Are Americans Lemmings When It Comes to Their Behaviour in the Face of Climate Change?

The noun lemming has two meanings. It describes a small Arctic rodent but also refers to people who unthinkingly join mass movements heading for destruction. When it comes to American mass behaviour I am referring to the latter. Why? Because when you look at the changing demographics of the United States, lemmings aptly describe settlement trends.

As I was reading the April 2nd issue of The Economist (I’m way behind in tackling back issues of that magazine), it provided an interesting report on the State of Florida describing its many contradictions. Florida is the fastest growing state by population. Yet it faces freshwater, sea-level rise and extreme weather threats from climate change. These threats are immediate. Yet Americans are migrating like lemmings to the Sunshine State with its population growing by 15% in the last decade, twice as fast as the rest of the country. It now has more people than New York State and is projected to reach 30 million by 2040.

Where are these new Floridians finding homes? The vast majority are residing in the southern half of the state at or near coastlines with the major exception being Orlando where Disneyworld has turned Florida swampland into an area of burgeoning subdivisions.

The other states also attracting American lemmings are in the south and southwest running from Texas through to California. They too, like Florida, face immediate climate-change-related threats. But that isn’t stopping American lemmings from marching southward in increasing numbers largely to seek the sunshine and warmth that characterizes these areas. It is understandable, after all, birds and many other animals including butterflies migrate seasonally for the same reason. But unlike other fauna, Americans going south have no intention of returning to the north each spring and summer. They are rooted now in subdivisions close to the ocean along coastlines or on properties carved from increasingly marginally sustainable land.

The story of the lemming is a myth. They don’t jump off cliffs en masse But it appears that Americans are behaving like the lemmings in myths, piling into areas of the country that are already experiencing climate change at an accelerating rate. Coincidentally, with the exception of California, these regions of the country are the ones governed by politicians who appear indifferent to the imminent threat.

In recent years Scientific American and many other publications have published the results of research showing the growing threat to America’s coastlines from rising sea levels and extreme weather events. One of those published studies projects an area the size of Connecticut will be submerged by 2050 with property worth $35 billion today permanently lost. Coincidentally the areas most at risk lie in the southern United States from North Carolina’s Outer Banks to the Florida Keys, and along the Gulf of Mexico coast from Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. In the State of Louisiana alone, an area the size of New Hampshire will be permanently inundated. And in Southern Florida, the great attractor of American migration, the cities of Miami and Fort Lauderdale will need to deal not only with a growing population, but as well, how to adapt and survive rising ocean water levels, diminishing freshwater groundwater sources, and extreme summer heat.

Are American lemmings prepared to pay the price as vanishing properties shrink the property tax base that today is the primary support for local governments? Will the states and federal governments constantly have to bail out those marching south and to the sea? One can only imagine as losses grow as we approach mid-century and beyond, that there will be a point in time when the jumping off the cliff myth will become a reality.