Planning the Next Great Migration

To further my desire to both acknowledge and dispute Eliza Daley’s recent essay on ruralization (mentioned in a previous post), I want to wrap up my thoughts about the unsustainability of our society and economy. If you keep reading you will see me argue repeatedly that giant cities should be avoided, or possibly departed if you already live there, in favor of smaller cities. Partly this is because their citizens are often gerrymandered out of political influence, but partly it is because I think big cities are inherently problematic. Here I’m skipping ahead a bit to explain why I think so.

As we will see, the entire world is facing problems due to the collision of skyrocketing population and consumption with falling global resources and increasing pollution costs. Many parts of the U.S. will suffer directly from climate change, but even the lucky places that see relatively little climate disruption will find their economic arrangements more and more affected by what is happening to everyone else. Thus, there are no really safe zones.

However, there are definitely less safe zones. My view of these is informed by three major sources: The U.S. Global Change Research Program’s (2018) Climate Report, John W. Day and Charles Hall’s (2016) analysis of regional economic dependencies and climate effects on water and sea level in America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions, and Julie Kurtz and colleagues’ (2020) present-day foodshed mapping, which analyzed how possible it was for America’s urban centers to be fed by the farmland of the surrounding region. These sources generally point in the same directions. While the latter two suggest that any large, densely populated urban areas are questionably sustainable, three regions are particularly problematic due to the severity of the problems they will face and the huge numbers of people involved. These are the Southwest, southern Florida, and the highly urbanized eastern coasts. Unfortunately, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau (2021), all of these regions are continuing to grow in population. All of them are sure to see serious disruptions, but the Southwest is going to be first. In fact, it has passed its tipping point into crisis and the disasters are already beginning.