Interesting essay...of course, like so many things at this point in history, saying "we need to be planful and mindful and organize a global response to this challenge" seems hopelessly naive. Even a coordinated response seems out of reach, much less a peaceful and just one.

To be fair, it's a short essay taking a very long view, and it does acknowledge the problems a bit?
posted by gimonca at 3:57 AM on April 17 [3 favorites]

to the north

“the upsurge of Indigenous environmentalism is one of the great triumphs of recent years. The emergence of many leaders like Watt-Cloutier, and of strong and unified communities behind them, has reshaped the struggle from Standing Rock to the Australian outback… To support the struggles of the Inuit (or of the Native Americans threatened by pipelines, or the Pacific Islanders threatened by rising seas, or of Bangladeshis whose crop land is submerging, or African Americans living amid belching and dangerous refineries) is to stand up against a threat that will take down even the richest and safest—it’s ultimately in everyone’s self-interest.” [the right to be cold, g]
posted by HearHere at 4:46 AM on April 17 [9 favorites]

“ There will inevitably be mistakes and growing pains associated with such approaches. But these efforts will be increasingly important if we are going to manage future land reshuffling to the benefit of societies as a whole, and without systemic conflict.”

Just in having allowed billionaires to happen and proliferate means there is a large pool of people operating entirely out of range and reach of community norms. What it takes to stop them is presently unthinkable for many or most people.
posted by toodleydoodley at 6:32 AM on April 17 [6 favorites]

Thanks, chavenet, for another great post. This article covers so much ground (sorry!) that it's pretty clear the editor had to trim a lot of the details -- which is a little frustrating, but now I want to track down this book, so mission accomplished, I guess.

One of those areas is from this statement, at the end of one section:

While looming northern land reshuffles will catch outsized attention, climate change will also foster internal reshuffles on the land in countries across the globe. That dynamic could be scary and destabilising, but it is also an opportunity. Changing land relationships and migration patterns associated with climate change present a possibility to put land in service of society in ways that have rarely been attempted in human history.

I wish the article had gone on what he means there, just what new ways land could be put in service of society.

This part sounds fascinating, and maybe this is old hat to urban planners, but I'd like to know how this works:

One approach entails a shift toward ‘layered’ property rights. Countries like Mexico and Peru now recognise community territorial claims over large areas of land while also allowing for private property. Members of Mexican communal lands ... can seamlessly and readily identify individual versus communal property within their communities, and recognise the different value and purposes of each.

Finally, this. We tend to assume that some national policies and attitudes are unchanging and unchangeable. But they may not be, and if changed, could have transformative effects:

An influential group of Canadian leaders are already organising around an idea known as the Century Initiative that aims to triple the country’s population by 2100, largely by supercharging immigration.

Canadian MeFites, is that for real, or is the author exaggerating its popularity and likelihood?

Apologies for quoting so much, but its's just a fraction of fascinating ideas in the article. Worth the time to read, I think. And BTW the original Aeon link seems to be free to read; the archive angle may not be needed.
posted by martin q blank at 7:43 AM on April 17 [3 favorites]

Canadian MeFites, is that for real, or is the author exaggerating its popularity and likelihood?

I was baffled by this too as we are aggressively cutting immigration, especially foreign students, right now.
posted by Kitteh at 7:50 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

My guess is, with the upcoming demographic decline, land in the next century on average is going to become *less* valuable, not more.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:29 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

My guess is, with the upcoming demographic decline, land in the next century on average is going to become *less* valuable, not more.


That would be my guess as well. Of course, some small areas it will become more valuable, but the world is pretty big and even the US has lots of land that is very cheap, and contrary to realtor belief we can make more land.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:35 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Many thanks for this chavenet. I am acutely aware of how patterns of land holding and reform in the 20th century underpin and shape politics in East Asia but my focus was time and country specific (such was my academic remit) and I had not had the occasion to think about this as a global, historically persistent and recurrent phenomenon. It is great to have the opportunity now. I look forward to reading the book.
posted by dutchrick at 8:35 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Lots to unpack here, but it's been clear for going on 30 years that the climate crisis is going to create a shift in land desirability.
We are seeing the first wave now, as the wealthy, in reaction to the early stages of the crisis, begin to move. Capitalism will only exaggerate the urgency. Thus Greenland/ Canada 51st state rhetoric.
It's interesting to me how the conservative elite have anticipated the next phase (an involuntary migration of the poor as climate makes parts of the globe uninhabitable).
As bungling as 47 can seem, the powers behind the throne are positioning themselves to gobble up the north as it becomes the climate/agriculture refuge of the next century. all the while blockading the poor from joining them.
Just another shitty detail of how the timeline took a nosedive when they stole the presidency form Al Gore.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:47 AM on April 17 [6 favorites]

As bungling as 47 can seem, the powers behind the throne are positioning themselves to gobble up the north as it becomes the climate/agriculture refuge of the next century.

No, they’re just malicious idiots; there’s no genius behind the throne. They do things that don’t make sense because they don’t understand how anything works. Tariffs are a perfect example.

With world demographic trends, people are going to be worth more than land, and the US isn’t going to make enough new people on its own. A functional immigration system would create a path for high wealth / low birth rate countries to integrate immigrants into their societies with minimal disruption, filling the lower skill jobs with folks happy to take them, and capturing the high skill immigrants necessary to stay globally competitive.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:55 AM on April 17 [6 favorites]

As bungling as 47 can seem, the powers behind the throne are positioning themselves to gobble up the north as it becomes the climate/agriculture refuge of the next century.

Maybe very late next century. I don't think they are positioning themselves for land plays 200+ years from now. I'm not exactly a 'science will save us' guy, but a lot of agricultural innovation will occur over that time period.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:02 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

No, they’re just malicious idiots; there’s no genius behind the throne. They do things that don’t make sense because they don’t understand how anything works. Tariffs are a perfect example.

With world demographic trends, people are going to be worth more than land, and the US isn’t going to make enough new people on its own. A functional immigration system would create a path for high wealth / low birth rate countries to integrate immigrants into their societies with minimal disruption, filling the lower skill jobs with folks happy to take them, and capturing the high skill immigrants necessary to stay globally competitive.

First of all, it's pretty much a set-piece They're Evil Geniuses/No They're Destructive Idiots dichotomy we're seeing lately, since the end of Trump I at least, and I wonder if we should worry more about real impacts regardless of the extent to which these impacts are intentional or incidental. I don't care if these assholes know what they're doing if I'm deported and getting tortured somewhere overseas.

Second: the problem with your latter statement is it's still largely a shit solution. Maybe that's the best we'll have as we proceed deeper into the 21st century and things get worse? But it's a type of theft, it's hard to differentiate this from the colonialism of earlier centuries: we contribute to circumstances in other countries such that professionals are looking to leave those countries, so we benefit from e.g. doctors and IT people while their points of origin just keep languishing.

The ship has sailed in Canada and it makes sense to find the most positive things in a society where, outside of Indigenous peoples, we are all settlers. I guess I am wondering about the framing: "stay globally competitive" like, that Line Goes Up way of thinking is really part of the problem, no?
posted by ginger.beef at 9:26 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

But it's a type of theft, it's hard to differentiate this from the colonialism of earlier centuries

I mean, one is voluntary, the other is compelled. That's a pretty big difference. I don't believe people should required to spend their lives in their country of birth if they wish to live elsewhere.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:51 AM on April 17 [2 favorites]

I won't derail further, I agree with you re: freedom of movement, I'm just noting that history and the actions of nations often play a big role in what ultimately motivates others to leave their country of origin

A lot of global movement of populations has nothing to do with what people want, it's arising from much more desperate imperatives. Southward migrations of peoples up to the United States, for example: there is history that leads to these decisions, some people are looking to flee instability and hope to find relative safety to live and raise families, same as it always was. We could ask: what are reasons for the instability?
posted by ginger.beef at 10:02 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

I have thought for a long time that the US right in some ways takes climate change more seriously than the left. They know it is coming. They just don't believe it will be possible to manage it collectively for everyone's benefit and would rather make sure they get in to steal all the government assets now, for instance our public lands in the national park system, while they are still beautiful and untouched and worth stealing.

Basically, it's all going to shit, so no use playing along with the rest of society. No use funding FEMA to continually rebuild after more and worse storms. No use creating a properous society that works for everyone, climate change will eventually destroy all of that so might as well get out ahead and destroy it ourselves first.

Trump himself is a moron, he definitely doesn't understand any of this. Someone else whispered in his ear about Canada and Greenland. He's screwed it all up by being such an unstable narcissist and easy mark for manipulation by foreign actors; there's no actual way the US will be strong enough to take either Canada or Greenland especially as his people keep weakening the country further in their zeal to crush any parts of society that might oppose them so they can rule unopposed over the wreckage.

Anyway. Just hope the example of the US does push the rest of the world in a more positive direction. Since it's clear what giving too much power to destructive billionaires is doing over here.

(Warning more US centric stuff ahead:)

Times of great change are also times of great opportunity, but you have to thread the needle. There was a lot of hope at the beginning of COVID that we could use the shock to rethink how society should be structured and create a permanent stronger welfare state. Instead we ended up with an even more extreme concentration of power.

In the aftermath of COVID, we had the chance to permanently strengthen workers rights as the reduction in the workforce through death or retirement gave remaining workers more bargaining power. Instead the immigration policies Biden et al pursued to unfuck the supply chain (which to be clear I support and think were effective) turbocharged and already extant backlash that will fuck over workers even more.

I'm not saying it always gets worse, by the way. I'm saying it matters a great deal who's in change and how they choose to respond. At least in the short term.

But hey, if Trump's economic policies lead to a worldwide recession, and there's no resulting world war, at least CO2 emissions will go down. Silver linings.
posted by subdee at 11:03 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

With world demographic trends, people are going to be worth more than land, and the US isn’t going to make enough new people on its own.

I find this population doomerism to be interesting, and a subject worth studying, as I admit I haven't been following the reasoning behind it.
There were 3.5 billion people on the plane when i was a kid, and there are over 8 billion now, a number that isn't going down yet. The world ran just fine on 3.5 billion. Automation and agricultural innovation have made a world where we can, at the same time, potentially work less and feed more. I fail, thus far, to see the doom in returning to a population south of, say 7 billion.
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:20 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

how generous of you... are you going to kill the extra billion yourself or just watch on pay per view?
posted by kokaku at 11:25 AM on April 17

Honestly all I'm I'm talking about is the doomerism about lower birth rates in the northern hemisphere. Your read seems a bit uncharitable.
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:28 AM on April 17 [3 favorites]

There were 3.5 billion people on the plane when i was a kid, and there are over 8 billion now, a number that isn't going down yet. The world ran just fine on 3.5 billion.

At the risk of further derail, the shape of that 3.5B matters. If they're all old, need care, and can't work, that's a problem.
posted by leotrotsky at 12:42 PM on April 17

I'm reminded of my visit to the Louis Riel House in Winnipeg, where I learned about the details of the North-West Rebellion.
posted by gimonca at 12:53 PM on April 17

No need to worry at all if climate change reduces the equatorial band to a desert too hot and dry to grow crops, as we can just move all that north, right?

So, basically most crops need ten hours per day of sunlight to grow. That's a loose rule of thumb. With less than ten hours they will live but they are likely to stop developing entirely, and will not fruit or flower or ripen.

Compare dates when day length is less than 10 hours in several US cities:

Location Dates When Day Length is Under 10 Hr

Atlanta, Georgia December 8 — January 4
Washington, DC November 19 — January 26
New York, New York November 14 — January 30
Portland, Maine November 8 — February 4

The farther north you go, regardless of what temperature it actually is, the fewer hours of daylight and the shorter the growing season. Unfortunately, I couldn't find that data on number of days with less than ten hours of sunlight for Canadian cities. But I think my little table here will show the trend I am mentioning. The growing season up here gets shorter and shorter the farther north you go.

The problem with cultivating the Canadian north isn't just temperature. It's sunlight. That's why they try to grow cucumbers in greenhouse up north - even with the protection of a green house, cucumbers are one of the very few plants that can be successfully grown without requiring more daylight.

Not only are there less sunlight hours to grow food up north, but if you actually look at a globe you'll see that there is a lot less land at the 60* parallel than there is at the 40*. There isn't remotely enough surface area that gets sunlight for us to move even a quarter of the world's agriculture into the north, even assuming that you can figure out how to provide top soil in areas that have never had top soil because they never had the decaying biomass to create it

We are not moving all the agriculture in North America to Canada. It's just not feasible.
posted by Jane the Brown at 1:36 PM on April 17 [4 favorites]

Anastassia Makarieva argues that Russia's enormous forests contribute enormously to the himalayan precipitation that drives most Asian rivers (via the biotic pump effect), so humans moving there and developing Russia could destroy the rivers upon which like half the population depend.

The Amazon is going dry. In one parched corner, a desperate wait for water is only just beginning.

Ideally, human populations should not be allowed to increase in Russia, Canada, Greenland, Alaska, etc, but those regions have agressive development policies unfortunately.

We do not exactly know how agriculture shall change up north, but likely they remain extremely cold for a substancial portion of the year, which limits perennials and so growth could demand industrial-ish farming. At the same time hotter places can do incredible things using wiser permaculture techniques.

Also, those really northern lands might never "feel nicer" than somewhat warmer places do, assuming you've air conditioning in the hotter places. You could always freeze to death without heating up north, maybe that never changes. At some point, you'd risk death from heat stroke in much of the tropics, unless you have air conditioning, but air conditioning could be powered by solar, while northern places shall always have more limited energy. Ain't so clear a northward migration makes sense.

“We know unequivocally that when you grow food at elevated CO2 levels in fields, it becomes less nutritious”
posted by jeffburdges at 1:51 PM on April 17 [1 favorite]

As for population..

We've reasonable guestimates cited by Will Steffen that +4°C reduces the earth's maximum carrying capacity to roughly one billion humans, but other planetary boundaries have bigger risk margins, so this number could wind up much lower.

We could probably decline to 1 billion by 2100-ish in a relatively peaceful way, provided current downward birthrate trends accelerate, including in Africa. Corey Bradshaw was so far the most informative commenter on this, incuding that population decline might not be stable. In particular, the billionaires could figure out that increasing infant mortality may increase birthrates more.

It's 100% clear the population decline shall benefit the working classes, at least relatively speaking given maybe our ecological damage worsens their lives more, because of inherent competition within social classes. The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel indicates that population decline favors workers too.

"For [solving] immiseration, population decline is an unvarnished good, because it reduces the supply of labor" - Peter Turchin, TGS 169 &t=49ms
posted by jeffburdges at 1:57 PM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Around carrying capacity declining, agriculture and civilization emerged because the holocene provided an anomalously stable climate. We've the technologies like irrigation, green houses, etc that permit doing more under less stable climates now, but agricultural yields should decline significantly, just from the increasingly eratic climate, even ignoring the shorter growing season, harsher winters or summers, decreased nutritional yield, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:22 PM on April 17

An influential group of Canadian leaders are already organising around an idea known as the Century Initiative that aims to triple the country’s population by 2100, largely by supercharging immigration.

Canadian MeFites, is that for real, or is the author exaggerating its popularity and likelihood?

I was baffled by this too as we are aggressively cutting immigration, especially foreign students, right now.

My impression, and I have only moved back to Canada a year ago so I may be off base, but it's that there are Canadian leaders who are into the idea of doubling or tripling our population, but also we have an entire political party (at least two actually) actively hostile to immigration.

We have a huge housing problem so Trudeau stepped back immigration targets over the next 3 years last October. If we get a Conservative government at the end of this month, the stepdown of immigration targets will certainly continue. If Carney stays in as PM, who knows, maybe if he can pull off building half a million units a year like I've read he wants to do, we might increase immigration targets again.

I will say though, even our reduced targets are higher (per capita) than immigration in the US under Biden. Almost 2.6 million people legally immigrated to the US in 2022, while Canada's target then, with 1/10th the population, was between 360,000 and 445,000 new PRs in 2022.

We'll admit 673,650 temporary residents (temp workers and students combined, roughly half and half) in 2025, 516,600 in 2026 and 543,600 in 2027; and we'll allow 395,000 new permanent residents (of which about 40% are temp workers and students already in the country) in 2025, 380,000 for 2026 (don't know percentages but same deal, people who are already here often get preference), and 365,000 in 2027.

To be comparable per capita, the US would have to admit an extra 1 million people, or 38% more, to match the lowest of these numbers (2027's).

Government statements about these plans is full of talk about "support the alignment of immigration with labour market needs and to help alleviate the existing pressures on Canada’s domestic systems" and the like. We're explicitly not letting people in just because we're so nice.

My partner just went through his PR application, and got it in the autumn, on a spousal, but as an American with job history related to engineering they might have fast-tracked him (he got it months earlier than we expected, and if that's what happened, it was a good call, since he's now actively drawing blueprints for new apartment buildings). He's never met a stranger, so every time we meet another Canadian immigrant he soon knows their entire life story, and having been an immigrant in the US, my impression is that Canada is far more friendly to immigrants while still being kind of shitty in many colonialist, exploitative ways (this is more of an indictment of how awful the US was even before recent events, if anything).
posted by joannemerriam at 2:40 PM on April 17 [3 favorites]

Every spot on a spherical Earth gets daylight half the year. Same number of sunlight hours for all. They’re just more seasonal as you approach the poles. Some crops are fine with this.

Net primary production, NPP, is in a triangle of daylight, and not-too-much-not-too-little water, and not-too-much-not-too-little heat.

Moving ecologies/agriculture is nearly unthinkable, but this is where to start.
posted by clew at 3:32 PM on April 17 [2 favorites]

Interesting article, thank you! I'd just add that the future lies to the South, as well. We're thinking of buying some land in Chiloé.
posted by signal at 3:56 PM on April 17

At higher latitudes, sunlight must pass further through the atomosphere, which scatters/filters some wavelengths. In particular, ultraviolet impacts some phytochemical synthesis, like impacting nutrition, but not photosynthesis. Also, climage change alters the "color" of sunlight in several ways.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:58 PM on April 17

So how many cubic tons of the greenhouse gas methane is locked at present in the permafrost? Will its release put the climate change pedal to the metal?
posted by y2karl at 4:00 PM on April 17 [2 favorites]

Also the angle of incidence at higher lattitudes means the sunlight is weaker, regardless of how many hours of it you have.
posted by signal at 4:01 PM on April 17

And, there just isn't at much land at higher latitudes. You're notionally, stripping off habitable rings near the equator, which are nearly the entire earth's circumference, and replacing them with much smaller rings at higher latitudes. So: less land, fewer hours of light, shittier light during those hours, and yes, a huge amount of methane release.

"We'll all just move north lol" is just hideously blinkered. Almost everybody is going to die. On an incredibly short timescale. And it's an open question whether the incredible rapidity of the implosion will suck any potential survivors down with it, because it's probably going to get violent on top of being rapid.
posted by notoriety public at 4:40 PM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Net primary production, NPP, is in a triangle of daylight, and not-too-much-not-too-little water, and not-too-much-not-too-little heat.

From the “about this dataset” section of that:

Because carbon dioxide gas helps to warm our world, scientists want to better understand where carbon dioxide comes from and where it goes

I’m imagining someone frantically wordsmithing what that said six months ago into something that doesn’t trigger the Wrath of DOGE.
posted by skyscraper at 5:26 PM on April 17 [1 favorite]

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