Climate Change Will Happen to You - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 14

they would migrate to the areas that lucked out? As a result, wouldn't
those beter-of areas be overwhelmed with people seeking a beter life?
What's more, does it seem likely these migrants would have been able to
sell their homes at a good price? Would they always have secured jobs
that paid them as well? The people in the lucky zone might find them-
selves trying to accommodate an inflow of stressed-out, disadvantaged
people hoping to find a good place to live. If nonhuman species will have
to migrate, people will too. What's more, they will often have to migrate
across national borders, leading to a whole range of crucial political ques-
tions. Once you factor in human mobility, you change the entire dynamic:
a region whose climate might not be bad will have to face a massive social
transformation, one that may stress out the region's ecosystem in turn.
So it simply isn't credible to suggest that climate change would benefit
anyone in the long term. Because of the intricate web of our economies
and the inevitability of migration, there are no guarantees. Perhaps if
those who lived in this hypothetical lucky region put together a self-sus-
taining economy— and declared political independence, surrounded the
entire zone with a thirty-foot fence to keep everyone else out, and taxed
themselves silly to create a state-of-the-art military that could defeat any
invaders— then they could live in relative abundance (if also in a state of
perpetual selfishness and paranoia). Does that sound like a good future?
All right , says one last voice, even if everything you say is true — even if
climate change will alter the ecosystems where I live or cause a massive social
transformation in my region, what difference does it really make to me ? I
don't care about nature; if a lot of species go extinct, it's not going to affect me .
Ecosystems may come and go, but in the modern world, what does it mater?
I don't really object to social change in my neighborhood, either; by now we're
all used to new developments of that kind. As long as I have a job and can live
in my urban environment, with a car, a cell phone, a nice Internet connection,
good heating , a working air conditioner, and plenty of food at my local super-
market, everything's going to be fine. .
The voice that speaks here is at last the distinctive, perhaps mostly
unconscious, voice of our own innate, indestructible narcissism. That
profound cluelessness arises in all of us at the prospect of our own mor-
tality: though we acknowledge the reality of our eventual deaths on some
level, we don't often live in accordance with that insight. The same applies