Nomad Century - Gaia Vince
Prize winning science writer and broadcaster Gaia Vince has written a landmark work that highlights an aspect of climate change that is not often talked about but needs to be focused on by us all and urgently…. that of human migration away from the parts of the world that are becoming so hot they can no longer sustain life to the cooler North. While here in the UK, we worry about the small boats of refugees coming to our shores, we need to look to the future when, depending on how global heating develops, 1 to 3 billion people will have to move. We see it on our screens already, thousands of Somalian villagers trudging across arid land looking for food and water. Is it commonly known that according to the UN refugees who are fleeing because of climate are not allowed by law to be sent home? Does our Home Office know this?
Gaia says we shall all be affected by climate induced migration whether fleeing our homes or receiving new arrivals. And we need to start preparing. She predicts upheaval for us all during this century but says, 'How we manage this global process and how humanely we treat each other as we migrate, will be key to be whether this century of upheaval proceeds smoothly or with violent conflict and unnecessary deaths.'
Gaia has done her homework. The book is dense with facts. She has travelled to sixty countries doing research. The book starts by giving a worst-case scenario of how hot the Earth is going to get by the end of the century, possibly 3.5 to 4 degrees of warming. She then looks at the parts of the globe that will not sustain life and those that could. Included are excellent diagrams showing the bands of temperatures across the globe and highlighting the areas that will be safe for humanity; that is the far north like Canada, Siberia, Greenland, areas that have been under ice but which with global warming will become liveable. She then comes up with the fantastic idea that cities could be built in these zones that were previously ice bound and human populations could move there. Crazy? Yes. Fantastical? Yes. Visionary? Yes. But with what we are living through, global heating is crazy, the fact that we haven’t tried to stop it is fantastical and maybe it is visionaries like Gaia that we need to show us a solution. She has at least issued a warning that we need to start thinking and planning about where our species is going to survive. She proposes the UN set up a Climate Migration International body.
One message of the book is that migration should be looked on as a solution not a problem. Humanity has always migrated across borders and in fact borders are quite a recent phenomenon. In one of her more idealistic passages, she argues for an abolition of borders. (In our book club we all started to talk about the different parts of the world that our ancestors originally came from. We are a mongrel nation). Migrants, she writes, bring youth, energy and new ideas and wealth to ageing countries.
As Gaia looks at ways to mitigate global heating, she writes extensively about a vast array of geoengineering solutions that she has faith will help. Some are happening now; others are for the future. All are exciting. She has more faith in these developments than in getting millions of people to change their way of life or societies to change their systems. Gaia is on a different page to George Monbiot here.
In her concluding paragraph Gaia compares future migration to the habits we adopted during the pandemic. 'Who would have believed that thousands of us would have voluntarily restricted our movements to within metres of our homes? It is easier to believe that people will migrate thousands of kilometres to reach safety.
'People will move in their millions -right now we have a chance to make it work. This could be a planned, managed, peaceful transition to a safer, fairer world. With international cooperation and regulation, we could and should make the Earth liveable.
‘That has to be worth trying. So, let’s begin.'