I have lived my entire life in Michigan, from the Detroit area to the shadow of Mighty Mac to a curious region called Michiana and many places in between. I love the culture, the northern woods and the pristine lakes, from Great to small.
What’s not to like, right?
Which is why I have found it odd for years that Michigan’s population has been stagnant – even losing ground (and seats in Congress) to states across America.
That is about to change, and a major reporting project that will be published next week will explain why. And it has nothing to do with the Sleeping Bear Dunes, Faygo and Vernors pop or even having the most beautiful state park in the nation.
The reason is global, to say the least – climate change. People in the United States are beginning to seek refuge from rising sea levels, intensifying hurricanes, pervasive western forest fires, suffocating heat waves. And Michigan is the most attractive destination, according to policy experts.
“Eventually, you won't have insurance that will help you rebuild your home. Eventually you will grow so exhausted with the storms or the heat or the collapsing electrical infrastructure that you'll look to your options elsewhere,” said Sheri McWhirter, an MLive reporter who worked on the project with colleague Lindsay Moore.
“And here in the Great Lakes we look gleaming in blue, compared to a lot of the rest of the country.”
Climate experts say Michigan is likely to have the current climate of Tennessee by the year 2050. That may seem a way off, but what is happening around the United States already is making the Mitten State and its surrounding Great Lakes a climate haven.
For instance, Moore spoke with a family she spoke with that recently moved from Oregon to Michigan. The tipping point was wildfires that drove air quality to dangerous levels and kept them captives in their own home.
“They had smoke engulfing them literally to the point where they were duct-taping every crevice of their house,” she said. “That's what pushes people to move. Younger folks that wanted to start families are like, ‘Why would we buy a house here if in the next decade we're going to have to move anyways?’”
Adding residents sounds like a win. But the reporting from McWhirter and Moore shows that an influx of what could amount to millions of people in a relatively short time span – at least in terms of humankind’s span on Earth – presents all kinds of challenges.
“We're still in a housing crisis,” said Moore, who has written about that issue this year. “We need roads, we need airports. We really need drinking water for them. We need groundwater wells.”
And that requires preparation on a grand scale – preparation that currently is not close to high gear. Moore noted that some issues, such as persistent flooding in the metro Detroit area and groundwater problems in Ottawa County, are being addressed at the local level.
“But at the statewide level there does not seem to be a playbook yet – at least not one that they shared with us after many requests. They need to figure out solutions before it's at much higher stakes.”
Some of the takes are being sorted out now, not in the future. For instance, McWhirter lives in Traverse City and has watched over the years as sprawl and land speculation have changed the nature of that area. Climate migration will compound those pressures, and the struggles she has seen in her hometown will become statewide problems.
“We didn't just want to scream ‘the sky is falling,’ as so many articles about climate have been,” McWhirter said. “We wanted to start a discussion on how Michigan can prepare, what our communities need to be thinking about and discussing now to get ready.”
🎧 Prefer to listen to your journalism while cooking or commuting? Try listening to John Hiner's Behind the Headlines podcast each week. In this episode, John Hiner and Eric Hultgren chat with Lindsay Moore and Sheri McWhirter about a climate change series they have been working on for MLive.. Just click here for Spotify or here for Apple podcasts to listen. You can also find Behind the Headlines wherever you get your podcasts!
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John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.
