Transcript - Climate Migration
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context/nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
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Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In. I’m Sam Evans-Brown.
Meet Bess Samuel. One of her first jobs was a counselor at space camp in Huntsville, Alabama.
Bess Samuel: It was fun! It's pretty cool to put simulated astronaut training on resume
Sam Evans-Brown: As Bess told our own Justine Paradis, that is in fact where she met her husband -
Bess Samuel: So we’re true nerds. We met at space camp. We got engaged at a Dr. Who convention.
Justine Paradis: yes!
Sam Evans-Brown: And now they have two kids. The older just started preschool this year. But these days - they’re thinking about moving out of Alabama.
She told us that it’s hard because there’s a lot of things about the south she really loves, but especially now that her son is in school, she’s worried about the political and cultural climate in the state. It’s more conservative, and more religious, than she’d like.
And there’s another reason too - and this is the reason Bess initially reached out to us. She actually dialed into the Ask Sam Hotline and left us a voicemail.
[mux]
Bess Samuel: Hi this is Bess in Huntsville, Alabama. My family and I are looking to move for a number of reasons but one of them is because: climate change.
[mux]
Where is the safest place to move based on the data we have right now?
[mux]
Sam Evans-Brown: This is a way more personal question than we’re used to getting for Ask Sam… which is why Justine called her back to follow up.
Bess Samuel: I feel like I have to be realistic about… this is as good as it’s gonna get for a while. Like, we keep hearing these things about, it’s the hottest summer, it’s the hottest summer, and it’s the hottest summer, and that trend doesn’t seem to be reversing. So I look at the summers we have now, and I look at the $200 power bills, and, you know, frying eggs on sidewalks.
Bess Samuel: At this point, we’re just trying to do… better, but part of the problem is, you don’t know what things are going to look like in ten years because everything is changing so rapidly.
Sam Evans-Brown: There’s a term for what Bess is thinking about doing: climate migration. Relocating entirely or partly because of climate and climate change.
And in the coming decades, the scale of climate migration could be somewhat dizzying. One analysis from ProPublica looked at what could happen in the Worst Case Scenario. In 50 years, four million people in the United States could find themselves “living at the fringe,” “decidedly” outside ideal conditions for human life.
…4 million. Imagine if even half that number needed to move.
And even now, Bess… is not the only one asking this question.
[theme but use stems?]
Alex Whittemore: So it worries me that the predictable stuff is the tip of the iceberg.
Jesse Jaime: Oh there’s a haze in the sky, isn’t there? And I'm like yeah dude, I need to go inside.
Bess Samuel: Where do we wanna go, it’s not enough to say i don’t want to be here, where are you going?
Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In, a show about the natural world and how we use it. Today, in collaboration with By Degrees, NHPR’s Climate Change reporting initiative, we’re devoting the entire episode to answering one question: if you’re worried about climate, where should you live?
Jola Ajibade: The idea that you would live in one place forever, I think people have to forget that.
Are people moving already?
Nadege Green: They see what’s happening. I’m being displaced.
And how should places prepare for the wave of climate migrants just around the corner?
[theme fade]
Sam Evans-Brown: So, first up: our producer Justine Paradis, our producer on Outside/In.
Justine Paradis: yup hello
Sam Evans-Brown: And NHPR energy/environment reporter Annie Ropeik, hey!
Annie Ropeik: hello!
Sam Evans-Brown: So can we answer Bess’ question? Where’s the safest place to live in the United States?
Justine Paradis: I think the real thing is, can you answer this question?
Sam Evans-Brown: Well to a certain extent there’s a straightforward answer to this. So in 2017 the US Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, put out something called a Climate Resilience Screening Index. Basically, it aggregated all sorts of climate risks and societal measures into a single point based score... and according to that, the most resilient county in the United States is….
Kodiak Island Borough, Alaska.
Annie Ropeik: Ok there’s the answer, good luck Bess!
Justine Paradis: End of episode.
[lols]
[theme drop]
Annie Ropeik: One question is whether most resilient is even the same thing as safest. Either way seems like this goes to show how unsatisfying it can be to just go by the data for a question like this.
Sam Evans-Brown: Right - Propublica did another one of these aggregate risk analyses, and it showed that some of the safest areas in 20 to 40 years, theoretically, will be places like parts of the Midwest, parts of the Northwest, and parts of Northern New England, like Maine and Vermont.
Justine Paradis: From Alabama to the wintry mix of New England winters, welcome Bess.
Sam Evans-Brown: Right! Not everybody who is facing sea level rise or wildfires is going to want to move to those places.
[mux]
Sam Evans-Brown: so, when we got the idea to do an episode responding to Bess’ question, we decided: let’s put out a survey asking people how they are dealing with this question of where they should live based on climate. So Justine, you reached out some of the people who responded to that survey?
Justine Paradis: I reached out to probably like 10, 12 people all over the country. And just like you were pointing to Sam, everybody’s individual situation was so different.
Justine Paradis: There was Suzi Patterson, living in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii -
Suzi Patterson: Anywhere you are, climate change is happening. It’s getting worse. Why not pick where you want to live the most? For us it was Hawaii, it was a dream.
Justine Paradis: There was Alex, who’s dealing with wildfire smoke, in LA.
Alex Whittemore: It’s a constant balancing act between what things to do to the air in any given room in order to create a habitable environment.
Justine Paradis: Mike Hass, an organic vegetable farmer in Kentucky.
Mike Hass: It gets super hot, in June and July. I don't really grow potatoes anymore those times of year because it’s just too hot.
Justine Paradis: But there was one story that I think in particular really illustrates how idiosyncratic this decision-making process, to move because of climate, comes from a guy named Jesse.
Jesse Jaime: I’m Jesse Jaime. I live in San Antonio Texas, and I’m currently a student and I work at a warehouse until I finish college.
Justine Paradis: And Sam you jumped on this call too. Jesse’s in school for biology right now
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah and totally excited about it, like we were on video call and could see that his bedroom wall is decorated with a poster of fossils and a map of Big Bend National Park
Justine Paradis: Yeah, loves the desert, loves the American West, but one of the things he’s thinking about as he considers where he’s going to live is his health.
Sam Evans-Brown: right, he’s got asthma.
Jesse Jaime: At my age,people don't look at people over 18, 20 - they don't think of asthma as an adult issue - it's mainly like kids in the fourth grade in PE - you even see it in shows. The people with asthma are nerdy kids haha. They got that right but it stuck with me -
Sam Evans-Brown: I love it, he’s like, ‘it’s a true stereotype, but I resent it anyway!’
/Annie Ropeik: Self-fulfilling.
Jesse Jaime: Yeah, my asthma condition is mild to severe. So… I had an internship in Utah, so I lived there for the summer, and it was in Glen Canyon. The whole time I was there, 2.5 months. I only used my inhaler once , and it was during a wildfire.
Sam Evans-Brown: I think Jesse said that the only other time he’d used his inhaler that summer was in LA, visiting his dad’s family. And that usually he’s using it all the time.
Jesse Jaime: Like, I don't know if you were ever buried in the sand, on your chest, so it’s like harder to breath. It feels like that. So that's what it feels like in the city or in an area with bad air quality - air quality can get really bad - other people might not notice - yeah dude - I need to go inside.
Sam Evans-Brown: Right. And having that means, living near wildfires, it’s a much bigger deal for him. And as things get hotter, air quality, both in terms of city smog and wildfire smoke, will probably just get worse.
Justine Paradis: And the other thing that happened in our conversation was Jesse had told us, hey, I’m living with my grandfather and my mom, and they both lived in a village in the high desert in Mexico -
Sam Evans-Brown: Hola!
Aurelia Jaime Ramirez: Hola! Buenos dias!
Sam Evans-Brown: Buenos dias.
and he brought his mom in to talk with us too -
Aurelia Jaime Ramirez: Mi nombre es - completes - es Aurelia Jaime Ramirez.
Sam Evans-Brown: Right partly because they argue about like, how much can you really do about climate change? And I remember in this conversation, asking her… like “hey it seems like this is a really big deal for Jesse and he thinks we should be doing things personally to fight it, and it’s really impacting the way he thinks about his future. And… is that the case for you? And she had this very diplomatic response...
Aurelia Jaime Ramirez: Yo pienso que sí que es lo que él piensa.
...where she just said “yes, I think that’s what he thinks .” And I was like,
Sam Evans-Brown: Sí pero usted no.
“... oh, but not you” and her answer was a sentiment that in a certain sense is true, which was “my impact is so small, what can I do? And in the meantime the people causing the problem are just polluting even more.”
Annie Ropeik: I mean, I think this points to how this is such a stressful, emotional decision. And we’re dealing with this massive collective action problem, and we’re all trying to figure out what that means inside our own individual lives, but I think that process can bring up a sense of loss of agency, of being out of control. And since we’ll all be experiencing it no matter what or no matter where we are maybe it doesn’t even make sense to move.
Sam Evans-Brown: Well and I, actually my takeaway from talking to Jese and his mom is the reasons people move are complicated and interwoven together. So Jesse is a young dude, he’s just getting started in life, and he’s thinking about this a lot: where am I going to make my life? Versus his mom, she’s reached a certain point, and it was just clear she was not considering moving. She’s noticing things are changing but these are not considerations that are a big enough deal for her to uproot everything.
[mux]
Annie Ropeik: So that brings us to one of the reasons why looking up this data isn’t exactly satisfying because: first of all, moving is such a combination of so many factors, lots of them are emotional factors -- and also, everyone’s decision affects everyone else’s decisions, it's this butterfly effect. Like how complicated it would be if thousands or even millions of people moved to Kodiak or, say, Coos County, NH - 2010 population, 33,000?
Sam Evans-Brown: Ha, I do find it kind of hard to imagine millions of people moving to Coos County, NH, but even tens of thousands of people would be a huge deal.
Annie Ropeik: And that’s the wild thing is you can’t know what to expect. That is the problem here. And then any one change in the system affects all the other changes. One disaster in one place will drive people to another place, which could drive people there to another place, so it’s a ripple effect.
[mux]
Sam Evans-Brown: And one of the places that it scores pretty high in terms of climate resiliency is our neighbor Vermont. And so Annie we sent you to find out if they were thinking much about climate migration. Is Vermont prepared for a big influx of people moving to the state?
Annie Ropeik: The very short answer is that there’s no good answer to it. It’s chicken and egg. And this is where we get to the inevitable COVID-19 tie-in. So, you might have seen this kind of theme in certain maybe New York Times stories during the pandemic, like “Small rural town not too far from major metro area struggles with influx of wealthy second homeowners fleeing covid.” We even did one here at NHPR. I went to New Hampshire’s Lakes Region early in the lockdown in April and literally the first people I met on the street in the town of Wolfeboro were a male swimwear model and a Ralph Lauren executive from New York City, who were hunkering down in their second home with their two cocker spaniels.
we’re just grateful to be here! I think not everyone is fortunate to be able to get out of the cesspool of new york right now
That will never happen to me again in my career, that I just stumbled on this caricaturishly perfect...
Sam Evans-Brown: love that story
Justine Paradis: I’m sure they were lovely
Annie Ropeik: They were great, and they had people yelling at them because they had New York plates on their car.
yeah we’ve gotten some looks - i’ve gotten some yelling, like who let you out of the state…
So, that is genuinely a microcosm of what could happen due to climate change depending on how towns plan to accept new residents.
So, take Vermont, for an example. Lots of people have moved there semi-permanently due to the pandemic. It could be up to as many as 11,000 people according to one research firm. And just for context - Vermont’s population is about 624,000. So that would be around a percent and a half increase if that turns out to be true.
Kate McCarthy: 14 months ago, we wouldn’t have anticipated a population bump due to a pandemic. So how can we sit here now and say we won’t see climate migration in a year or five years or ten years?
Annie Ropeik: This is Kate McCarthy. She’s the sustainable communities program manager at the Vermont Natural Resources Council. And she was one of the first people in Vermont who started thinking about climate migration in this kind of context, just in the past few years.
Kate McCarthy: And we were met with some skepticism for sure, like ‘oh, that’s not going to happen, there are no jobs here, people don’t have any motivation to come here.’ And now I think with COVID I think people have seen two things. One, you don’t need to be coming to a job, you can be bringing a job with you. And two, we don’t know what the next year is going to bring.
Annie Ropeik: Kate is trying to kind of normalize this conversation around climate migration, and it’s really complicated, especially because, you know, what people like her are expecting is that the first wave is going to be upper middle-class folks, people who have the ability to move in regardless of how Vermont prepares to accept them. Kate has worked on this a lot with Elena Mihaly. She’s an attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, which is a nonprofit up here, and she lives in Vermont.
Elena Mihaly: I don’t think Vermont has really faced the kind of development pressure that it may once other parts of our country become uninhabitable.
Annie Ropeik: And Elena says, without some good planning, she’s worried that rampant development will only serve to heighten inequality, to undermine Vermont’s other goals including around climate change – by fragmenting forest lands, maybe by increasing transportation emissions, which are our biggest contributor to climate change in this region. And Elena says they also don’t want new housing in river floodplains, or drinking water stress on aquifers that are sensitive to drought… you know, this is the thing, we’re not immune from climate change in New England. These things are going to happen. Just because we’re safer than California in wildfire season does not mean there will not be problems and climate-related challenges for current and new residents to deal with.
Justine Paradis: Including wildfires.
Annie Ropeik: Including wildfires. Exactly. We’ve seen forest fires in a drought this year. I’ve had a NH official tell me verbatim, ‘it could happen here.’
Sam Evans-Brown: And it also just makes me think that some of these things are oversimplifications. Like people look at New England and they say, oh that’s a place that they have abundant drinking water.
Annie Ropeik: Bingo
Sam Evans-Brown: but look at this year! We’re still having a pretty crazy drought - wells going dry, having to drill new wells which could be putting pressure on aquifers. I think some of these top-line numbers oversimplify what it’ll be like to live through climate change here in New England.
Annie Ropeik: Right, yes, so short term extremes are not the same thing as long term abundance. But you know, Elena says making those plans means doing a lot of stuff she says towns should be doing anyway. So practically, this means a greater variety of housing types, more affordable housing, creating more support for infrastructure, like water and sewer, expanded healthcare and education capacity. And Elena says it also means better zoning.
Elena Mihaly: It’s as much about the town saying here’s a development we want, as it is about the town saying here’s a dev we don’t want, so that there is... something for them to fall back on besides instinct and bias and cultural norms when faced with a development or a population influx.
Annie Ropeik: This might be the toughest nut to crack. It’s the culture clash issue.
Sam Evans-Brown: Can I jump in quickly with an anecdote?
Annie Ropeik: Yes.
Sam Evans-Brown: I visited a friend who lives in Vermont over the summer. It was a birthday, and don’t @ me, it was outside, everyone wore masks, when they came to the food table, everyone was just sitting around a fire. I met a friend of hers who grew up in Vermont and they were all talking about how all these people were coming to Vermont. And there was just something she said that I found totally chilling: ‘yeah, all these people, they’re coming. I Just hope they’re “the right people.”’ And I was like, the New Hampshire person, my hackles went up a little bit. And then she went on and it turns out she was obviously just talking about Trump voters, which you know is a little bit of an eye roll in its own way.
Annie Ropeik: I mean, that’s… there’s no good… if you have to ask.
Sam Evans-Brown: Exactly.
Annie Ropeik: I think there’s no good outcome t o asking that question. At best she means NH people.
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. This is real.
Annie Ropeik: Yeah, I was going to say, that’s the real life version of these NYT stories about traffic jams at the rural transfer station because of all the New Yorkers fleeing covid who don’t know how to drop off their recycling. Or you know we’ve also seen stories about racial slurs being yelled at people of color with out of state plates on their cars who are driving around in towns where they have a second home. And it’s important to remember that Vermont is shrinking, and aging, and overwhelmingly white.
Elena Mihaly: I can’t emphasize enough I think how much energy should be devoted toward the social issues that come with welcoming new people to Vermont, and the deep-seated nativism and sort of ‘you’re not a Vermonter unless you were born and raised here three generations ago’ notion. It’s really time for us to see the opportunities that come from welcoming people into the state.
[mux]
Justine Paradis: Yeah, so, I think it’s really interesting for us to think about this from the perspective of New England states where we are, like Vermont, and Maine, and New Hampshire… But I want to pull back a little more to see how this shapes how we live together at a bigger scale - how are entire communities and cities changing.
[Jola clip]
Sam Evans-Brown: Outside/In will be right back, after a break.
BREAK
Sam Evans-Brown: Welcome back to Outside/In. I’m Sam Evans-Brown, here today with Justine Paradis and Annie Ropeik… and today, we have been talking about climate migration in the United States. Basically, there are going to be millions of people who are increasingly at risk from climate-related problems - flooding, extreme heat, crop failure - and that means potentially millions of people might be picking up and moving somewhere safer over the next few decades. But where? And what place isn’t so affected by climate change?
Justine Paradis: So, so far, we’ve been talking about New England, and a few individual stories of people trying to make decisions for their own lives, but then, I talked to this researcher who is really focused on change at a societal level.
Jola Ajibade: My name is Jola Ajibade. I am an assistant professor at Portland State University.
Justine Paradis: So Jola focuses a lot on cities, and a big question that Jola asks is: can different types of movement driven by climate change, happen in ways that are just and fair? Jola herself is originally from Lagos, Nigeria, and grew up in a part of the city that flooded a lot - and this was even before climate change was such a serious factor.
Jola Ajibade: So I grew up in a community called Ijeshatedo in Lagos. But it was built in, the old Ijeshatedo at the time was a swampland.
Justine Paradis: and because they lived on the ground floor -
Jola Ajibade: We got flooded every time it rained.
Justine Paradis: And that experience really follows her to this day, even just as far as living on the first floor -
Jola Ajibade: Even if it didn’t get flooded, it was just the fear. I hated living on the ground floor. Even to date, I don’t like it.
Justine Paradis: So, in the course of her work, Jola had been noticing that people and policymakers were conflating what she says are very different types of movement: climate migration, versus “managed retreat”.
Jola Ajibade: And I was just infuriated, I was saying no! The people who are retreating are not the same people who are migrating. Of course you can retreat and migrate, but these are not the same things and it’s not helping move us forward.
Justine Paradis: The way she defines it, climate migration is what we’ve been talking about so far. Even if it’s at a massive scale, even if people feel like they have no choice but to leave, climate migration really tends to focus on individual people or families.
Jola Ajibade: And then with managed retreat, people are thinking: we can move lighthouses. We can move the capital of a city. We can move businesses, we can move all of those things. So it’s very different in terms of how it plays out on ground.
Justine Paradis: Managed retreat is about planning. It can be more collective, it can be more or less government/institutionally supported, more or less strategic. So like moving buildings, or buying people out in New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, or moving entire communities together. Think of those recent case studies you might have heard about… coastal, native communities in Shishmaref [SHISH-ma-reff] Alaska or Isle de Jean Charles in southern Louisiana…choosing to relocate because of the changing climate.
[mux begin]
Lots of examples, but Jola says... not all created equal.
Jola Ajibade: What does it mean for retreat to be successful? I haven’t seen a situation where all of the aspects of human life to date can be said to be a win-win.
Justine Paradis: A “win-win” is hard to achieve. Some managed retreats can be really top-down and not participatory. So like, there are buyouts, in the case of Hurricane Sandy + New Jersey, but in Lagos, Jola says there are examples that didn’t provide any compensation for moving.
Jola Ajibade: And so I call that a kick-out instead of a buyout.
Sam Evans-Brown/Annie Ropeik: Hmm.
Justine Paradis: There was this other example in Manila that she studied, of the restoration of a river that had been declared “biologically dead,” gave people funding and built housing and got buy-in.
Jola Ajibade: And so some of the slum dwellers themselves became environmental justice advocates, or should I say, they became environmental practitioners, people saying, we need to protect, because they were engaged. Actively engaged from the beginning.
Justine Paradis: The other thing was - this took 20 years. So time was a factor in that one.
But there’s another example in Manila that Jola also told me about, also in the Philippines. This is the example of New Clark City - which is a totally new city, right now being constructed outside of Manila.
Jola Ajibade: They are building already rail lines, housing, sports centers, so they are building the city from the scratch. And the goal is that it will be completed in 20 years.
[mux fade]
Justine Paradis: The idea behind New Clark City is that when disasters hit Manila, the people that need to respond are also affected and therefore can’t help.
Jola Ajibade: They all live there, so they also get impacted. So the idea is, if you move them, if there is a major issue - flying with helicopter. That's part of the logic for this New Clark City. But I don't know if the people in families, low income classes, will also be a part of the people relocated to New Clark City.
Justine Paradis: So, like, she said, Jola wasn’t sure how this will play out, if it will be equitable or not.
Annie Ropeik: I guess I’ll just say that there’s no guarantee it will be equitable, but according to the folks I’ve been talking to, if you only try to make it fair while the change is already underway, it’s kind of too late. Like if you don’t plan for change to be equitable, you can pretty much guarantee it won’t be.
[mux begin]
Justine Paradis: In fact there’s also another kind of iconic example of how movement due to climate change is happening within one city here in the United States. And this example kind of demonstrates how equity, and history and climate change are interacting - and how climate change puts pressure on top of what’s already taking place.
And this city is Miami.
Nadege Green: Yes, I was born and raised in Miami. 305 till I die, like born and raised in the county of Dade. So this is... this is home for me .
Justine Paradis: So this Nadege Greene, she works for the Community Justice Project. And she reported on climate gentrification for the local public radio station, WLRN.
In Miami, there is this limestone ridge that runs north-south through the city. And this is where the railroad tracks were built, on top of this ridge. So, east of the railroad is the ocean and lower elevation. It’s the waterfront - historically quite desirable.
Nadege Green: The neighborhoods immediately west of that ridge tend to be historically Black neighborhoods. For example, Little Haiti and Liberty City are west of the ridge, and they sit on higher elevation.
Justine Paradis: So higher elevation, with projected sea level rise, elevation is obviously one of the factors that will accelerate investment and development and rising property prices in places like Liberty City and Little Haiti. And Nadege was careful to say it’s not the only thing. Like, people are still buying waterfront property in Miami.
Sam Evans-Brown: Insanely!
Justine Paradis: I know! But Liberty City in particular was founded by a Black community that was displaced earlier in the 20th century by urban renewal and specifically the construction of I-95, the highway. You know, and this happened up and down the east coast and across the country, directing highways specifically through Black communities.
So before, earlier, displacement came disguised under phrases like “urban renewal”, and now words that you hear a lot are
Nadege Green: You’ll hear terms like “smart planning.”
And the question is, is this just the same thing, under a different name? Like, this is a familiar pattern.
Nadege Green: They see what's happening, right, like, ‘I'm being displaced. I have to move. My rent is going up.’
Justine Paradis: Some call this not just gentrification, but climate gentrification. So, Nadege herself was born in Little Haiti and she’s of Haitian descent. She grew up in and around the neighborhood , and she’s seen old residents move out...and new development and residents move in. And one thing we talked about for a while was cultural loss.
Nadege Green: When we talk about displacement, it can feel very like, okay, people were moved to somewhere else, and the end. But we don’t really delve into how displacement impacts folks. Right? Like the emotional impact, the psychological impact of leaving your community or not being able to call home the community you’ve always called home.
Justine Paradis: And this shift of the neighborhood is especially acute for older folks. Nadege pointed out people on fixed income, maybe Social Security, in a city with just, really high rents, in a lot of it.
Nadege Green: What does it mean to have a neighbor that knows that Madame Pierre lives upstairs, and you know, when she doesn’t feel well, I can make the tea, the Haitian tea from this bush that we drink when we have a stomachache. Right? Like, who will check on Madame Pierre when the neighborhood shifts?
[ambi tone rise]
Jola Ajibade: Impermanence might be the new normal for many of us. And so, you know, the idea that you have to live in one place forever, I think people have to forget that. It's not happening. That's the truth.
I mean, and I think people who have been able to do that historically, I think it's a privilege that they should celebrate.
I mean, in my case as a Nigerian woman, moved abroad. There are a lot of issues in my country that led me to decide to move abroad but I would have preferred to stay back, if things were fine. And so I sort of have in my head that every - that nothing is permanent. I guess that's how I live my life.
Justine Paradis: One thing that she said, Portland is going to experience this earthquake at some point, this 9.0 earthquake -
Annie Ropeik: The big one!
Justine Paradis: She’s like, I know it’s going to happen, it’s always in my head.
Jola Ajibade: But at the same time, I’m not afraid. Because I’ve had to leave my family. I’ve had to go to many countries. I’m living in a foreign country. This is not new to me.
Justine Paradis: Years ago I read this piece about exile and identity. And there are so many different terms, expat, or immigrant, or migrant, or refugee - it’s so political. It’s by Charles Simic - and he said, you know, he had been displaced, and he said, he would walk in the streets, and “the streets were full of these ‘somebodys’ putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too.”
Jola Ajibade: I’ve never read that before. But that’s exactly how I feel! And that’s exactly what I think many people are going to come to understand and perhaps experience. It does something to you! You see people as people.
You know, you get some opportunities because you move, you lose some things. But it gives you that sense of resilience, individual resilience, if you want. But for other people, this is going to affect them psychologically because they’ve never had to do this. And climate change is going to make people exposed to the psychological and all other types of impact that comes with impermanence.
[ambi tone fade]
[mux]
Justine Paradis: Hey!
Bess Samuel: Hello!
Justine Paradis: can you hear me?
Bess Samuel: yes I can, where is the volume?
Sam Evans-Brown: So, at long last, Justine gave Bess a call back.
Justine Paradis: You ready for an answer?
Bess Samuel: yes, where should I go run and hide from the storms, winds, tornadoes, other sordid bad nature things?
Sam Evans-Brown: First, with the straight-up EPA answer.
Justine Paradis: So what do you think about moving to Kodiak Island, Alaska?
Bess Samuel: Uh i don’t think my partner would be into it but I might be. I don’t know, how’s the internet access in Kodiak Island?
Justine Paradis: The next on the list is Juneau, Alaska… then Ketchikan, Alaska… then Sitka, Alaska... are you getting the picture?
Bess Samuel: Yeah lots of Alaska! I don’t know if I could sell Alaska… I don’t know!
Justine Paradis: Do you have top contenders for options?
Bess Samuel: Colorado is high on the list. I did look into New Hampshire, because you guys made it sound pretty good. I don’t know how I would feel about the primary season, though! That would probably be not my favorite.
Justine Paradis: Ha! Our first in the nation.
Bess Samuel: yeah and also the diversity is kind of an issue up there. I like the scenery a lot. But being an interracial family… that just, it just gives me pause.
Justine Paradis: Our real answer is really, like… not an answer? Like the data only gets you so far? And like, this will sound obvious but the people we talked to said, it depends on priorities, trade-offs.
Bess Samuel: Yeah there’s no solutions, only trade offs.
Justine Paradis: Yes, yeah. That’s exactly it.
[mux fade]
Justine Paradis: I hope you let us know what you decide to end up doing.
Bess Samuel: Yeah I’ll let you guys know. Yeah. and if, you ‘ll definitely hear about it if we do end up in NH somehow.
Justine Paradis: Okay. I’m going to go put this in the episode.
Bess Samuel: Oh, okay!
Justine Paradis: I’ll see you later!
Bess Samuel: Bye!
Justine Paradis: Bye!
CREDITS:
This episode was produced by Justine Paradis, Annie Ropeik, Taylor Quimby, and me Sam Evans-Brown, with support from Cori Princell and Tat Bellamy-Walker.
Erika Janik is our Executive Producer.
Maureen McMurray is Director of It Could Happen Here.
If you want to hear more of Nadege Green’s reporting on Miami, we recommend listening to Season 3 of There Goes the Neighborhood - a great listen on how elevation, sea level rise, race, and history are all intersecting in the city.
Thank you to - Anna Marandi, Chris Campany, Lauren Gaudette, and Garrett Neff.
And thanks everybody who responded to the survey, and to everyone we spoke with for this episode: Alex Whittemore, Daniel Mitchell, Mark Nystrom, Meaghan Kelly,
Alex Texeira, Jesse Jaime, Aurelia Jaime Ramirez, Jenny Stowe, Mike Hass, Suzi Patterson, Mike Thiel, Allyshia Dycus, and of course, Bess Samuel.
Music in this episode came from Massimo Ruberti and Blue Dot Sessions.
Theme Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/in is a production of NHPR.