TITLE:
Habitable Land Will Soon Become the World’s Scarcest Resource: Why Appalachia Should Choose Climate Change Havens over Millionaire Estates and Golf Courses
AUTHORS:
Elizabeth C. Hirschman, Devonte Booth, Tzu-Wei Huang, Kamryn Livingston, Kobe McReynolds, Rachel Six, Logan Smith, Olivia Toomer
KEYWORDS:
Climate Change, Appalachia, Habitable Land, Climate Change Haven Communities, Two-Caste Economic System, Migration, Ice Age Analogies
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Environmental Protection,
Vol.15 No.6,
June
25,
2024
ABSTRACT: This research advocates for the construction of Climate Change Haven Communities across the Appalachian Region. The proposed development plan can be extended to the northern tier states across the US and also to the northern and mountainous regions of Europe and Asia. We present an analogy to the earlier climate change period of the Last Glacial Maximum/“Ice Age” in which these same northern regions of the planet were covered in ice sheets making them uninhabitable for most humans and many plant and animal species. In some significant ways, the Ice Age scenario can be a reverse-model for our current climate crisis. We also advocate strongly for the prevention of upscale real estate development projects in these same regions of the globe, as these will foreclose the possibility of safely sheltering the millions of persons who will be displaced by climate change over the next 5 to 10 years.