Climate Migration Has Come to the United States
After living through a spate of record-breaking wildfires, some Californians are opting to leave the state.
By
Kate Wheeling
April 16, 2021
"In September of 2020, California was in the midst of a
record-setting heat wave. The hot and dry conditions fueled fires all over the state, and smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away hung over the Bay Area for weeks. Andrew Kornblatt woke up one morning at his home in Berkeley to find that the air had grown cool and still, and the sky was an eerie orange.
“It hit at the lizard brain part of your noggin, trying to tell you to just run,” Kornblatt said. “And you’re thinking to yourself, well where are you going to go with this flight response?”
"By November, Kornblatt and his wife, who both grew up in the Bay Area, had left California for Oregon.
"They’re hardly alone. At least 57 percent of Americans believe that weather- or climate-related events will influence their future moving decisions, according to a recent
study published in Climatic Change.
“We’ve never asked this kind of question before in the context of the United States. Because climate-induced migration has always been discussed in the context of the global south,” said Byungdoo Kim, a doctoral candidate in environmental communication at Cornell University and lead author of the study. “But recently, we’ve been through a lot here in the United States.”
"It’s
not just California..."
More...