Move, page 19
More than 90 percent of the Earth’s territorial surface has no inhabitants. Can we disperse from the vulnerable coastal megacities in which so much of the global population has concentrated? When I first searched for cases of de-urbanization, I found very few and at very limited scale. But now that we can inhabit smaller and more self-sufficient communities without sacrificing global connectivity, it’s far more plausible a scenario. As we begin to plan to resettle populations, we should locate them farther inland and at higher elevations, and ideally near agriculture to avoid dependence on far-flung food supplies. The outskirts of Zurich, for example, feature numerous towns where agriculture, woodwork, 3D-printed precision machinery, computer modeling, and other both high- and low-tech industries thrive side by side amid clean air, freshwater, and low noise pollution—all connected by railways to major cities in Switzerland and beyond. For large populations, we would install long-distance water canals or pipes, and nuclear-powered desalination plants and wastewater treatment facilities. Even cities of 3–5 million people can leverage their surrounding ecoregions without destroying them.
“Plan B” for billionaires
A chorus of philanthropists and celebrities have pledged their wealth to finance carbon capture, reforestation, alternative energy, and other climate interventions. At the same time, boomers and Gen-Xers with unlimited means have already begun preparing for the worst. Their “apocalypse insurance” includes buying up tracts of remote Hawaiian islands or vast ranches in Kansas with impenetrable bunkers, off-grid power, freshwater tanks, weapons caches, motorcycles, and helicopters. Switzerland’s private bunkers are not only impregnable fortresses but ensure digital resilience so you have access to your Bitcoin. Yacht owners are outfitting their vessels to last for months if not years on the high seas, and investing in a new class of super-yachts that are both ships and submarines. Others are scheming to build floating private islands that make their own laws and dock only in friendly jurisdictions. Given New Zealand’s safe distance from turbulent shores and its trustworthy government, rich agriculture, and abundant freshwater supplies, it’s no surprise that it has become a desirable end-of-the-world destination for those who are allowed to buy property and citizenship. But New Zealand’s population is only 5 million, and it has little interest in raising it much further—unless you’re a billionaire.
I. Let us hope they’re more eco-friendly than cruise ships, which emit more carbon per passenger than cars or planes, while dumping countless tons of waste into the oceans.
CHAPTER 8 WILL “THE SOUTH” SURVIVE?
Decaying states, departing people
The first time I consciously noticed the depravity of idle youth was when I was about twelve years old visiting relatives in Uttar Pradesh (widely known as “UP”), India’s most populous province. Everywhere we scootered around—Lucknow (UP’s capital), Kanpur (my hyper-polluted birthplace), and Varanasi (Hinduism’s holy city)—kids loitered on the roadside, in front of shops, in their alleyways, or on the banks of the Ganges River. It was as if they were waiting for something meaningful to come to them. It still hasn’t. With more than 200 million people, UP today has twice as many people as China’s most populous province of Guangdong (in southern China). However, while the per capita income of Guangdong is roughly $5,500, UP’s residents earn about $900 per year, less than half of India’s national average.
Many Arab youth have not fared much better. In the 1990s, European countries promised to invest and outsource more work to the Arab societies of North Africa. In the immediate post-9/11 landscape, no shortage of experts drew attention to the despair facing Arab citizens suffering under arbitrary dictatorships; more money was spent on publishing reports about the Arab “youth bulge” than doing anything about it. The US went on to spend trillions of dollars invading Iraq and Afghanistan, while also launching PR campaigns irrelevant to Arab life.
It was in the mid-2000s that I began traveling extensively around the Arab world to research my first book, from Morocco and Libya to Syria and Iraq. I talked to hundreds of people my own age, twenty-somethings who had little professional opportunity. Those old enough to drive a car would hustle various odd jobs; younger kids often just sat around sniffing glue. The “Arab Spring” revolts of 2011 seemed inevitable.
Two decades on from the “youth bulge” reports, many Arab countries are in worse shape than they were then—while the youth have grown up with neither useful education nor jobs. Meanwhile, Europeans can have robots do their menial work and focus on exporting to Asia—and blocking any boats or rafts of Arabs from making it safely across the Mediterranean. Arabs are on their own. The vast majority of respondents in the Arab Youth Survey still rank jobs and the cost of living as their top concerns. Arab youth unemployment stands at 30 percent, the highest in the world, including university graduates.1 Youth marginalization is not an episode but a permanent condition—as is their desire to emigrate.
Arabs largely share language and religion, and have spent most of the past thousand years under shared caliphates and the Ottoman empire. Despite their modern division into bordered nations, their descent from postcolonial nationalism into chaotic implosion has been nearly borderless. During my time advising US Special Operations Forces in Iraq, we watched daily as Tunisians, Jordanians, and other disaffected young men streamed in from across the region. The radicalized “ISIS generation” that emerged out of the Iraqi insurgency and Syrian civil war was originally composed of disaffected Iraqi Baathists and Saudi Wahhabi-backed Islamists, but economic deprivation made thousands more vulnerable to seduction by radicals who promised sex slaves in lands liberated from infidel (American) occupation and virgins in the afterlife. Now those conscripts have become the “jihad diaspora” of disgruntled fighters conducting attacks worldwide.
The best hope for the Arab region’s failed states is to follow the model of Morocco, which has kept youth gainfully employed by investing in solar power for villages, high-speed railways, water desalination plants, agricultural revitalization, and tree planting. Since most Arab youth won’t make it across the Mediterranean, they ought to be deployed toward this kind of nation-building that the past two generations mostly ignored. Otherwise, they’ll just head to the Gulf—especially the UAE. There has long been a fluid Arab talent arbitrage whereby one country’s demise enables another’s rise. The Lebanese civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990 led to an exodus of savvy multilingual professionals; today there are twice as many Lebanese in the diaspora as in Lebanon. When you walk into a government meeting in the UAE, most likely a Lebanese banker will be in the room as well.
Lebanese, Egyptians, and other down-and-out Arabs have also wound up in the oil-rich Gulf kingdom that has financially propped up their nations: Saudi Arabia. But oil prices are collapsing and the need for their services is limited, for now. The millennial Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has launched grand schemes to reinvent Riyadh and erect multibillion-dollar resorts and entertainment complexes on the Red Sea coast. Catering to the 80 percent of the population that’s under the age of forty, he has also pushed social reforms, including greater women’s rights, to drive, travel, and divorce. If his plans succeed, then another generation of Jordanians, Egyptians, and Lebanese will pour into the hospitality industry. They may even rebuild lost connections such as the Ottoman-era Hejaz Railway that linked Istanbul through the Levant to Islam’s holiest sites of Mecca and Medina. This is the optimistic scenario for an Arab renaissance.
But if the Gulf countries fail to reinvent themselves, the rich Saudis and Emiratis will head to Europe while the poorer Arabs will go back (or stay at) home—and take to the streets. In the simmering revolts from Algiers to Beirut to Baghdad, youth have wisely learned to abandon sectarian divides and take on the corrupt ruling class as a united generation. In fact, across the Arab region—including Saudi Arabia—a rising number of young Muslims are abandoning Islam and becoming non-religious and even atheist.2 Like most young Christians in the West, they’re religious more in name than deed. Young Arabs have also dramatically lost faith in religious leaders and Islamist parties. A 2019 Arab News survey showed that most Iraqis and Lebanese resent the outsize role of religion in their politics and favor governments that focus on economic policy. They see religion as a personal preference rather than a political prison. They don’t want to wait until the afterlife for dignity.
Arab governments have responded to resistance with the reflex they know best: repression. One lesson regimes clearly did not learn between the Arab Spring of 2011 and its reprisal in 2019: Don’t tamper with the Internet. In 2011, it took only three weeks from when Mubarak’s regime cut off Internet access to the masses flooding Tahrir Square and when his three decades of iron-fisted rule were brought to an end. In late 2019, the Lebanese government proposed a tax on digital messaging services. As soon as word of the “WhatsApp tax” spread, Lebanese youth parked couches in downtown Beirut and ground the city to a halt. They even formed a 170-kilometer human chain stretching the length of the country from Tripoli to Tyre. The tax never came into effect. Instead, ministers were forced to take a big salary cut.
No Arab country faces more dire circumstances than Yemen, whose civil war has become the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, all while its 30 million people run out of water. Yemenis will soon flood into their tormentor Saudi Arabia, and have already begun to flee on rafts across the Red Sea to Africa, toward Sudan and Egypt. But Egypt is a political, economic, and environmental time bomb all at once, a civilization on the precipice of collapse. The Nile River itself is the best metaphor for the state of Egyptian society: By the time the country’s agricultural lifeblood reaches the Mediterranean delta, it’s a swamp. Egypt has gone from cotton titan to having such severe water shortages that its prized industry is disappearing. Soon the Suez Canal will lose relevance as ships take the cooler and faster Arctic route between Europe and Asia and freight trains crisscross Eurasia. Already the country’s marriage rate is falling (because men can’t afford it) while the divorce rate is rising. Men are encouraged to get alimony insurance before marriage since in the event of divorce, they’ll have to pay 40 percent of their incomes to their ex-wives. Needless to say, this diminishes their prospects for a second marriage.
Egypt has long considered itself the true guardian of the Nile, but in fact almost 90 percent of the water it and Sudan (another military-controlled state of nearly 50 million) receive from the Nile originates in Ethiopia, which is constructing a grand hydropower dam on the upper Nile to boost electricity generation for its fast-growing economy of nearly 110 million people. A lot of things have to go right in the coming years for Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia to survive: cross-border power and water sharing, efficient irrigation and desalination, the curbing of corruption and the creation of jobs for tens of millions of listless youth. Since hope is not a strategy, it’s a safer bet that many of this restless generation will disperse out of Africa, becoming everyone’s problem.
Like Egypt, Iran represents a teeming young society with no meaningful strategy for the future. For forty years since the Islamic revolution, talented Iranians have been ditching home for Dubai, London, and Los Angeles, with most never returning, even to visit family, due to the risk of arbitrary arrest. In this fifth decade of self-defeating isolation, Iran faces not only tighter sanctions and low oil prices, but an overwhelmingly young population stifled by the country’s corrupt theocracy and stagnant economy. Uprisings have been sporadic but sizable since the 2009 “Green Movement.” After a week scootering around Tehran and meeting dozens of Iranian movers and shakers in 2014, I crowned them the “Just Do It” generation for their brave pluckiness and knack for getting gadgets imported and fixed despite all obstacles. Now they’re calling for “madaniyya,” a civic rebirth, taking the root word meydan that means public square. Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution” centered on the meydan (parks) in Kiev, and after the Iranian regime shot down a Ukrainian Air flight bound for Kiev in early 2020, Iran’s youth have imported the spirit of Kiev to the streets of Tehran. But each time they return home from another futile protest, ever more plot their escape.
Ramadan lifestyles and underground living
At the stroke of noon, the power goes out. It’s the same thing almost every day in Pakistan—and Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Nigeria, and many other countries. The taps often run dry too—even as temperatures soar. Such is life for hundreds of millions of people across north and central Africa, the Middle East, and southern Asia. With water tables falling and electricity grids frying, can daily life be made more livable for people trapped in the scorching subtropical latitudes? As the world heats up, people of all faiths may have to learn to follow a Ramadan-like routine: Waking up early to eat, staying indoors in air-conditioned buildings or resting through the hot daytime hours, and coming back out only after sundown. Maybe we should also dress like Gulf Arabs, in simple white, flowing cotton gowns that reflect light and keep us a bit cooler.
Heat waves and water shortages may also return us to communal practices abandoned long ago in the West but still thriving in the Middle East. For example, more people may take comfort in the bathhouse (hammam) culture that was the norm for many centuries. To avoid baking at home without air-conditioning, Europeans will congregate in climate-controlled public arenas or coworking spaces cooled by water from underground aquifers piped in through district cooling systems. This may well reinforce some of the social cohesion that has been fading as neighbors have become strangers.
Many bathhouses are subterranean, constructed to provide access to natural thermal springs or cool streams. Perhaps entire settlements will be built underground. Decades ago, some cities accustomed to frigid winters developed extensive underground shopping arcades, eateries, and even cinemas. Moscow is famed for its artistically decorated underground metro, and Kiev for its subterranean bazaars. Montreal’s underground walkways stretch for thirty-two kilometers of pedestrian zones, even linking residential buildings. Similar plans have been developed in Helsinki, Toronto, Beijing, and Singapore—though none include actual housing. Humans still prefer to live aboveground rather than subject themselves to claustrophobia. But imagine searing heat, devastating storms, and other natural disasters befalling us on a regular—or unpredictable—basis. The same cities that built underground passages as a refuge from the cold might use them to provide a respite from the turbulence ahead.
Africans trapped on the go
Africa is the continent that the Club of Rome’s 1972 message did not reach. It embodies how a growing population can be a great thing—until it’s the worst thing. Its population size has expanded well beyond economic necessity and pushed it deep into ungovernability and ecological crisis. Africa needs more productivity, not more people it can’t afford. The question now is: What to do with the 60 percent of the continent’s population that’s aged twenty-four or younger?
Over the past thirty years, Africa’s food and mineral resources have become much more connected to the global economy, leading many to predict that the twenty-first century could belong to Africa. But none of the trends that elevated Africa has guaranteed longevity. China and India are diversifying their commodities imports, making Africa less relevant as a supplier—yet as oil and mineral prices sink, African nations may fail to make debt payments and be forced to give up their oil fields and mines as collateral. From Djibouti to Niger, the countries most indebted to China may be in civil war when China comes calling. The European migrant crisis is partially made in China, whose projects are displacing communities and altering river systems to grow food for export, driving Africans northward. But European investment—despite various iterations of a grand African support strategy—is stagnating even as Europe closes itself off to future migrants.
But the migrants have tried their best to come anyway. Hundreds of millions of African youth live in poverty,3 and especially those from central African states such as Congo and Niger have fled northward to Libya, where the same militias that plague the country profit from allowing thugs and pirates to extort and starve those seeking to cross the Mediterranean. Many never make it: Far more Africans (nearly twenty thousand since 2014) have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea than Latinos perishing from heat exhaustion crossing the Mexican desert to reach the Rio Grande. The continent’s rampant population growth and environmental stress have led to ethical pleas for more open migration to Europe, but the northern hemisphere’s reply has been: Stay home and have fewer children.
Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, is the linchpin of forecasts of Africa’s continuing population explosion and economic rise. But Nigeria is as much or more a story of resource stress and decay, and more likely to become a civil war zone than a bustling market of 300 million. It’s a country often described as being on the brink of imploding, rather than stating more plainly that its implosion is accelerating. Lagos, Africa’s largest city, is also at risk from rising sea levels; slums such as Makoko are built on swamps soon to be engulfed by the encroaching Atlantic Ocean. Nigeria is home to one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups, Boko Haram, and numerous other militias that campaign against Christians and other minorities. When Nigeria criminalized people trafficking, young Nigerian smugglers lost their livelihood and now make the journey themselves, adding to the exodus from equatorial Africa.
