Move, page 3
Wherever they hail from, today’s youth are the largest and most physically and digitally mobile generation in human history. Where they’re going, how they’re living, and what they’re doing today reveals what social, political, and economic models will prevail—and which ones will fail—tomorrow. Countries that are losing citizens today are likely to wither tomorrow. By contrast, countries gaining youth today may well thrive tomorrow.
What will the next three decades—between now and 2050—hold for those under the age of thirty today? What geopolitical, economic, technological, social, and environmental circumstances will they face? Where are they going? Which societies will be the winners and losers in the twenty-first century? These and other great questions of our time are being answered as young people vote with their feet. To know the future, then, we must follow the next generation into it.
Survival of the mobile
Baby boomers remember the Cold War “Doomsday Clock” that warned of impending nuclear destruction; scientists moved the needle closer to midnight as geopolitical tensions escalated. Today’s youth are much more familiar with the “climate clock” that counts down to when the Earth’s temperature rise hits two degrees Celsius. As climate activist Bill McKibben has written, “It is far too late to stop global warming, but these next ten years seem as if they may be our last chance to limit the chaos.”4 It’s safe to assume we will fail to limit the chaos. Philosophers such as Roy Scranton tell us that we need to “learn to die.” That’s equally unlikely. The more interesting question becomes: What will we do to survive?
Mankind has long been on the move in search of the right climate, settling along rivers and coastlines in the temperate latitudes. As we learned to control fire, herd animals, build sturdy shelters, and pump groundwater, we spread more widely, with cities becoming the locus of populations and growth in the industrial era. But the intense resource consumption required to fuel urban life for billions of people has caused skyrocketing carbon emissions, scorching temperatures, and record ice melt, rendering ever more swaths of the Earth unlivable.
There are many ways to beat the heat and retreat from the sea—but no survival is possible without freshwater. Ancient civilizations of the Nile, Tigris, Indus, and Yellow River valleys were built on irrigation. Today two-thirds of the world’s population lives near rivers, and agriculture consumes 70 percent of our freshwater. But with groundwater depletion accelerating and rainfall declining, rivers are drying up. Farmers from Brazil to Africa to India already face crop failure year after year. Those who are bonded to their land amass huge generational debts, commit suicide, flee to cities, or join the hordes illegally migrating across borders. One season without rain or one week of “zero day” water shortages is all it takes to push farmers and city dwellers to chase more fertile and hydrated lands.
Rising Water Stress Across the Planet
Freshwater availability is projected to decline in almost all regions of the world over the coming two decades. The Middle East and North Africa, as well as the southern United States and eastern Australia, will be among the most affected geographies.
The term “Anthropocene” (defined by Webster as “the period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age”) initially gave us a false sense of control over the environment, but now we see that it signifies a self-destructive feedback loop.II Even if some of today’s most ambitious proposals are undertaken immediately—stopping all coal-powered electricity generation; replacing fossil with nuclear, hydrogen, wind, and solar power; and planting 1 trillion trees across Russia, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and America—greenhouse gases already accumulated in the atmosphere may have an even more severe impact on planetary life than they have had to date. For billions of people, staying put means inevitable suicide. Political sovereignty has been a defining feature of our geography for only three centuries—but our seas will be rising for the next several centuries. Ask yourself which force will give way.
The climate doesn’t care about our political boundaries, and people too will clamor ever more to overcome them. Climate stresses cause migrant swells. The 50 million climate refugees today already outnumber political ones. According to the National Academy of Sciences, another degree of temperature rise could push 200 million people out of the “climate niche” to which they have become accustomed.5 And a further degree beyond that could mean the decimal place moves one further, turning 1 billion or more of humanity into climate refugees.
How Fast Will It Get Hot?
The optimal geographies for human habitation are shifting as temperatures rise. Regions in black will have average daily temperatures above thirty degrees Celsius and become unsuitable for human habitation by 2070 or sooner. Lighter shaded regions will become more suitable for settlement over time.
Mitigating the effects of climate change no longer appears plausible, and few will wait until the worst case scenarios come true to abandon wherever they have called home. We must focus instead on adaptation—and for most people, to adapt will mean to move. Poor Central American farmers who lose everything in a cyclone and Africans wiped out by drought will simply take what’s left and move north. As the rich lose a home in a forest fire or a yacht in a typhoon, they invest in land and bunkers farther inland and at higher elevations, or in Norway and New Zealand. Whether rich or poor, ever more people are, like our ancient ancestors, chasing the climate niche.
Running from the robots
While climate change drives us away from our traditional habitats, robots are chasing us away from the stable jobs we once knew. Outsourcing and automation have already devastated America’s industrial workers, forcing them to move to cheaper places in search of new jobs. Asian workers were the beneficiaries of supply chain shifts, but today no country is investing more in ramping up industrial robotics than China, pushing tens of millions of Chinese workers into the rootless gigonomy.
Covid-19 will accelerate automation efforts worldwide as companies seek to reduce dependence on vulnerable humans. In the US, up to 3 million truck drivers could lose their jobs to autonomous vehicles, and 2 million real estate agents to proptech apps. Amazon’s warehouses will eventually manage themselves without people. The unsung heroes of the Covid lockdown were undocumented migrants laboring on farms and in meat processing plants, but they won’t be rewarded: They will be automated by machines that can crush weeds, plant seeds, and pick crops. Latino farmhands might as well move on to Canada to help expand farming there, and Romanians to Russia.
Many current job creation engines will be wiped out before today’s youth even join the labor market. There’s no point in aspiring to install 5G telecom networks or solar panels when all of that will have been done already. Other major sectors, from education to hospitality to retail, have yet to be digitally overhauled—but they will be. One estimate suggests that at least 375 million people will have to switch “occupational categories” due to artificial intelligence and automation. Will their new job be located where their old one was? Not likely.
The race against the machines is survival of the richest. Coders, engineers, and others with top-tier skills stay ahead of robots and algorithms by designing them, while poor workers serve as cogs in the manufacturing, logistics, or retail machinery until they become disposable. At the same time, young people don’t want to work like robots either. In France, village bakeries are being replaced by semi-automated grocery stores and even baguette vending machines. Youth aren’t interested in waking up at 3 a.m. to bake bread anyway, so they move.
If countries tax corporate robots and redistribute profits, they can become more equitable welfare states without needing larger populations. Today, however, only Germany and Japan could conceivably muster the political will for such a move without their companies rushing to outsource. Either way, they remain migration magnets because they offer jobs in finance, media, education, tech, medicine, logistics, entertainment, retail, and other professions. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), US states where these sectors are growing are the same states where populations are growing: North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, Virginia, Georgia, Utah, Colorado, California, and Texas.6 The lesson is clear: Follow the people.
A quantum future
Over the past two decades, millions of Americans who abandoned rust-belt districts of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other northern states wound up in California, almost by default. Since 2015, however, California has been losing residents, especially to lower-tax Texas and Arizona. Yet the entire southwestern US is suffering from intensifying heat waves, water shortages, and volatile immigration policy. Despite the popularity of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson, large tracts of America’s desert regions might need to be deserted—and those who fled the Great Lakes may well return sooner than they think.
To end up where one started seems a pointless circularity. And yet over a certain time horizon, we can engineer the logic behind it. Take another example: The UK’s 2016 Brexit decision pushed business and investment away from the country, with British talent taking their skills and money to Canada, Portugal, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and a half-dozen other countries. But Britain has an educated population, a large economy, ample freshwater, and will fare far better than most places as climate change accelerates. So those that Brexit pushed away may eventually return despite Brexit—along with a new wave of migrants recruited by a wiser government.
Human geography is getting fuzzy. As people find themselves regularly on the move, we are experiencing a phase shift like when matter transitions from solid to liquid to gas: molecules heat up and loosen from one another, vibrating more rapidly. One might even say that humans are becoming like particles in quantum physics, their velocity and location always in flux. It would be nice to return to some semblance of stability, but that’s not how things work in a quantum world. Instead, the complexity of today’s world makes it increasingly difficult to settle permanently anywhere. Highly paid digital nomads and billionaires with multiple passports as well as the migratory underclass of Filipino maids and Indian construction workers are all part of the diverse and growing global demographic of quantum people.
There’s also no reason to believe that the rising tide of political refugees and asylum seekers will stop—but plenty more reasons suggesting it will continue. Across the postcolonial landscape of Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, nations began to decay from overpopulation and corruption almost as soon as they were born. In recent decades, the multiple Iraq wars and the Arab Spring have pushed millions of Arabs from North Africa to Syria into Jordan, Turkey, and most recently Europe—perhaps never to return to the home nations that have been shattered beyond recognition. As Paul Salopek wrote in National Geographic in 2019, “More than a billion refugees and migrants are on the move today, both within countries and across borders, fleeing mass violence and poverty. This is the largest tide of rootlessness in human history.”7
The term “refugee” implies a narrow and transient group, but what we have is semipermanently resettled people, such as Syrians in neighboring states, Palestinians in Jordan, Afghans in Pakistan, and Somalis in Kenya. In Turkey, nearly 4 million Syrians hold “temporary protected status” but in reality may never leave. At the same time, they’re always at risk of being deported as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from Europe—as Turkey did in 2020 in pushing another wave toward Greece. These refugees regularly shift within Turkey, meaning more steps in their perpetual movement—and for those who are deported, yet one more. There are few safe bets for tens of millions of refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants. The US has pushed several million Mexican and Central Americans back across the border over the past decade, Spain continues to expel North Africans, and China booted Burmese migrants back into Myanmar as the coronavirus struck. They thought they had made it—until they were forced to move again.
Violence and resource stress are daily facts of life in the teeming megacities of Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. Today’s fastest growing cities are not those in China’s hyper-modern Greater Bay Area but cities such as Lagos, Karachi, Cairo, Dhaka, Manila, Istanbul, Jakarta, Mumbai, Kolkata, São Paulo, and Bangkok—most of which rank worryingly low in climate resilience. The vast slums in these and other megacities are home to an estimated 1.5 billion people. Cities that recycle shipping containers or subsidize 3D-printed housing, offer mobile health clinics, and create jobs in urban farming and installing solar panels may pacify the poor underclass. But such initiatives are still few and far between. In the coming decade, we will either see such innovations scale or we will witness large-scale revolt against marginalization and oppression. There is also a third scenario—mass exodus—as people flee to towns closer to resources and at higher elevation. Which will it be? The answer is: all three.
How do we know which places will gain or lose people in the years ahead? Some places have every strike against them: They have too few young people, are politically volatile, economically uncompetitive, and ecologically vulnerable. These are the places from which people want to flee. At the other end of the spectrum are places that have it all going for them: robust demographics, stable politics, prospering economies, and environmental stability. Those are the places everyone wants to go to. The catch is: How we would describe one country today may not be true tomorrow. What place can be sure of its stability when so many newcomers arrive? Its own desirability could quickly destabilize it. This is what some feel has already happened to Europe and America; Canada could be next.
But unpredictability is no reason to stand still. On the contrary, it’s precisely why so many people move in the first place—and find themselves moving again and again. Mobility is our response to uncertainty: flight from what we cannot fight. The future is a moving target—and so are we.
One Future, Four Scenarios
I’m not the daydreaming type, but sometimes during a long hike, I fall into a light trance. My mind slips into visions of a world in which disparate communities across the globe freely and peacefully connect and exchange, and people circulate as they please. Sadly, we are a long way from that dream today. At the moment, our human geography is emerging more by accident than design. That leaves us little choice but to build a range of scenarios for how the combinations of mobility, authority, technology, and community will unfold in the years ahead.
The four scenarios depicted here represent divergent visions for our future playing out along the axes of migration and sustainability.
Which Path Will the World Take?
Four scenarios for the future. All are likely to play out simultaneously in different parts of the world.
In the upper left, “Regional Fortresses” most closely resembles today’s status quo. Clean energy investments are ramping up, but migration is limited. The rich countries of the North are far more focused on their own climate resilience than supporting deprived regions. They selectively promote sustainable farming or other survival measures in impoverished regions, but mostly to bribe their people to stay away. North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia drift into self-contained systems with limited interactions, though they may coordinate where necessary to limit encroachment from the South. They could also be at perpetual war with one another as in George Orwell’s 1984.
Another low-migration scenario portends the emergence of a “New Middle Ages” of even greater fragmentation. In this scenario, sustainability investments are abandoned and militaries forcibly seize water and energy resources from their own citizens or across borders. Waves of natural disasters and man-made ecocides kill off large portions of the world population. Those that remain converge upon feudal city-regions that form alliances akin to the medieval Hanseatic League. This landscape has been captured in countless films, from Hunger Games to Mad Max. (Throw in killer robots and you get Terminator.)
In both these low-migration scenarios, the world population as a whole is clearly not better off. Climate change may be less devastating in a world of regional fortresses, but even with lots of robots supplanting foreign labor, we may lack the young workers needed to rejuvenate our societies and lead a more convenient life. If we’re headed into a new Middle Ages, then the world will be much less than the sum of its parts—and potentially on the fast track to human extinction.
Moving to the bottom-right quadrant, we find a world similarly unable to coordinate sustainability efforts but with far more “Barbarians at the Gate.” Climate change wreaks havoc on the global economy, “water wars” break out over watershed regions, and masses of migrants force their way into livable regions, their overwhelming influx ruining habitats. At the same time, the rich buy up climate oasis zones for themselves and their dependents, building armed moats around them. The sci-fi disaster film The Day After Tomorrow perhaps best captures this combination of political and climatic chaos.
Only one scenario, “Northern Lights,” involves advanced planning for large-scale human resettlement and environmental regeneration. Economies move rapidly toward carbon-neutral energy, vast tracts of transnationally financed and governed zones (mostly in the northern hemisphere) absorb billions of migrants, and large investments are also devoted to rehabilitating the southern hemisphere. The world achieves both resource efficiency as well as managed cultural assimilation. No movie has yet been made about this scenario. We will have to write the script.
What might be the pathways and stages for getting to a Northern Lights world? In the first phase, today’s populism and pandemic restrictions may limit migration to the national and regional level. But within a decade, as economies recover and baby boomers retire, labor shortages will worsen and a younger generation of more migrant-friendly leaders could take the helm. At the same time, climate effects may kick in even more severely, compounding the need for migrants to relocate and governments to deploy them to cultivate habitable terrain. Serious geoengineering efforts will get underway to limit CO2 emissions and solar radiation, as well as fortify the ecology of devastated regions. Eventually, we might well stabilize the environment and safely repopulate the Earth.
