everyone I met, the stories that you hear are so complex and so sort of peculiar and particular that they're all really very powerful and give you a lot of insights, just each one in different ways.

But I remember going to, when I was in Greece, speaking to the people who are detained there, Syrians and Afghans mostly, and I was just really struck by how many of them were teachers and journalists and lawyers.

These were like professional class people who had picked up and left and they were living in tents and in parking lots for months and years at the time.

That struck me because it was kind of different than the stereotype of the dusty refugee and the camp, you know?

Which I think is sort of why we have the depiction is more commonly as somebody who's kind of really down and out and desperate.

And of course, these are people who have a lot of resources actually, who are able to make these incredible journeys.

But I remember talking to a Haitian man who had made it to Canada and his journey had started in Haiti.

Then he went to Brazil, then he went to Venezuela and then he went mostly on foot through, I think it was nine countries to get up to Panama.

And when you get to Panama, the road kind of ends through the Darien Gap which is this very thick jungle at the end of Panama.

He walked through that, I think he took about a week and he went with maybe a dozen people of whom only a few survived.

And then he got to the other side and then made it all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border, somehow got into the United States.

And then the Trump administration changed their rules about who from Haiti could actually come into the United States and be granted different kinds of protection.

So he went up to Canada and he was a refugee even in the United States as well and made it up to Canada.

And then just kind of waiting for his status in Montreal.

And he was living in this chilly flat, wearing his flip flops and t-shirts, freezing cold in Montreal.

And he was with a whole bunch of other Haitian guys who had made a similar journey.

I mean, it's just amazing amounts of resilience and innovation to make it through all that.

And then for me as an American to hear that these people, who had made it to the United States, which is, I mean, I grew up with that idea of, bring us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses and all that and then had to flee the United States to find refuge somewhere else.

That really has stuck with me.

- How about you, Abrahm?

- Yeah, I was just thinking through my encounters as Sonia was speaking and I think the strongest impressions are the same ones that I wrote about.

Sort of getting at my analytical quest, I went down to Central America reporting and I think I had this idea that I'd be sort of tapping into people's decision-making process and together, we'd sort of sit down and work out a list of pros and cons to staying put or migrating to the United States or migrating somewhere else and I didn't know what would be in those columns but that's what I was kind of there to find out.

And my takeaway and what really drove the stories was realizing that by the time, at least for the people that I was working with, you know, by the time they got to the point of really considering migration out of their sort of rural and sustenance farming, kind of existence, there were no columns of pros and cons.

There was just sheer necessity.

That really moving migration for many of these people was an absolute last resort and I think that's what you see in the research and is true that migration has driven exchange of cultures on our planet forever but it's also true that people have an amazing gravitation towards their sense of home and community.

And so when it comes to the kind of disruptive environmental conditions I was looking at what was driving the people in the communities, it was they had gotten to a point where they had really pulled out all the stops, borrowed all the money, tried all of the local jobs, tried migrating to the cities and then come back home and failed and all of that.

And then couldn't eat and just really suffering like acute malnutrition and hunger and were in this region, this part of highlands in Guatemala was at the time, really on the edge of famine.

And that by the time, father and son in a household that I spent time with actually hired a coyote, a guide, to bring them to the United States, so decided to make that journey.

It was a painful one and not one that anybody wanted to make and it was just driven from sheer desperation.

And that was really the eye-opening discovery for me, this entire body of reporting.

- Yeah, that's really interesting 'cause it contrasts with something else that you brought up in your reporting that was fascinating, which is that as opposed to many parts of the world, as you were describing, Americans tend to move perhaps against our best interests toward heat, coastlines, things like that, why is that?

And do you see that changing as these sort of climate emergencies become more frequent and more intense?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, so the first answer to get out of the way is I think culturally, Americans kind of think that we think of ourselves as a bit impervious to circumstances and we can overpower nature, we can out engineer it or we're just kind of invincible but that's kind of a subjective judgment.

But there's a bunch of structural parts of our system that have encouraged the U.S. population to move into places that happen to be the highest risk.

So insurance, the way that insurance is structured and offered is one of those in the way that the United States, in various ways, subsidizes both housing and also disaster relief are other ways that have pushed population growth in places like Florida, where there's state subsidization of insurance so that you can, even though we know there's increasing number of hurricanes and we've seen many, many billions of dollars in damages, you can still buy insurance on the coastline in Florida pretty affordably.

And that's because the state subsidizes and has for more than a decade subsidized that.

And that's one of many forms of appalling populations into what are at least from an environmental standpoint or a climate change standpoint, kind of the wrong places.

I mean, you look at the population in the Southwest or the growth of Phoenix, Arizona or the over-reliance on the Colorado River, which is built out with federal infrastructure and federal subsidies.

These are all things that have pulled us kind of into relatively high stress environmental environments.

So, a couple of things are changing now.

The apparent impact of the climate is becoming very obvious and we've had a couple devastating four or five years in a row across the country, whether it's wildfires or hurricanes or floods in Houston or deep freezes in Texas, that are awakening, I think people across the spectrum politically, to the real change that is afoot.

And at the same time and impartially in response to that, the financial mechanisms are changing as well.

So those subsidies are disappearing, whether it's states rejiggering their policies to be a little bit more sustainable or banks or finance systems and credit rating agencies starting to evaluate climate risk in a different way.

So the incentives that have pulled Americans in the wrong direction are disappearing while their vision of the risk that they face is becoming more explicit every day.

And I do think, I don't know where that tipping point is but there is a point where that will push those who don't wanna live in that high risk environment to move to a place that they think is lower risk.

- Kind of connected to that, some countries are seizing on the opportunity of migration or how they can kind of rethink their infrastructure faster than others, like you see Russia, for instance, embracing this potential of becoming the world's bread basket as the climate shifts.

Are we seeing any similar things happening here in the United States are opportunities for that?

- Yeah, it's a great question.

I have not seen that as explicitly as you might think that we would and maybe it's to come but I think, so just described all the ways in which we seem to be coming to terms with climate change but we're still so far behind and have been so slow to come to terms with that, that I think in the commercial sector, there is a push to get ahead of the curve in terms of seeing the opportunities of climate change and there's this kind of climate intelligence arms race around the science to see who can understand what's coming best and model it best?

And if they can deploy that commercially for profit before somebody else does but in terms of larger, like societal, you know, our policy changes the way you described what I wrote about Russia and that's this idea that Russia is trying to build out its agriculture industry because its lands are changing and it can grow more food and that there is a long-term strategy to perhaps strengthen themselves.

I haven't come across that same kind of dynamic in a big way in the United States.

We see elements of communities planning for it, which is interesting.

Like the state of Vermont has a sustainability plan that anticipates really significant population growth there because I think a lot of people move north and want that kind of environment or will need it and I think that's probably true.

And you see those conversations starting in other places around The Great Lakes region or whether it's Wisconsin or Minnesota, Rochester or New York.

But that's to say that they're starting to think about what the change will bring and perhaps how they need to adapt to it.

But I haven't really come across a great example of anybody trying to get ahead of that and figure out how to especially thrive in that environment yet, probably coming soon.

- Hopefully, this is a question that I think both of you would have a lot of insight into but I mean, even today there was reporting on how birth rates in the U.S. are falling and all the reasons why we are on this trajectory to have, we're not having as much population growth as we have in the past.

And so is it possible for this migration?

I think other writers like Matthew Yglesias maybe has made an argument for like one billion Americans and how we might embrace that kind of migration.

Is that something that you see as a potential?

Maybe we embrace some of this influx of population that can then offset other things like to paying for the social safety net, say that type of thing.

- Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I see that happening anytime soon, obviously.

I mean, we face a real kind of political and cultural crossroads and backlash at the moment that makes that difficult long-term maybe.

I haven't tracked the one billion conversation but what I have seen and wrote about in part is economic analysis that suggests that Northern countries will seek greater economic growth as the climate changes, so long as they have the manpower or the person power to support that growth and it so happens that a lot of Northern countries, United States included but even more so, Canada or Scandinavian countries or Russia are in a pretty steep demographic decline.

They're aging faster than new nationals are being born.

And the U.S. has started to head in that direction as well.

So it suggests, but no one's really sure about this yet that if you're gonna really seize that economic growth that might be available through the change in climate, that you'll need a lot more people to do it and I'll come back to the U.S. in a second but Russia has great opportunity to go expand this way should they choose to take in migrants and migrants choose to go there.

Canada is a destination for migrants and has recognized its need for a larger population and has this informal program pushing to grow that population from about 37, 38 million to 100 million Canadians over the next century called the century initiative.

So there is that explicit recognition but the United States, I just think, we're really having a difficult time, culturally wrapping our heads around mixing as a society and bringing more people across the border and having sympathies for those impacted by climate change, as well as all the other things that force migration and lead to it.

And I think there's plenty of evidence that our economy would benefit from some amount, I don't know what the number is, some amount of a growing workforce but I just don't see us quite as ready to embrace that as other other parts of the world are at the moment.

- To bring you back into the conversation, Sonia, your book, certainly grapples with the risks of migration but it explores the possibilities and opportunities, especially twinned with the idea that we're a migratory species at heart and we're just going through the next iteration of an inevitable process.

So what we were kind of talking about and we might've lost Sonia again (chuckles), I was trying to bring her back into the same question but I'll move on in case we get her back.

I think we lost her, okay.

So to move on, Abrahm, do you think like the pandemic has changed our thinking and maybe prepared us to make some of these changes culturally a little bit?

I mean, obviously we're seeing all kinds of cultural grinding there and I think at the beginning, there was a lot of noise about, the cities are gonna hollow out and people with remote work will move to smaller and more rural areas.

And maybe that hasn't quite happened with home prices and the like.

But yeah, I'm just curious if you think the pandemic has altered our thinking.

- Yeah, I've come kind of full circle personally, I'm trying to wrap my head around how the pandemic has changed things and sort of like it's changed everything and it's changed nothing at the same time.

You mentioned the Exodus from cities, which is a short-term phenomenon and a lot of the researchers that I talked to think that in the long run, that will reverse for two reasons.

One, that we've been urbanizing as a society for a really long time and the bigger, broader trend and momentum is in that direction.

But also that as with respect to climate change and particular in the expenses required in the investment, in the infrastructure and the policy and sort of the robust governance that's gonna be needed to adapt to a lot of the change that's coming is going to be something that cities can afford to do more than rural areas.

And the more they do that, the more that they will attract people and people will need to live in a place that has those systems to support them.

And so there's sort of a vision for a longterm urbanization as one of the sort of movement phenomenons.

And then COVID, of course, it's taught us that the most unforeseeable and unthinkable can be right around the corner and it can change moment by moment.

What you can learn on Tuesday versus Friday versus Sunday, so everything's up in the air on one hand.

It's shown us how interconnected the world is because I think that's how these corona viruses got to the United States in the first place.

And we just have a larger population that's traveling more, whether it's from the jungles of South Asia to the cities of China or from the cities of China to Europe and United States and so forth.

But it's also hardened our sort of nationalistic impulses, I think, which is another risk of migration in general.

But the COVID years taught us to close borders and be self-protective and those are things that are maybe coincidentally but which also happened in response to large-scale migration and what you see in response to the pressures on the U.S. border right now.

And so, I don't know, if the lesson that we see from COVID, five years from now or longer is that we're all connected and we need to allow greater cross border movement, or that we're all so connected, we need to disconnect more and protect ourselves and kind of shut things down.

- I'm also curious, like outside of these big govern, sort of whatever powers or whatever levers government has to pull to kind of counteract these changes and these mass migrations, I'm wondering if you see any grassroots activities on the ground, like communities that are coming together and finding ways to mitigate or migrate or adjust outside of governmental support.

- Yeah, to a limited degree and what I'm thinking as you asked that question is a lot of the political movement that's happening in the Southeastern United States and especially around push for climate equity and to kind of reverse some of the structural biases, environmental justice has been an enormous concern in terms of pollution and other environmental factors in terms of disproportionately affecting black and brown people around the country and particularly in the south.

And climate will be an extension of that for a lot of reasons, ranging from the availability of insurance or affordability of insurance to the way cities zone their neighborhoods.

So, there is a bit of a grassroots movement, that I see across the south to think up sort of a version of the Green New Deal.

I mean, what kind of growth is sustainable?

What kind of adaptation to climate change or rising sea levels on the Louisiana coast, for example, does enhance adaptation but protects against rapid gentrification and things like that?

So, I'm seeing that in some of those communities and then on the flip side, I guess, I'm hearing a little bit from places like Rochester, New York, where the city has taken a large number of Puerto Rican migrants.

People have moved from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, that there may be a little bit ahead in that process with other U.S. cities in terms of thinking about how to provide that infrastructure and embrace that growth and the economic opportunity that comes with that.

So those are two places where I think there's some forward movement and some creative energy being put towards this problem or challenge.

- Now that we have you back, Sonia, I wanna return, we're basically talking about with all of the risks and the doom and gloom that comes with migration.

One thing that I think your book pursues in a really direct and interesting way is the opportunities and so I was hoping you could take us through some of, from your perspective, what are the opportunities of this migration, especially if we can kind of reorient how we think about it and get past maybe some of the nationalist tendencies that are coming up in the wake of it.

- Yeah, I mean, I think in this case, the comparison to wildlife is really interesting because in conservation circles and in wildlife biology, the notion that wild species are moving into new places in sync with the change in climate is embraced as a wonderful thing, because that means that we have a chance of preserving biodiversity in the future as the climate changes.

So, in conservation circles, the conversation is about how do we facilitate these movements so that creatures that can no longer live in the place or not stuck in those places and it can actually move into new places if they're able to do that, can we create corridors?

Can we connect parks?

Can we build bridges over highways so panthers can walk over them?

Things like that, which is really exciting and I think when we looking at human migration, I think one way we could start to think about it is, well, what is the option, right?

So if we're not allowing people to move into new places where they can find habitable spaces to live in, then do we want them to be trapped where they are as the seas rise and as their fields dry out?

Because what happens when you trap people in places is not that they just kind of go away and adapt to those places, they'll still try to move.

It'll just all happen at once and in a catastrophic way and so that's what I saw when I was in Bahamas last year after Hurricane Dorian, which is islands where the average altitude is three feet above sea level and they're having these massive storms, these big, slow moving storms that can be incredibly destructive because of climate change in warmer waters.

And people haven't been able to move from those places, there's a whole minority of people there, the Haitian minority in particular who have been really marginalized and they're not able to move easily, they don't have a lot of legal pathways to move.

And so even those people who would have liked to have moved earlier, before the hurricane started, before the hurricane seasons, there's many, many people, there's lots of, sort of pent up demand, so to speak for people who are willing to move earlier.

And who really, if they have been allowed to move, you can imagine that that would have contributed to the resilience of the people who are left behind because there would have been more space.

The little bit of higher ground that is there could have been more fruitfully occupied instead of having all these people who really had nowhere to go when the storm hit.

And what happens when they're trapped is now many of them died, of course, and those who survived, they're still trapped there, except now they're living in an even more exposed state because before at least they had sort of cement walls around them and now they have really make makeshifts or shanties and shacks that they're living in.

People are living in overturned buses and things like that.

So they're even more exposed.

So we're really creating a crisis by not kind of opening those release valves, so people can move in advance of the really catastrophic climate events that happen.

So I think if we find it cumbersome and troubling to have lots of people come in in unregulated flows and up to the U.S. border and knocking on the door and then we have to sort of deal with that and that seems really burdensome to us.

I mean, on one hand, it seems to me that is well within our capacities to manage these flows, if we were willing to just spend the resources and get some more immigration judges and get more asylum officers and people who can actually process these claims in a reasonable fashion, that doesn't seem beyond the capacities of the U.S. government.

But if we don't wanna do that and we think it is troubling that people just come and knock on our door and process them, well, we need to just open up more legal pathways.

We know that works and there's a lot of people, I think who would take us up on those.

I mean, you look at the number of people who are enrolled in the UNHCR's refugee program.

These are people who don't even leave the places where they're stuck, they're waiting for permission to come and there's millions and millions of them.

So I think 39 million or something, Abrahm probably knows the number off hand.

So something like that, that the UNHCR has already decided.

Well, these people qualify as refugees.

Well, here in the United States, we're letting in 65,000 of those people next year and even that is being sort of embraced as just a huge act of generosity.

Well, it's just a tiny drop in the bucket of what we need and if we think about, do we really wanna live in a world when we ourselves will have these crisis and when we ourselves will have to knock on someone else's door and say, look, my state is on fire now or my city is under water.

Do we really wanna set a precedent where the answer is, well, we're pulling up the ladders and closing the doors on you and all of your kind?

I don't think so.

I think what we wanna do is sort of create a system where we all can increase our resilience to the crisis that we're really all sharing.

The way the planet is settled was based on 19th century shipping, it's not logical.

If we had to resettle the planet right now, we would not put all of our major cities on rivers and on coastlines, we would do it differently but that's in fact where people live.

And what we know about human migration is people start in the countryside, they move to the nearest city.

Then they jump to the next city across the international border and then they cross an ocean and it's this step-wise fashion.

And we can use it to our advantage if we embrace migration as something that can contribute to our resilience, instead of pretending it's this problem we can somehow end.

- Excellent, that's great.

Okay, well, I wanna make sure we have some time for some audience questions that we have rolling in.

So I'm gonna go to those.

Human societies tend to be tribal and view people in other countries as others or invaders.

Won't systemic resocialization be needed to create the welcoming environment that climate change immigration will require?

- Can I take a stab at that?

- Yes, please.

- That is a common conception but what I found when you look into the social science research that in fact, when different peoples collide in new places, conflict is actually the exception, it's not the rule.

In most places where you have people from different places coming together, they assimilate really quickly and there's been lots of social science research around that.

So xenophobia is actually an exceptional response to different peoples coming together and so it's worth really examining why we have the xenophobic responses in some situations and not others?

And also embracing the fact that well, most of the time, assimilation actually does work.

There's been people moving around for a long time but we know from paleo genetics is we've been moving around from the very beginning when we walked out of Africa, we didn't just stay put in Europe and North America and Asia, we kept moving around, even in ancient times, even in prehistoric times.

People were colliding and mixing in all kinds of complicated ways and we can see that in our DNA, right?

We can see all the little bits and pieces of DNA that we've picked up from all of our travels that our ancestors have done and that all worked because we were able to mix with each other, to such an extent that we reproduced together and had families together and that's why all of our genes are so mixed up.

We don't have really well-defined genetic populations in homo sapiens, like other species do have that, but human really, we mix and match pretty well.

- That's great.

Here's a specific one that might touch on some of Abrahm's reporting but I'm sure you both have ideas about it.

In Louisiana, whole communities have already gone under water.

For a few, there's been a planned migration essentially to move the whole community inland by a certain distance.

When I think about New Orleans though, or Miami or NYC, this seems super impractical, how could we do this and how would we ever rebuild the cultural soul, those cities embody?

- I wish there was a great, easy answer to this question and this is what makes the task ahead of us so difficult.

One answer, not to be glib about it but it's that those communities that can afford to resist and build physical infrastructure barriers to protect them against that change will do so.

And so, one of the reasons why you see levees in New Orleans and may eventually see an expensive seawall around New York City is because those economies are more robust and the people there are wealthier than the indigenous communities on the south coast of Louisiana who have no resources and where the cost of building that physical infrastructure would just be so astronomical as to cripple even communities that tried to pay for it because you get into this vicious cycle of you have the expense and the cost of the bond measures and the taxes go up.

And so people leave the school districts which collapse, and you get the spiral into a community collapse, unfortunately, and it it's one of the reasons, what I mentioned earlier, is that I think that we'll see sort of gravitation towards cities because the cities will be wealthier.

And whether they're New Orleans or New York City, that's where you'll see a bit of that kind of consolidation.

- If I can be selfish for our Pacific Northwest audience and ask, from your perspective, I would say from the domestic perspective would be Abrahm and then the global purpose perspective would be Sonia, how might the Pacific Northwest change?

what are the biggest changes that we should be ready to weather from migration over the near long-term?

- I mean, I can jump in with what I see for the Pacific Northwest.

It probably won't come as a great surprise.

On the downside, you'll see rising temperatures and more common wildfires and more common smoke, which may be outweighed by the benefits, which is that it'll remain a pretty wet and temperate place.

And as water becomes more scarce, you'll have the water resources, much of the Pacific Northwest will to cope with that.

When I looked at agriculture across some of the inland Pacific Northwest into Idaho and so forth, I mean, the forecast is for crop yields to increase substantially in a lot of places.

So as you see it becoming more and more difficult to grow, whatever crop, whether it's corn or grapes from California to Nebraska, you're gonna see that farming opportunity increase and maybe productivity along with it increase, even on the kind of Eastern slopes of the Pacific Northwest.

And obviously, you'll have sea level rise to contend with.

And the research is already showing that Seattle, especially, but Portland too and Vancouver are destinations that have been receiving a large number of moving people for years already, many Americans but not only Americans.

And so some of the models that people have actually completed, that I've looked at suggest that it'll be a destination region in the future.

- Sonia, do you have any prognostications for how the future of the Northwest might play?

- Oh, no, I think Abrahm really covered it.

In every place, these differences are very fine-grained and we have to look at like the details and how they affect the kind of culture that people have created in those different places.

So, I think about some places are gonna be more resilient to that kind of change in other places.

I mean, you think about places like Florida and being connected to the palm tree and what happens when the palm trees don't grow in Florida anymore or what happens in Minnesota when the moose are all gone and they're somewhere else?

And how much of the local culture is based on the flora and fauna that are shaped by the climate?

I mean, just like we are, right?

But like our cultures are so influenced by the ecosystems around us and some places are more like that than other places.

So, that just adds another angle to it is something to think about.

There's I think at least six or maybe nine states now where the state birds no longer can live in those states, are not found in those states anymore.

- Did we lose her again?

Well, we might've lost Sonia once again but yeah, this might be a good time to wrap up.

So, we're actually about at the amount of time that we have.

So Abrahm, Sonia, thank you so much for the great conversation.

- Thanks.

- Thank you all for joining us at the Crosscut Festival.

I hope you all get a chance to check out some of the other sessions at the festival this week.

I recommend the session this Friday with Peter Singer who authored the book "Animal Liberation" and Michelle Nijhuis, who is a writer for The New Yorker and other great places and she's got a terrific new book out called "Beloved Beasts".

There'll be talking with Crosscut's Hannah Weinberger about animal rights and conservation at 5:00 p.m. this Friday.

Okay, thanks for joining us for The Great Climate Migration and have a great week.

(upbeat music)