We need a 21st Century Homesteading Act to help Americans displaced by climate change

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Good afternoon from cloudy Washington, where my local library is being renovated and my heart is breaking as we continue to get more information about the devastation Hurricane Helene has wrought across the South and Appalachia in the United States.

Dozens of people are dead, millions remain without power, and many more Americans face challenging days ahead after homes and businesses were washed away or destroyed.

Natural disasters like this always show us the best and worst of our fellow Americans, from the helpers and healers who first respond during the peak of the emergency to the community leaders who remain to aid console, and rebuild when federal assistance ends and national attention moves on.

As we awaken to the scope of the historic disaster people have experienced in the wake of Hurricane Helene, my hope is that it stimulates more national dialogue about what’s yet to come, and what has come before.

Tonight, Americans are still being rescued, no matter what god they do or do not worship, which state they live in, which party they vote for, or who they love. Tomorrow, FEMA and state and local workers will keep trying to reach people isolated and trapped, calling for help. That’s as it should be.

One of the worst experiences I’ve had in modern American history was seeing disaster response in Puerto Rico and pandemic response across the United States politicized by the last administration. That was a break not just in our democratic norms but the democratic compact itself. We are all Americans, not red states or blue states.

It’s been profoundly good to see this White House declare emergencies and surge responders and aid to every state and territory in our union, regardless of what the governor has said about the president or how the Americans in need there cast their votes.

What has been harder to watch is the inability of a hyperpower to get us all to focus on bigger systemic thinking based on a shared collective fact about what climate change will mean for communities across a sprawling nation, including those far from the coasts where hurricanes have spent their wrath.

A great nation would have a world-class immigration system for legal immigrants seeking refuge & opportunity.

Safe, efficient, understandable & humane. Apply for asylum, find refuge.

Enter illegally, get deported.

Serve in our military, earn citizenship.

Get a PhD, get a green card. And so on.

Natural disasters will lead to growing “temporary” evacuations that become semi-permanent nomadism for Americans, who’ll compete for attention & resources with climate refugees streaming north from fallen states.

The costs of Congressional inaction on immigration reform in 2024 will be dire, as an overloaded system breaks down.

Millions of people are now seeking refuge from war, crime, & natural disasters. Climate change will lead to tens of millions of people not just yearning to breathe free, but to survive, fleeing uninhabitable regions.

We need leaders to fix systems, now.

Climate change is already here, but its societal impacts are not evenly distributed.

The habitable zones of Earth and North America are already shifting.

Fresh water is already a geostrategic resource.

Managed retreat from coastal zones & burns could quickly shift to endless crises as hurricanes & fires displace people with nowhere to go. 

The US government should be preparing the American people to lose cellphone, Internet access, or GPS – and to anticipate a century of climate refugees migrating north.

If the United States government does not shift from reactive response to climate disasters like the only unfolding across the South and Appalachia this weekend, the people we entrusted with being guardians of our nation will have failed us.

A “21st Century Homesteading Act of 2030” could resettle the millions of Americans who will be increasingly were displaced from flooded cities in Florida, the Gulf Coast, and drought-wracked communities across the Southwest to habitable zones further north, from emptied midwestern towns to the neighborhoods of Detroit. 

Resettle people with farms, solar panels, wind turbines, etrucks, and the investment of hope that comes from a government of the people that believes in the capacity of Americans to adapt, improvise and overcome what lies ahead, instead of failing to respond as our collective future arrives in wildfires, floods, droughts, and windstorms. 

I hold out less hope about action now than I did a decade ago, despite the passage of a mammoth bills that will help shore up infrastucture and invest in greener energy sources and distribution, but I haven’t given up.

I trust you won’t, either. And if you can, please help your fellow Americans tonight, in whatever way you are able. Stay safe and remember that we are all in this together.