Photo: iStock
Tin Can Economy | Huddled masses
- Published: January 21, 2025
Mercifully, my sister-in-law is safe.
She lives on the eastern side of Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, which, for now, is shielding her from one of the worst and most devastating wildfires in U.S. history.
They began Tuesday, Jan. 7, when Hurricane-force Santa Ana winds caught a spark and quickly spread the blaze across nearly 40,000 water-starved acres, turning so much of LA into a nightmarish inferno.
At the time I’m writing this, on Jan. 13, the wildfires have claimed the lives of 24 people, forced approximately 180,000 others to evacuate and have destroyed more than 12,000 residences, businesses and schools. Two dozen people are missing, and the infernos created upwards of $250 billion in damage. Those numbers will surely go up with each of my keystrokes.
So much of LA is incomprehensible. Hollywood opulence has been reduced to ash and whole neighborhoods are smoldering ruins. Though the blazes indiscriminately tore through celebrity mansions and lower-income communities, the Associated Press has already surmised that the wildfires will likely leave behind huge disparity in their wake — rendering LA, a notoriously socio-economically unequal city, even more unequal.
The Altadena community, for example, has been an affordable haven for generations of Black and immigrant families avoiding discriminatory housing practices elsewhere. The Eaton fire has almost entirely leveled that area.
The celebrities who lost their homes — including Paris Hilton and Mel Gibson and the like — will surely bounce back, but what of the Altadena residents? Where will they go?
I’d like to think places like Yellow Springs would welcome them with open arms.
I have, after all, met a number of relatively new villagers in recent years who have referred to themselves as “climate refugees.”
One new Yellow Springs family told me not long ago that they were tired of the ongoing threat in California of wildfires, mudslides and earthquakes. Another person, this one from Colorado, said the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire was the final straw; she sought refuge in the less variable, more predictable conditions of Yellow Springs.
Climate migration is nothing new. The International Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates that an annual average of 21.5 million people were forcibly displaced each year by weather-related events — such as floods, storms, wildfires and droughts — between 2008 and 2016.
That figure reached a record 32.6 million in 2022. The Institute for Economics and Peace expects even that to grow to frightening highs in the coming decades: By 2050, a predicted 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally due to climate change and natural disasters.
What we must accept is that 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history, that wildfires are unusual in Southern California in January, that capitalism encourages irresponsible logging and matchbox landscapes, that catastrophic cyclones shouldn’t reach Appalachia, that wildfires are burning hotter and moving faster than ever, that growing coastal storms can carry more moisture, that so many biomes have turned into pressure cookers, and that people on the margins are always the first to die and suffer the brunt of climate collapse.
If we accept all that, then we necessarily must also accept that people will seek refuge where they can — that the demographics of the Midwest will change enormously over our lifetimes.
We saw last fall how our new Haitian neighbors — who themselves sought refuge next door — were treated. Will we make room for a future mass of Floridians whose homes sunk into the sea? Or will they suffer the same hateful, nativist ire?
Like anywhere else in the Midwest, Yellow Springs must prepare for tidal waves of new neighbors. What will our raft look like?
*Tin Can Economy is an occasional column that reflects on object, form and scale. It considers the places and spaces we inhabit, their constituent materials and our relationship to it all. Its author, Reilly Dixon, works in production and as a reporter for the News.
One Response to “Tin Can Economy | Huddled masses”
The Yellow Springs News encourages respectful discussion of this article.
You must login to post a comment.
Don't have a login? Register for a free YSNews.com account.
I look forward to the robust debates my (former) village will have about such matters as dissolving the Tecumseh Land Trust and various conservation easements in order to domicile the flood of ‘climate refugees’ from places like Florida….and perhaps even Martha’s Vineyard? Should make for great theatre.