Olivia: Jackson, what if I told you that by the end of this century, your ideal summer vacation spot might be Siberia? And not because you’ve developed a sudden love for the cold, but because it’s one of the few comfortable places left on Earth. Jackson: Wow. Siberia? My vacation plans usually involve significantly less permafrost and more... well, anything else. That sounds like the opening scene of a disaster movie I’m not sure I want to watch. Olivia: It feels like that, doesn't it? But it’s the startling future laid out in the book we’re diving into today: Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince. Jackson: Okay, Nomad Century. The title alone is pretty epic. What gives this author, Gaia Vince, the authority to make such a wild prediction? Olivia: That’s the crucial part. She’s not just a journalist. Gaia Vince is an award-winning science writer with degrees in chemistry and engineering. She’s an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London’s Anthropocene Institute. She approaches this not as a political pundit, but as a scientist looking at overlapping systems: climate, demographics, and our own human history. Jackson: Huh. So this isn't just speculation; it's based on some serious scientific modeling. How on earth do we get from here to a world where Siberia is prime real estate? That’s a massive leap. Olivia: It is. And Vince argues it’s a leap we’re already in the middle of, whether we admit it or not. She says we’re facing an upheaval so profound that our only rational response is to move.

Jackson: Right, but people have been talking about climate change for decades. The usual solution we hear is 'reduce emissions,' 'go green,' 'drive electric.' Why is her answer 'pack your bags'? Olivia: Because, as she lays out in terrifying detail, a certain amount of warming is already locked in. We’re past the point where simply cutting emissions is enough. She introduces this concept of the 'Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene'—the forces that are already beginning to make huge swaths of our planet unlivable. Jackson: The Four Horsemen. That does not sound good. What are they? Olivia: Fire, Heat, Drought, and Flood. And she doesn't just list them; she makes you feel them. Take the first horseman, Fire. She tells the story of the 2020 Australian bushfires, what they called the 'Black Summer.' It’s one of the most harrowing things I’ve read. Jackson: I remember seeing the headlines, but what was it like on the ground? Olivia: She shares the personal story of a woman named Auntie Helen, who lived on the south coast of New South Wales. On New Year's Day, she was evacuated to a beach with hundreds of others, literally surrounded by a wall of fire, with the sky turned black at midday. They were trapped between the fire and the ocean. Later, they found thousands of dead birds washed up on the shore, birds that had tried to escape the smoke but just fell from the sky from exhaustion. Jackson: Oh man. That’s an unbelievable image. Olivia: And the scale is what’s truly mind-bending. Those fires killed 34 people directly, but the smoke pollution led to an estimated 400 premature deaths. And the ecological cost… scientists estimate nearly three billion wild animals—koalas, kangaroos, birds, reptiles—were killed or displaced. Three billion. Entire ecosystems were incinerated. Jackson: That’s a number so large it’s almost meaningless. It's hard to even process. Olivia: Exactly. And that’s just one horseman, in one country, in one year. Vince then walks us through the others. Deadly heatwaves, like the one in Europe in 2003 that killed over 70,000 people. She points to research projecting a 2,000% increase in heat-related deaths in a country like Colombia. Then there's drought, which she illustrates with the story of a Bolivian village, Overjeria, that literally became a ghost town as the glaciers that fed their water disappeared and farming became impossible. Jackson: So the world is, in many places, becoming actively hostile to human life. Olivia: Precisely. And this leads to her central, most controversial argument. Given this reality, migration is not the problem. It is the solution. Jackson: Hold on. That’s a huge claim. We’re constantly hearing about a 'migrant crisis' at every border. How can the thing everyone calls a crisis be the solution? Olivia: Because she reframes it. The crisis isn't the movement of people. The crisis is that parts of the planet are becoming uninhabitable. The movement of people is the logical, adaptive response to that crisis. It's what our species has always done. The problem isn't that people are moving; the problem is that we are trying to stop them, creating a humanitarian disaster on top of an environmental one. Jackson: Wow. Okay, that flips the whole narrative on its head. It’s not about building higher walls; it’s about figuring out where people can safely go. Olivia: Exactly. She argues that clinging to our current locations while the ground burns or floods beneath our feet is the real insanity. The rational choice is to plan for a great migration.

Olivia: And that’s the great paradox the book dives into next. We see migration as this modern, disruptive force, but Vince argues it's the oldest and most fundamental human story. We are, by nature, a migratory species. Jackson: What do you mean by that? Most of human history, at least the parts we learn about in school, seems to be about building cities and empires—settling down, not moving around. Olivia: That’s a relatively recent chapter. For hundreds of thousands of years, we were nomads. Vince points out that studies across nature show that global dispersal is the most effective strategy for any species to prevent extinction. We populated the entire globe because we moved. She tells the story of the Yamnaya people, horse-riding pastoralists from the Eurasian steppes who swept into Europe around 5,000 years ago. They brought their language, their genes, their technology. Today, most Europeans speak an Indo-European language and carry Yamnaya DNA. Migration literally made modern Europe. Jackson: So we’re a species hardwired for movement, for exploration. It’s in our DNA. Olivia: It is. But then we invented something that works directly against that instinct: the nation-state and its rigid borders. Vince calls nation-states 'imagined communities,' a term from the scholar Benedict Anderson. They feel ancient and permanent, but for most of human history, they didn't exist in their current form. Jackson: It’s like we’ve built this incredibly complex software—nations, passports, citizenship—that’s now glitching because it’s running against our original hardware, which is the instinct to move to survive. Olivia: That’s a perfect analogy. And she shows how absurd and cruel this clash can be with a modern story. She talks about David Lammy, a Black British politician, born and raised in London. He was on a national radio show when a white caller phoned in and asked him, "How can you call yourself English?" The caller claimed her ancestry went back to the Anglo-Saxons, implying that Lammy, because of his Caribbean heritage, wasn't truly English. Jackson: That’s infuriating. He's as English as anyone. Olivia: Of course. But that tribal, exclusionary impulse is what fuels anti-immigrant sentiment. It’s this idea that there's a 'pure' national identity and that newcomers are a threat to it. Vince argues this is a dangerous fiction, especially in a world where we desperately need to cooperate. Jackson: This is where the book got some pushback, isn't it? I remember reading that some migration experts felt she was a bit too simplistic here. They argue that people’s decisions to move are incredibly complex—it's about family ties, social networks, economic pull—not just a straightforward calculation of 'my home is hot, I'll move north.' Olivia: Absolutely, and that's a fair and important critique. The book is praised for its bold vision, but some academics in migration studies feel it doesn't fully engage with the messy, non-linear reality of how and why people move. People might move from one climate-vulnerable area to another, for instance, because they have family there. Vince’s model is a bit more of a clean, rational, top-down projection. Jackson: So she’s painting with a very broad brush. Olivia: She is. But her goal, I think, is to shock us out of our current paralysis. She’s presenting the macro-logic of the situation, even if the micro-details are more complicated. She’s saying, look, whatever the individual reasons, billions will be on the move. We can either treat them as an invading army or as fellow humans in need of a new home.

Jackson: Okay, so if she’s right that this great migration is coming, what’s her actual plan? How do we manage this without the world descending into total chaos and conflict? Olivia: This is where the book moves from diagnosis to prescription, and her ideas are just as bold. She argues we need to stop thinking about controlling migration and start thinking about managing it. Her flagship proposal is the creation of a global UN Migration Organization. Jackson: A UN agency for migration? We have the UNHCR for refugees, what’s different about this? Olivia: The difference is power. The UNHCR is often underfunded and reliant on the goodwill of nations. Vince envisions an organization with real teeth. One that could manage global labor mobility, matching migrants with jobs in countries that need them. It would issue international passports, like the Nansen passports after World War I, allowing people to move and work legally. It would also have a mechanism to compel nations to accept their fair share of climate-displaced people and help fund their integration. Jackson: Wait a minute. An agency that can compel a country like the United States or a European nation to take in migrants? Politically, that sounds like an absolute non-starter. It feels completely utopian. Olivia: It does. And she acknowledges that. It’s probably the most optimistic, and most criticized, part of her proposal. But she backs it up with a powerful economic argument. Economists have calculated that if we had open borders, global GDP could increase by as much as $90 trillion a year. That’s essentially doubling the world's wealth. Jackson: How is that even possible? The common fear is that immigrants drain resources and take jobs. Olivia: She dismantles that fear completely. She cites studies like the one on the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, when 125,000 Cubans arrived in Miami almost overnight. The local labor market swelled by 7 percent, and the conventional wisdom was that wages for low-skilled workers would collapse. But they didn't. The economy simply grew to accommodate the new people. Migrants are consumers, they are entrepreneurs, they start businesses, they create jobs. Restricting their movement is, in economic terms, like leaving trillions of dollars lying on the sidewalk. Jackson: So the argument is that it's not just a moral imperative, it's an economic one. We’d all be richer. Olivia: Massively richer. And for aging countries in the Global North with declining populations, like Japan or Italy, she argues that migrants aren't a burden; they are an essential lifeline to keep their economies and social security systems from collapsing. Jackson: And where would all these people go? You mentioned Siberia at the start. Is that literal? Olivia: It is. She maps out what she calls 'Haven Earth.' As the tropics become too hot, the northern latitudes—Canada, Scandinavia, Russia, even Greenland as its ice sheet melts—will become more temperate and habitable. Canada, for instance, already has a policy to triple its population to 100 million by 2100, almost entirely through immigration. Vince envisions new, sustainable, purpose-built cities rising in these northern regions. Jackson: So we’d be building new cities from scratch for millions of people. The scale of that is just… immense. Olivia: It’s a civilizational-level project. And she admits it's daunting. But her core point is that we're going to have to deal with these displaced populations one way or another. We can either do it reactively, through chaos, conflict, and overflowing refugee camps, or we can do it proactively, with a plan that harnesses this movement for the good of everyone. She points to the EU's response to Ukrainian refugees—granting them immediate rights to live and work across the bloc—as a small-scale, successful example of what a managed, humane response can look like.

Jackson: So, when you boil it all down, the book is really a profound challenge to our most basic assumptions. It's saying the physical laws of climate change are non-negotiable, so our political borders and social attitudes are the things that have to bend. Olivia: Exactly. Gaia Vince is forcing us to confront a really uncomfortable question: Are we a species that clings to our 'imagined communities' and our patch of land until they sink or burn? Or are we a species that is clever and cooperative enough to find new homes and build a new kind of global society on higher ground? Jackson: It’s a terrifying prospect, but the way she frames it, there’s also a strange kind of hope in it. The idea that this crisis could force us to become more cooperative, more global in our thinking. Olivia: That’s the core of the book's impact. It received mixed reviews, with some finding it overly optimistic, but it was widely praised for shifting the conversation. It takes what feels like an apocalyptic threat and reframes it as a design problem. A massive, terrifying, but ultimately solvable design problem. She ends with this powerful idea: "Climate change is everything change, because climate is the fabric on which we weave our lives." Jackson: And we have to re-weave that fabric, not just patch the holes. Olivia: We have to. The book leaves you with this final, lingering thought. What kind of ancestor do you want to be? One who helped build walls, or one who helped build arks? Jackson: Wow. That's a heavy question to end on. It makes you think. What do our listeners think? Is this vision of a Nomad Century a terrifying future or a hopeful one? We'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts on our social media channels. Olivia: Please do share them. It’s a conversation we all need to be having. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.