We were only a few hours’ drive north of the California-Oregon border when I began to feel the pangs of survivor’s guilt. It was mid-August, and the news from back home was no good. We had busted out of the San Francisco Bay Area just as the heat wave began to sizzle California, and as we drove north through wine country, the temperature gauge in our car said it was 108 degrees outside. Days later, a freak electric storm swung across the state, sparking hundreds of fires. Some of our favorite places were burning: the forested mountains around Santa Cruz and the oak woodlands west of Davis, where we had spent many summer afternoons lounging on the banks of Putah Creek. Smoke was already beginning to choke our friends and former neighbors. “You got out just in time,” a buddy texted. “California is imploding.”

The Oregon coast felt, at that time, like a whole new world. As we threaded our way up Highway 101, the sky was cool and gray, and by evening a thick fog had turned into a spitting rain. The smoke and fires might as well have been on another planet. The rain was a relief, but I couldn’t shake a certain shame. I felt bad about our good fortune, about leaving our community behind to suffer.

I had lived in California for more than 20 years, and my family’s long-planned departure was supposed to be an adventure of sorts, an opportunity to start a new life for ourselves in the Pacific Northwest. For months, we had been looking forward to the move with a mix of trepidation and excitement, the swirl of emotions common to any emigrant: nostalgia for the life we had built, spiked with the thrill of surprising horizons. But now, as grim news piled up in our newsfeeds, the move had taken on a sour taste.

We weren’t merely heading toward a new home in another state. With a disaster unfolding behind us, we were fleeing.

*

In this century, millions of Americans will be forced to move from their homes due to climate chaos. Rising temperatures, combined with suffocating humidity, will make sections of the South and Midwest virtually uninhabitable for good chunks of each year. Wildfires in the West will displace others. As many as 13 million people will have to retreat from the coasts because of rising sea levels. In a recent investigation for the New York Times Magazine, Pro Publica’s Abrahm Lustgarten reports that “the number of Americans who might move … could easily be tens of millions”—a figure that would dwarf the Great Migration of the 20^th century, when Blacks left the South en masse for the North and West.

“Was it finally time to leave [California] for good?” Lustgarten asks himself as he witnesses the heat and fires grow in strength. He later writes, “The [migration] wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of the broader, wealthier parts of the population.”

I’d been mulling Lustgarten’s departure question for years already, and eventually my partner, Nell, and I came to the conclusion that, Yes, it’s time to leave. It’s with a mix of sadness, anger, and—as I said—guilt that I realize that my family and I are on the crest of the first wave of American climate migrants. 

I should be clear that climate chaos isn’t the only reason that my little family decided to leave California for the greener precincts of the Pacific Northwest. For the most part, we packed up and split for the same reasons that hundreds of thousands of other people are leaving the Golden State. California—and the Bay Area in particular—is crushingly expensive. Nell and I never managed to buy a home, and by the late teens, as we saw tiny bungalows in our Oakland neighborhood routinely sell for a million bucks, it had become obvious that we were priced out. We had all the other typical gripes. We were tired of the traffic, tired of constantly rushing, tired of watching the free-love spirit we had come for sputter into the profit-seeking ethos of Silicon Valley. San Francisco, the magnet that had brought me to California in the late 1990s, had already been pronounced dead a good dozen times. The city of the Beats and the Hippies had become little more than a playground for tech bros.

For a number of years, we had been planning to make a jump northward to Bellingham, Washington, a quaint college town that’s closer to Vancouver, BC, than it is Seattle. Bellingham promised affordable real estate, a slower pace of life, and close contact with sea and forest. Most important, Nell’s parents live there, and we were eager for our daughter to grow up with her grandparents. It was still a tough decision, to leave our community of 20 years and to ditch the cities and neighborhoods that were like old friends. In the end, though, we decided to trade community for family and exchange diverse human cultures for access to wild nature. 

But I’d be lying if I were to say that climate change wasn’t a key factor in our decision making. For years now, I’ve felt a primal urge to get the hell out of California. “Go north,” a voice in my head has been whispering, urging me to get to someplace that will be more resilient to the shocks of climate chaos, a place that, above all, will be better for my five-year-old daughter in this hot and threatening century.

Go north. If our California departure were solely about being closer to family, then we could have just as easily headed to Arizona. I was born and raised in the state, and my parents still live there. But raising my daughter in Phoenix? Yeah, well, nope. This summer, the city experienced a living hell of 50-plus days with temperatures above 110 degrees. The “normal” late season monsoon rains never came. My mom tells me the summer was “just awful.”

If my partner and I were going to leave behind all of our friends, it was going to be for a place better endowed with natural assets to cope with climate chaos. A place that is cool, green, and watered.

*

Let’s be clear: I’m immensely privileged to make a climate move on my own terms. I know how lucky I am to be able to relocate in comfort. My family and I are not climate refugees like the farmers in Central America who are being driven to the United States by the drought gripping the countryside there. Nor are we climate migrant like, say, the Marshall Islanders who are coming to the United States as sea level rise increasingly renders their homeland uninhabitable. We’re not among the thousands of families in the West who have had their homes burn down in recent years. 

Ours was a carefully managed retreat. We packed up four (four!) U-Haul pods and had them whisked nearly a thousand miles way. Then we turned the relocation into a pandemic road trip. We stuffed the Prius with our camping gear, our three favorite house plants, and a stacked bike rack, and along the way hit a string of forests, beaches, and rivers.  

During all my time in California, I was never in immediate danger from climate chaos. Yet even living behind the urban shield of freeways and housing developments, the California fires of recent years have been terrifying. The smoke storms choke the lungs and clench the mind. In many parts of the West, late summer and early fall are now a claustrophobic season, horizons reduced to ash and the sun turned into a hot, distant penny in the sky. Take a breath and you are, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, “inhaling our forests.… And not just our forests: homes, photo albums, wedding dresses, stuffed animals … salamanders, owls, lichens … turned by fire into ashes.” 

It wasn’t really the fires, though, that drove me from California. No, it was the specter of drought—the fires’ flinty handmaiden.

Those dry winters between 2011 and 2016 were grim. According to the US Drought Monitor, some parts of California were in a state of drought for 376 weeks—the longest dry spell in state history. In the winter of 2013–14, the Nor Cal hills that are normally emerald-green were a shade of brown bordering on gray well into February. In January 2015, not a single drop of rain fell in the Bay Area, the first January such a thing had happened since recordkeeping began during the Gold Rush. At that time, I wrote, “without any rain or the typical cold winter winds, a thick haze developed over the bay and stuck around for weeks … an orange miasma chocked the view from the Berkeley Hills to the Golden Gate.”

If a wildfire terrifies with a speed and force that delivers a jolt of adrenaline, a drought beats you down with a sluggish persistence that brings on low-grade anxiety. If you lived in California during the last decade, you may know what I’m talking about. As the drought years stretched on one after the other, a foreboding settled over California. State water managers, county and municipal officials, and climatologists warned about a new normal of chronic water scarcity. To me, at least, California began to feel increasingly brittle and old, the landscape used up and tired. It seemed like the state’s future was shriveling before my eyes.

As an urban farmer, I struggled with how to keep growing food with ever less water. As an amateur naturalist and a lover of wild nature, I grieved. At the nadir of the water famine, I was haunted by the work of soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause, who had been recording the natural sounds (the” biophony,” he calls it) of Sugarloaf Mountain, located southeast of the town of Napa. Krause’s recordings got quieter and quieter as the birdlife began to diminish. The water dried up and the California wildlands went silent. 

Eventually, the rains returned. The winter of 2016–17 was a doozy, with rainfall so heavy it almost collapsed the Oroville Dam. But I found that, even in the wet years, I couldn’t shake my precipitation anxiety. It was like I had some kind of meteorological PTSD. In the fall, I found myself obsessively checking NOAA to track the latest forecasts about possible incoming storms. In the wintertime, I would visit NOAA’s Northern California Observed Precipitation Map again and again to monitor every rain and snow event.

My knowledge of climate change projections for California (an occupational hazard) made the anxiety worse. By the end of this century, the Sierra Nevada snowpack, the source of most of the state’s water, is supposed to decline by anywhere from 50 to 65 percent compared with historical averages. Spring precipitation will likely drop off, further lengthening the fire season. Precipitation as a whole will likely decrease by at least 20 percent, making severe summer droughts more likely. The California dream will slowly but surely evaporate.

California, it seemed, had reached a crossroads—and so had I. I decided to make a retreat and head northward. With this year’s fires exploding just as we hit the road, it seemed like prescience was its own form of privilege.

*

Privilege may cushion the blows, but it can never offer total protection. One can retreat from the most climate-ravaged places, but there is no escaping the effects of global warming. In this human age of the Anthropocene, there is no perfect refuge, no true "away."    

Whatcom County, Washington—where I now live—is the most northern corner of the Pacific Northwest, the place where you catch the boat to Alaska. And while it may in many ways be more climate change resilient than the Sonoran Desert where I was born or semi-arid California where I’ve lived nearly all my adult life, this place isn’t immune to climate shocks.

Mount Baker, Washington | Photo by Anne08/iStock

It burns here too. The summer of 2015 was a real scorcher. The ferns were flattened, as if they’d been hit with a clothes iron, and that year fires even popped up in the Olympic Peninsula rainforest. I remember all too well the summer of 2017, when Washington and British Columbia were ablaze and I watched a Macbeth-red moon slip into the Salish Sea. In 2018, the fires in BC were so bad that they clouded Spokane with a hazardous haze for weeks; one local launched a crowd-funding campaign to erect giant fans to blow the smoke back across the border. These days, I’m trying to figure out how best to have a conversation about defensible space with Nell’s parents, who own a wooded place on the edge of town.

And if it’s not fires, well then, it’ll be floods. The New York Times recently published a county-by-county map of climate risks. Whatcom County is a relatively light shade of jeopardy. We are, however, in danger of extreme rainfall. “Whatcom” is an Anglicization of a phrase from one of the area’s Indigenous nations, the Lummi: Xwotʼqo, meaning “noisy waters.” What will happen to the Nooksack River when the rains come warm and fierce and the glaciers on Mount Baker (Kulshan to the local Native peoples) begin to melt in earnest? It’ll be a disaster.

Too much water or too little. Fire or floods. In the epoch of climate chaos, there will be dangers anyplace you go. But some places are better than others. I’ve just come to the conclusion that California is no longer one of those better places. 

*

I retreated, but there’s no way I’m surrendering.

That’s because climate resilience is not measured by ecological attributes alone. The truest test of climate resilience is the strength of human communities. The places best poised to cope with climate-related disasters will be those that are aware of the threats on the horizon, that have equipped themselves for the worst, that have established networks of mutual aid, and, above all, an ethic of solidarity. The most effective prepping isn’t just a family affair; being prepared is a collective endeavor.

No matter where you live or what type of climate threat your community may be confronting, the work of adapting to a hotter, drier, wetter, more-storm-tossed planet will look largely the same. It will involve building public works of sustainability: renewable energy grids, electrified and affordable mass transit, regionalized food networks, and the kind of infrastructure that copies the rhythms of natural systems. Above all, climate adaptation will rest on encouraging a spirit of cooperation. Neighborliness, kindness, generosity, charity, equity, and mutual respect: Without those social assets, all the other climate adaptations may not even be possible.

So even though I’ve retreated from California, I’m committed to digging into the new ground here in Cascadia. I want to become native to place and learn the names and routes of the creeks and rivers, all the flora and fauna, and the histories of this landscape. I need to get to know my neighbors, to find ways to contribute to the local organizations and networks working for sustainability and justice.

And as someone on the crest of the coming wave of climate migration, I have another responsibility: to help prepare my new neighbors and friends for the fact that many other climate emigrants will eventually be coming this way. Toward the end of his article, Abrahm Lustgarten imagines how the impending climate migrations will transform the destination locations. “Cities like Detroit, Rochester, Buffalo, and Milwaukee will see a renaissance,” he writes. There will be a “breadbasket along the Canadian border” and a “megalopolis of Seattle, which by then has nearly merged with Vancouver to its north.”

That Seattle megalopolis is no cli-fi fantasy. Today, about 4.1 million people live in the greater Seattle region. It’s forecast that by 2050 an additional 1.8 million people will move to the region. All of those people are going to have to fit somewhere, and I think it’s fair to say that many longtime residents of Bellingham and Whatcom County hope it won’t be here. They like the chill, mid-size city vibe and the fact that it’s a short drive to the open space of farm fields and pastures and the national forests and seashores just beyond that. At a recent after-school pickup, I met another dad, and it came up in conversation that I had just arrived from California. His response? “Just don’t tell your friends back home.”  

For those communities that are likely to become the destinations of climate migrants, hospitality may well prove the toughest test of solidarity. Climate migration is just a trickle now, but it will eventually swell to a flood. The people are already on their way, their numbers will only get larger, and many will arrive with far fewer resources than my family brought with us.

Openness is likely to be one of the most important climate change adaptations. Even in the midst of their own catastrophes, communities will be asked to show generosity to the newcomers, to remember that ancient, Christian prescription: Welcome the stranger.