The Times has published a blockbuster, must-read piece about climate migration. If you’re near the fires that have burned five million acres in the West or are breathing the noxious air moving across the country, you are paying attention to climate issues as you never have before. You are right to be: Wherever you live, climate migration is coming your way.

Here’s a summary of the Times piece:

– Across the United States, some 162 million people -— nearly one in two — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe.

– One in 12 Americans will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population… will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse.

– By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri.

– 100 million Americans -— largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin —- will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke.

– 13 million Americans will be forced to move away from submerged coastlines.

– In 1950, less than 65 percent of Americans lived in cities. By 2050, only 10 percent will live outside them.

– With time, the bottom half of the country will grow inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest will decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind will be disproportionately poor and elderly. In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people — the nation’s opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000.

Now we come to a must-read novel.

When I first wrote about “Exit West,” I said it was the best serious fiction I’d read in 2017. I wasn’t the only one to think this. It made many 10 Best lists. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Hamid now won the inaugural Aspen Words Literary Prize — one of the largest literary prizes in the United States — for “Exit West.”

This is what Hamid said when he won the Aspen Prize:

“I wanted to portray migrants as heroes, not criminals. But more than that, I wanted to show that everyone is a migrant, even those who never move geographically, because moving through time, aging, is itself a form of migration… Instead of inevitable conflict, I wanted to find a space of recognition, of mutual and shared sorrow, between the person who has moved to a foreign country and the person who has begun to feel foreign in the country of their own birth. And I wanted to suggest a future of radical migration that expressed elements of optimism, because if we can’t look to the future with optimism we are prone to exploitation by political nostalgia, leaders who promise to make the future like the past.”

“Exit West” is short: 230 pages. Just two main characters. A love story, of sorts. Which is to say: original in every sentence. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Nadia and Saeed live in a country that’s “swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.” They’re young professionals, blessedly unaffected by the chaos soon to overtake their lives — their first date is at a Chinese restaurant. Hamid’s gaze is objective to the max:

It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class — in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding — but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.

There are 65 million stateless people in the world today. Why shouldn’t Nadia and Saeed be among them? [Implied question: Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t you?] Quite soon, it becomes time to leave. When they go, it’s not like those terrifying boat trips across the Mediterranean, with overloaded vessels and incompetent crews and small children washed up, dead, on resort beaches. In a dazzling bit of writing that’s like science fiction, they simply go through doors —“doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this deathtrap of a country.”

That’s all the plot you need to know. More to the point, perhaps, is my experience of reading this book: it changed the way I think. I often quote my Buddhist reading: “The ground is not solid.” I mean that in the sense that I no longer trust the economy or government or any infrastructure, that I feel we’re on our own now, that our only useful resource is the support we get and give to friends and lovers and family. Hamid goes further. For him the ground is really not solid — the entire planet is restless, searching, literally on the move.

“We are all migrants through time,” Hamid writes.

Exactly.

—
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mohsin Hamid’s novels are all one-offs, as you can tell just from the titles. “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” is a novel in the sly form of a self-help book. [To buy the paperback or Kindle edition from Amazon, click here.] “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” is the book that first made readers and reviewers cheer. At the end, with your heart pounding, you will suddenly think, “OMG, that was a thriller! Didn’t see that coming.” [To buy the paperback or Kindle edition of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” click here.]

Michelle and Barack Obama’s Higher Ground Productions and Riz Ahmed are teaming to tackle “Exit West” for Netflix.

Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free