Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd
Alexandra Tempus
A few years ago, while visiting a tiny village, I toured a grand old community hall scheduled to be demolished after a historic flood. Across the street, a phantom row of eight buildings had already come down. Next to go was this beloved structure, built with local lumber by the craftsman grandfathers of the people who still lived there. One of the two local officials escorting me had been married here, she told me. There was a plan to repurpose the six soaring arches, the other official said, gazing towards the ceiling. “The other part of it, knocking the rest of it down …” he trailed off, emotionally. “I won’t be in town to see that.”
This village isn’t located on the rapidly eroding Gulf coast, or any coast. It isn’t on the edge of a drought-stricken wildland. It isn’t anywhere typically named as existentially threatened due to the impacts of climate change. Forever altered by floods, the village of Rock Springs, in my home state of Wisconsin, is instead located smack in the middle of what’s often been called a “climate haven”.
As wildfire resculpted the geography of Los Angeles and snow piled up on the levees of New Orleans in early 2025, the question of where US residents could live to avoid climate disaster echoed from sea to shining sea. “The LA-to-NYC Migration Has Begun” became one of New York magazine’s most-read online articles in the weeks after LA’s initial conflagration. The Shade Room, a celebrity gossip blog with an Instagram following that dwarfs that of TMZ, reposted a question that quickly generated 6,500 comments: “Where is the perfect place to live and not worry about natural disasters?”
It’s an issue I’ve thought a lot about in my years reporting on the climate crisis. Following Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in New York City in 2012, walking the obliterated streets of Staten Island and Far Rockaway and Red Hook, interviewing residents who stayed and those who left, I learned up close what climate-driven displacement looked like. Soon I found myself learning from scholars all over the globe about climate migration, and how it mostly plays out internally – inside national borders, not across them.
It was around this time a decade ago that marketing campaigns and media discourse began claiming that portions of the United States were potential climate havens. While media outlets published stories of US residents moving across the country to places like New Hampshire and Buffalo, a cottage industry sprang up to advise stakeholders of all kinds on where to develop, build, insure, invest and move. An ostensibly noble goal, these efforts can fuel the sense that there are places where the wealthy and powerful enough can wall themselves off from danger while the rest of us contend with disaster. Such a concept is not only exclusionary – it’s entirely wrongheaded. Yet it lingers on.
Rock Springs, Wisconsin, was my first stop on a series of cross-country road trips to communities uprooted by the climate crisis, about which I’m writing a book. The journey included towns that had bought plots of land to relocate to after hurricanes, neighborhoods hollowed out by riverine floods, former communities that had burned off the surface of the earth. From the heartland, to the Carolinas, to California and back again, I’ve confronted an enduring truth: there were never any climate havens.
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