Lots of Maps Will be Changing

If you have a big moat, you might not have to redraw your borders

Map and globe makers are going to be busy.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

There were 138 sovereign nations on Earth 50 years ago in 1974.

There are 195 sovereign nations on Earth today.

Fifty years from now there will probably be more.

Those past fifty years did not include what we will see in the next fifty; namely extreme weather events and environmental devastation brought on by climate change and overshoot.

For the sake of this thought experiment, to see what the world looks like in 50 years, I’m going to assume we don’t do much about overshoot, or do so at about the pace we are going now. Fossil fuels will slowly be phased out but at a pace much too slow to keep the temperature rise to less than 2.0C.

We will see more damaging storms and hurricanes, more drought, more famine, more wars over resources, and more mass migration on a scale we can’t imagine.

I’m going to walk through the places where I have the most subscribers. Not because I love them anymore, but because these are the people who most likely think they are safest. They are in the rich world and have more resources and ways to adapt.

Five rich island nations are the most likely to survive the collapse of our civilization. They are Ireland, Iceland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The oceans will keep unwanted visitors out to some extent if civilization collapses, and proximity to oceans means they will have access to at least some semi-normal rainfall, and whatever bounty the ocean can still supply, even if we kill most everything in it. Expect these island nations to start putting up legal walls to make it harder in the future for “refugees” from other rich parts of the world to come in and stay.

For this essay, I want to focus on the rich countries that have most caused this problem, who think they are safe. They are not.

United States

America's founding documents were delightfully aspirational, but the country is not living up to what was promised. To be fair, the founders were only considering life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to white, male, landowners at the time, but once the rest of us were raised to revere those words, we kind of wanted those things too.

But right now, the US is going through some things.

Many people are fretting that the Trump administration will bring the end of civilization. But if you were paying attention, that started years ago, he is only a catalyst. The coming purge of already inadequate climate and environmental policy will in the long run make America weaker and more vulnerable, but in the short term, it will make more oligarchs lots of money, so everyone in a certain tax bracket wins.

Trump’s immigration policy, economic policy, and environmental policy are actually likely to be degrowth policies if they are implemented in the way they have been discussed thus far, but don’t tell any of his supporters that. That is an essay for another day.

But on to why America may break apart in some ways in the next 50 years.

Politics is only one of them.

As I noted in my post earlier this month, Yascha Mounk's book, The People vs. Democracy, sets out that countries don’t hold together for the long term if they don’t have either; 1. Common blood, 2. Common religion, or 3. A Common enemy. Either intentionally or unintentionally, these three ideas make up the Republican platform in the US today. But people don’t generally like to be forced to have common blood, common religion, and a common enemy, so such a project will be self-destructive to any American Fabric Republicans think they are weaving.

This lack of cohesion, both from the lack of a common story and the revulsion from half the population to having a common story forced upon them will only sour more people in America on the American experiment.

Then you add what is coming from climate change and ecological overshoot. When the Great Salt Lake is dead, when states are suffering through a drought (which is the case now by the way), when the Colorado River slows to a trickle and there is no water in the West, when we see our first category 6 hurricanes tear apart the Southeast, when the power grids fail for weeks during 100 degree days and tens of thousands of people die, when we see migration set new records every year from the places in the world that will become uninhabitable – somethings will break unfixable ways.

Independence movements from California, Texas, and other places in America are dismissed as quixotic today, but they will gain more followers in the coming years. Expect the sentiment of “let’s leave” or “let them leave” to become more discussed out in the open. Yes, there are plenty of red parts of California and blue parts of Texas, but they will be outvoted when a future disaster gets the people there so upset, that they decide they have had enough.

I’ll likely be long dead in 50 years when 2074 rolls around, but the odds aren’t bad that I will be buried in a county that does not exist today. I’m not hoping for this, but I will not be surprised at all if it happens.

Canada

Canada is often perceived as like the United States, just more liberal when it comes to healthcare, social safety nets, immigration, and guns. Oh, and more polite. All of this is true, but like the US, Canada is a far-flung expanse of land, with very different cultures and very different ethnic groups held together by … what exactly?

In the East is French-speaking and culturally very French Quebec. All my Canadian friends can speak French partly due to the two separate independence pushes in 1980 and 1995 by Quebec, that ended in no succession, but concessions by the federal government to give Quebec a little more autonomy.  This amounted to decentralizing the authority of the federal government, allowing the provinces greater influence over policy-making.

West of Quebec you have Ontario, where the financial capital (Toronto) and the actual capital of Canada (Ottawa) are found. The culture here is similar to that of the Northeast US, quite white and quite liberal. I didn’t say the same as the US, just similar.

Then West again you have the great plains of Canada. This is where most of the mining and oil production takes place. These provinces, especially Saskatchewan and Alberta may chafe a bit at the carbon tax and environmental regulations implemented by Ottawa. Alberta, which produces about 80% of Canada’s oil and gas has even flirted with a separatist movement, but the movement is very small and not expected to amount to much. Still don’t be surprised if some genius from the Trump administration floats a trial balloon to make Alberta America’s 51^st state, to come to the oil and gas lovin’ USA, with no carbon tax and soon-to-be loosened environmental regulations. It will be a fun story if it happens, but I don’t see Alberta leaving Canada to have even less power (1 of 51 states vs. 1 of 10 provinces).

To the North are the three sparsely populated provinces of Nunavut, Northwest Territories, and Yukon, whose indigenous peoples enjoy a good deal of autonomy from Ottawa. That is until the climate changes everything and more people may look to escape to these provinces.

Out west is British Columbia, with very cosmopolitan Vancouver and Victoria, which dominate the vast Canadian Pacific Northwest. They agree with the capital politically but are physically very far away.

Canada has the same broad problem that the United States has. It is a vast swath of land in which the people are starting to question why they are held together. Climate change and ecological overshoot will only exacerbate these problems. Climate and overshoot refugees will be drawn to Canada which is more welcoming to them than the USA and has vast land to settle into. The politics of fossil fuels will further strain the relations between Alberta and Ottawa, and Quebec may finally say, “Thank you for everything, but we can be energy, agriculturally, and politically independent.”

I would bet that in 50 years, a map of Canada will look very different.

Like the US, Canada is attempting to build a multicultural society based on the vague notion of being Canadian. In the face of environmental degradation coming for all of us, it is going to take more than a love of Tim Hortons to keep Canada together.

Europe

Europe fought valiantly against climate change, with the continent at the forefront of most climate change legislation. Europe has the same problems as most other relatively rich Western nations, but there is a tipping point looming that could devastate the continent. If the The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) shuts down, Europe could enter another ice age.

The Gulf Stream (AMOC) currently keeps Europe warmer than it has any right being. This could Europe from the worst of the extreme heat that would caused mass migration from the Middle East and Asia. Europe could enter a new ice age, and the agriculture of all of Europe will be devastated, with the crop yields from France to Germany expected to drop consistently in the coming decades, necessitating new crops and the importation of many foods that have historically been grown in these countries.

The immigration crisis from climate change would hit Europe the hardest, as land and ocean crossings from Asia, the Middle East and Africa are easier for migrants to travel than to North America, Asia, or Australia and New Zealand.

This will strain the economic viability of the poorer Eastern European countries where many migrants stop. European Union members in the West of the Union will put up legal and logistical roadblocks to keep those migrants out of their countries.

These factors and the other challenges from climate change and overshoot could eventually tear apart the European project, and reintroduce a more balkanized Europe, with smaller and smaller countries who do share blood, religion, or enemies reforming, or forming for the first time.

If you count Russia as part of Europe, there will be even more reasons for European collapse. Russia is currently engaged in a foolhardy war that is just bringing the date of demographic reckoning forward. About a million Russian men of fighting age have already been lost to the war or fled the country. As the war further strains the country's resources and demographics, faraway sections of Russia may break away, with little ability from Moscow to bring them to heal.

Europe is a land of hundreds of nationalities, languages, and cultures. Expect it to fracture into further fragments as the physical and political climates become untenable.

We are going to need some new maps – and often.

Conclusion

A collapse won’t happen all at once. Supply chains will disintegrate over time as resources become scarce and the cooperation needed to run a Just-in-Time world will melt away. International agreements and financial structures will buckle and sometimes break. Those that created the system, those of us in the rich West will have farther to fall from our perch. Luckily, Ireland, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand all speak English. You might want to get there before the doors close.