I've Been Thinking About "Climate Havens" (encore)

A re-post about some reflections from kayaking in Sweden

Nearly a year ago I traveled to Sweden for a foraging and kayaking trip of a lifetime. It was a dream. I learned a lot on that trip (and realize now I have yet to do any kind of full recap of it here), but one super interesting fact that sent me down a rabbit hole.

I thought I’d send you all a redux of this post as this last week has been a push to both get the kid ready for the school year and finalize a ghostwriting project that is due! With that, enjoy this re-post.

On a recent trip to Sweden, I learned a mind-boggling fact: the land is rising there. Yes, you read that correctly, the land. Not the sea. Not to say that the sea is not also rising there like everywhere else in the world, it’s just that the land is rising faster than the sea in Sweden and Finland.

This fact was dropped into an audio tour my friend, Lindsey, and I were taking of Gamla Stan, the old town of Stockholm. When we heard it, we looked at each other with did-we-hear-that-right puzzlement, paused the recording, and said “the land is rising?!” We agreed we must’ve heard incorrectly and continued with the tour. 

Alas, we had heard correctly as this fact was legitimized by our kayaking guide, Rob, on the first day of our Do The North trip. The reason for the land rise is related to the very same reason that the Sankt Anna Archipelago, where we were kayaking, is made up of 6,000 tiny, beautifully sculpted islands: the release of glaciers and the melting of said glaciers from the last ice age. For 10,000 years, the land underneath where those glaciers were, has been continuously rising as the pressure was slowly releasing. And it still continues to rise.

“We’ll find sometimes that a land bridge between two islands has suddenly formed,” Rob told us, “and two islands suddenly become one.” They have to edit their map of the archipelago every few years to account for these land bridge appearances.

I could not help but ponder if moving to a place like Sweden where it’s already a generally colder climate and the land is actually rising might actually be a way to escape some of the worst of the climate impacts. Of course, I’m not moving to Sweden. But it sounds like I’m not alone in these kinds of ponderings. Not specifically about a move to Sweden, but to “climate havens” in general. In fact, a few days ago, I came across this National Geographic story about the best places in the North to escape the worst climate impacts when it came across my feed.

Of course, if you actually read the story rather than being click-baited by thinking it’s a potential list of climate havens, there’s complexity around the topic. But it made me think that as climate disasters continue to rise, we will see more “climate haven” listicles (Which cities are the best to escape climate disaster?). And as it gets even worse, those might be a bit drearier (Which cities have become overrun by climate refugees?). But at the moment, where we’re still waiting for a major city to be completely underwater, I wonder if this mindset needs to shift. I’m speaking of my own mindset as well. It’s inevitable–in the same way it was so natural for me to think “perhaps we should move here?” But we don’t have to go down that road just yet. (And maybe I’m writing this to remind myself as well!).

To me, this tendency of identifying climate havens or declaring to move where the disasters are less holds the similarities to the people on the left declaring they’d move to Canada if Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Of course, most people making those declarations didn’t. But the threats to do so seemed, to me, an avoidance technique. If things don’t go my way, then I’m leaving, seemed like giving up. Not to say that I wasn’t tempted by the idea as well (I’m very much included in this group I note above). And similar to what I wrote about in last week’s post on Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing? If you’re just going to leave the society you want to be better, how does that actually make said society better? And even so, any American who leaves America is still an American and, thus, beholden to the collective successes and failures said country holds no matter where you are in the world. 

That, I believe, is perhaps even truer when it comes to climate change. Because we will all–and are all–affected by climate change. Not equally, of course, because the way society/capitalism has set it up is that the most vulnerable people will be affected the soonest and the worst. That fact will not change whether you stay where you are or travel to milder climes before the world is knocking on their door. This is something that I need to continuously remind myself as a privileged White person.

If things don’t change, there will be no choice but for many, many people to have to leave their homes for places that won’t be under water. But perhaps before that happens, we can maybe think less about where to go to escape climate change and how to stave it off in the first place.