How can you move away from a place you call home — even when your home has been destroyed?
 | By Eliza Barclay Climate Editor, Opinion |
If you, like me, shudder at the thought of seeing your neighbors stranded on their rooftops or losing your precious possessions in a flood caused by a Gulf Coast hurricane made more intense by climate change, then you, like me, may have wondered why people who live in highly hurricane- and flood-prone communities don't relocate to safer, higher ground. |
Yet when you ask some Houston residents, for example, whose neighborhoods were pummeled five years ago by Hurricane Harvey and have experienced intense bouts of flooding since then, why they haven't sold their homes, you learn something about the power of place. |
In March, I traveled to Houston for the Society of Environmental Journalists conference and met residents of Meyerland, a neighborhood next to a bayou that overflows in heavy rain. They told me about three floods, including Harvey, that destroyed the first floors of their homes. They also told me why they were determined to stay in Meyerland for the rest of their lives. They mentioned their churches and their neighbors and, most of all, a high quality of life — defined by warm weather, friendliness and familiarity — that they wouldn't trade for anything. |
These stories were a reason I was drawn to the research of the sociologists Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris, whose guest essay this week offers deep insight into why many Americans who stand to bear the worst impacts of climate change in the coming years aren't considering moving at all. While the idea of managed retreat — in which communities, with some government support, relocate to a safer place — may make sense to scholars and planners worried about rising costs of disasters, hardly any of the residents of the flood-prone Houston community of Friendswood interviewed by Rhodes and Besbris for their new book had plans for it. Why? The reasons the writers offer are fascinating and reveal a major challenge for how we adapt to climate change in the coming years. |
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