SPECIAL NOTE: For those readers in the Berkshires area, I’ll be giving a talk, “The Future of Climate Chane in the Berkshires,” at Lee Public Library, on April 12, from 4:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.

For more information, click here.

I’m not talking games here, when I say, “it’s your move,” although you just might think so if you think of life as a game, and if you do, then I guess we’re playing for high-stakes with climate change.

There’s a lot of talk, research, and speculation about climate migration with books like Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle, and Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century by Neel Ahuja, to name just a few current works. These books posit that climate change has already made parts of the world less able to support human life and that this is only going to get worse and worse, and that means people in such areas will have to get up and go someplace else in this wide world of ours that can still maintain life. Heat is one problem, with too many wet-bulb days as likely to kill people as they are to make living unbearable, and then there are issues such as extended droughts driving people away, since food is one of those commodities it is hard to live without. And then there are those island and seaside nations so low that any rise in sea level is already a problem, and those areas where conflicts over dwindling resources will lead to displaced persons by the hundreds of thousands and millions.

Most of us still think of immigration challenges in terms of people coming to American borders, and, indeed, this is what is in the news these days. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports close to 2.5 million Title 8 apprehensions, Office of Field Operations Title 8 inadmissibility judgements, and Title 42 expulsions for 2023. Already in 2024, these numbers are at 1.2 million as of February, although keep in mind USCBP uses a fiscal year that starts in October, so we are almost halfway through.

For those who believe the crush of migrants at our southern border are there so that they can steal jobs from Americans in order to buy into the great American lifestyle—or worse, are rapists and murderers and drug runners and terrorists in large number—well, you are wrong. Most are asylum seekers running from social and economic collapse, and for many the root causes of such collapse is environmental and tied directly to climate change’s negative consequences. Just to be clear, in my opinion, we have both the room and the need for large numbers of immigrants, but this post is more specifically about Americans’ internal migrations due to climate crisis.

NPR’s Fresh Air ran an interview with ProPublica reporter Abraham Lustgarten, who has recently published On the Move, which, in a nutshell, is a book claiming that “millions of Americans are likely to move in the coming decades to escape wildfires, rising seas, oppressive heat and drought.” Most of the climate migration studies and books and articles have looked at shifts of masses of people from one country to another, but Lustgarten’s focus is on Americans’ intramural migrations and I can see nothing wrong with his basic assumptions.

I am particularly interested in what he has to say because one of the themes of my third book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Over Brooklyn Hills, is climate migration. This book tackles the theme in a couple of ways, including with the news reporting on climate migrations in other countries and at our southern border and the resulting military responses that are likely to occur, or be threatened, at least. The action of Over Brooklyn Hills takes place in 2035, so as you might imagine, the climate crisis has worsened, just like scientists forecast. Over Brooklyn Hills shows the movements of Americans themselves to other areas in America in reaction to the climate crisis.

The Steep Climes Quartet series keeps close to the Berkshires in terms of the lives of the through-characters such as Davin, a home owner in Housatonic who is trying to be an artist but works for the online newspaper Berkshire Interactive and has house sharers living at his house because life is expensive and housing is in short supply. The housing shortage is very likely to be even worse than our present day, since not only will short-term rentals remain a big part of the tourism economy of the Berkshires, but also people will continue to move to the area, building on and exceeding the phenomenon of the Covid-era shift out of cities. Part of the action of Over Brooklyn Hills is the growing number of mainly young NYC area urbanites who have become a substantial population of free-campers or “unhoused” in the Berkshire summer and the numbers have become untenable, with panhandlers and shoplifters and milling crowds of would-be Brooklyn hipsters up from the city because it has become too expensive or too unpleasant to make it through too many too hot days in the city. How do you think the citizens of our green hills are likely to react? The manuscript work for this book is still underway, but I’m having fun writing selectboard meetings where some call for border checks and others tout vagrancy laws still on the books, if long out of style.

And, of course, there is someone raiding Davin’s backyard garden from one of the make-shift camps hidden among the trees of Monument Mountain’s nearby south-facing slope.

One of the most interesting points raised in Lustgarten’s book is the potential for many long-dwindling Rust Belt cities (Detroit being the number one poster child) for climate migrants, and I’ve long wondered how best that aging but in-place infrastructure might serve to support a revived population. Lustgarten argues that some climate change projections posit the upper Midwest and Northeast as relatively positive locations where people coming out of heat-stricken locales, or wildfire-prone places, or drought-wrecked areas of the country might relocate. Hey, maybe Pittsfield, North Adams, Holyoke, and Springfield—to name some ex-mill cities in Western Massachusetts long-fallen on hard times—might finally see the renaissance so many keep here dreaming about.

Food for thought for the book, anyway.

Still, I’ll hold off on climate crisis-related real estate speculation for now, at least other than not considering oceanside property.