The eco-migrants: new name for age-old process

NATIONAL WEEKLY EDITION: "In Search of a Better Place to Live: Across the globe, people are relocating to escape climate change and environmental disasters," by Shankar Vendantam, Washington Post, 2-8 March 2009.

Moving in response to environmental stress is hardly a new concept; indeed, it defines much of human history.

At the media forefront of any such movement today are the truly fear-filled, who ditch their home in the U.S. for one in New Zealand, believing it will be spared our Mad Max future (better keep an eye on Australia, next door, mate, because that's where that particular imagery was born), but the vast majority of movement will happen inside nations, not across them. All this push to the lowlands of recent decades, concentrating so much population in coastal areas, will simply be reversed.

End of the world as we know it?

I think not.

Comments

[ende]

I would add here a potential obsoletion of the mass-transit induced suberbization experienced (at least in the US and much of the West) during the last century, made possibly by the advent of.. well, the internet, to put it plainly.. but also the breaking down of the old 9-to-5, @ the workplace paradigm, and its gradual replacement (where applicable) of the 'work-at-home' paradigm. I wonder if this (the article) could serve as a source of pressure for those rust-belt expatriates to return home, or move elsewhere completely.