Moving to Disaster
More Americans are now moving out of cities and towns hit hard by wildfires, floods, tornadoes, rising heat and hurricanes—but often, to places just as risky. What gives?
New research suggests that a variety of factors are at play, but that our political divide over climate change and how to manage it may remain one of our nation’s tallest hurdles.
One of this summer’s biggest blockbusters, Twisters, is a monster movie where the monsters are big, super cell tornadoes, and the heroes are a brave team of Millennials working as storm chasers in Oklahoma, chasing tornadoes across the central plains to see whether technology can be used to disrupt, or tame them— before they can demolish a small town and kill many of its inhabitants.
The movie, a fantasy science remake of the 1996 global hit, Twister, has been catalyzing record ticket sales since its release last month, and packing theaters in the Midwest, where more than 100 real-life tornadoes have torn through several states so far this summer—double the annual average.
Movie reviewers credit the film’s popularity to its hopeful premise that humans, using the right tools, might be able to control, or at least downsize, these menacing, highly damaging forces of nature—tornadoes, as well as real-life threats by wildfires, floods and recent super storms like Hurricane Debby, which last week lumbered across the Southeast and up the Atlantic Coast, dumping up to two feet of rain in some areas along her path. Twisters, ironically, was released nationally on July 19th, just four days after Chicago’s tornado-packed derecho on July 15th caused 28 tornadoes to touch down in quick succession across that city’s metropolitan area over the span of a few hours, forcing hundreds of airline passengers to deplane from flights grounded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and take shelter in its underground corridors as wind gusts outside exceeded 100mph. Some of those passengers shared bits of that drama on TikTok as it unfolded.
Life Imitates Art
The upshot? Life imitates art, again—and Twisters, though far from being a climate-change polemic, also has a “man/woman v. nature” storyline that undeniably mirrors many Americans’ hopes that we humans can control the outbreak of natural disasters, or at least downsize their deadly impact. It also helps to explain America’s political divide over the topic of climate change this global election year, and why many climate migrants whose homes were destroyed by natural disasters often move back to these now-ravaged landscapes to rebuild.
Political research suggests those who lean right blame poor land management as a major culprit of wildfires—something humans can control, while those who lean left tend to think the ravaged sites of these natural disasters should be abandoned to avoid repeated destruction and loss of lives.
These two core attitudes are not just being referenced on the big screen. The political divide over climate change is also surfacing in groundbreaking new data being gathered by Ryan Miller, a geologist at the University of California, Davis, and an expert in climate migration— the climate-forced moves of people displaced by natural disaster. Miller’s current research focuses primarily on those forced to flee their homes in the wake of the famous northern California wildfire of 2018, called the Camp Fire, which wiped out the small forested town of Paradise, destroying 18,000 structures and causing an estimated $16.5 billion in damage and 85 fatalities. Miller, whose mom lost her house in that fire, said he watched, as “everybody I went to high school with go through this same cycle of seeing that their home is no more” and how “everybody’s family had to scramble to figure out what’s next.”
Now, six years after that traumatic disaster—the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history—many of those forced to flee Paradise are now returning to the hilltop hamlet to rebuild. One of those residents, Kylie Wrobel, explained her decision to CBS News in June, saying that she believes that “the likelihood of seeing another wildfire in Paradise is very small” —though Miller, who is tracking growing climate migration in the U.S. and the conflicts it is causing, says the forested, no-frills retirement town of Paradise is still vulnerable to experiencing another wildfire in the region.
“I have been studying why people choose to remain, or return to, areas which are not safe,” Miller said in an interview with us earlier this week. Miller and his team from UC Davis, used postal records to track where people moved after the Camp Fire. What they found was that in many cases, a move didn't solve the problem, but put people back in harm's way, with households moving into areas also threatened by other kinds of disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes.
"Maybe we're in a situation where, increasingly, people are finding that in their search for affordable housing, they sort of have to live in an area that's exposed to one of these climate-driven hazards," Miller said. But after tracking down most former residents of Paradise and asking them who they blamed for the wildfire, Miller also heard that their decisions about where to relocate were being influenced, too, by their political beliefs about climate change.
Miller says that those who didn’t believe climate change had anything to do with the 2018 Paradise fire “were most likely to move back and rebuild,” while those who believe climate change played a large role in the disaster “felt they lacked agency over the situation—and, therefore, saw a greater risk of a wildfire returning to Paradise, so were less interested in moving back,” he said.
“Paradise is a microcosm of broader issues that our nation's going to have to grapple with more,” Miller added, saying America’s climate migrants of all natural disasters now face a variety of key obstacles and political beliefs influencing—and in some cases, limiting their decisions. “I'm hoping that with some of the research work we are doing on the Paradise Camp Fire, we can get ahead of some of those issues and influences and prevent these kinds of disasters from happening again later on, down the road.”
What follows is an edited transcript and “teaser” of some of the highlights of our conversation with Miller about his new in-depth climate-driven research still in progress, which we’ll share in its entirety as a podcast segment this fall.
NEW RULES: Your mom’s house in Paradise was destroyed during the 2018 Camp Fire tragedy, California’s deadliest wildfire in state history. This experience has, in many ways, fueled your work as a geologist and your current research on the aftermath of that Camp Fire. What have you found most compelling about what happened to the Camp Fire’s climate migrants, and what have we learned from this, post-fire?
MILLER: There are really interesting things happening with climate migration, like the northward shift of the population over time. I’m really interested in places up north that are marketing themselves now, saying they’re the climate-safe place in which to invest. Duluth, Minnesota, for example, has been running ads about this, saying they’re going to have the best climate in the nation because there, the weather is only going to get nicer, and that it also has fresh water. I’m also looking into where people have relocated after really big climate disasters and displacement events. … If you’re thinking about long-term investment, you may be more willing to invest in Seattle than Phoenix, just in terms of reasons around the future water supply and future climate.
NEW RULES: Why would a climate migrant, someone displaced from their home during a natural disaster or climate event, why would they go back to rebuild? Aren’t some of these places still in the path of similar threats?
MILLER: I’m no psychologist, but generally, I’m finding that one’s belief about who is responsible for natural disasters influences whether or not they are willing to move back to a city or town in which the disaster happened. …In my surveys, a majority of Paradise survivors said climate change was “somewhat responsible” or “very responsible” for the Camp Fire, but for the rest, climate change doesn’t enter the conversation at all. Those people say the Camp Fire had to do with an electric utility that sparked the fire, and because Pacific Gas & Electric, in this case, were deemed legally liable, most people assumed it was really just all PG&E’s fault, or that it’s actually the fault of the environmentalists, who have prohibited logging and therefore, we have this overgrown forest and that’s why the fire happened.
What I think is really interesting about this is those people —the ones not thinking about climate change—believe we can control what caused the fire, so they moved back into a danger zone they cannot see. There are many factors driving all of this, but in truth, climate change plays a big role, and keeps making the fire season longer and makes these wildfires more likely to happen and when they do, makes them worse and actually almost impossible to control.
NEW RULES: What about programs the government is running to help people stop living in places most vulnerable to climate change?
MILLER: Managed retreat programs are so hard to get off the ground, mostly because the culture of collaborating with different layers of government in this country can make this really impossible. I know in coastal Louisiana, for example, where we are relocating people inland, but even there it’s hard for climate change to be the rallying cry when there are so many citizens who really don’t believe climate change is real— even when they are seeing the effects of it. My own family used to say, literally, the whole town would have to burn down for our house to be affected. It would never happen, until it did.
…In the coming years, I think the safest part of the country will likely be the most expensive, and I think we’re going to see that happening more and more. We’re also starting to see what I call “climate gentrification” of lower-cost neighborhoods situated in safer areas environmentally — like in some coastal towns, not on the beach but maybe six or seven blocks away.
As people become more aware of the risks, these places and some of the safest parts of the country will become more expensive.. .It’s happening now in some places but I think we’re going to start seeing that happening in many more places.
NEW RULES: So what’s your advice based on your research and knowledge of what’s happening environmentally to people who want to navigate these changes best? We always ask people in our audio conversations with them, what they think might be the best way for us all to navigate the challenges they’re working to alleviate — something we call a “new rule.”
MILLER: I think the best thing we can do from a climate resilience perspective is build more affordable housing in safer places, and not to rebuild in Paradise. I think that’s an area that’s always going to have risk and that risk will continue to increase as climate change accelerates. In Paradise, if we want to manage that land and we want to prescribe things like managed burning — we can’t do that if we have 26,000 people living interspersed in that forest again. So I think the best thing would be to build more affordable housing down in the (Sacramento) valley, not just from a climate mitigation perspective but also from an adaptation perspective that would allow people to avoid having to pay for sky-high insurance policies, and have the double benefit of living in a place closer to jobs and opportunities without exposing themselves to some of the same old risks.
What’s your take on our changing climate and how best to navigate the current and coming storms? Please share your stories and insights on what’s next.