Nomad Century Quotes

“Even when the income disparity is very much greater, people are sticky. Micronesians mostly stay where they were born, even though they are free to live and work in the US without a visa, where the average income is twenty times higher. Niger, next to Nigeria, is not depopulated even though it is six times poorer and there are no border controls between the countries. People like to stay in the communities they were born in, where everything is familiar and easy, and many require a substantial push to migrate – even to another location in the same nation, and even when it would be obviously beneficial. One study in Bangladesh found that a programme that offered subsidies to help rural people migrate to the city for work during the lean season didn’t work, even when workers could make substantially more money through seasonal migration.22 One problem is the lack of affordable housing and other facilities in cities, meaning people end up living illegally in cramped, unregulated spaces or in tents.”
― Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

“Migration is not the problem; it is the solution – it always has been. As we will see, migration is the oldest survival trick.”
― Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

“In the oceans, we’re looking at vast dead zones as pollutants combine with warmer waters to produce an explosion in algae that starve marine life of oxygen.”
― Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

“El cambio climático es el cambio de todo, porque el clima son los cimientos en los que apuntalamos nuestras vidas ... En las próximas décadas cada uno de nosotros experimentará este profundo cambio existencial: una alteración radical de nuestra relación con el ambiente que generó nuestra cultura, nuestra sociedad, nuestras vidas.”
― Gaia Vince, El siglo nómada: Cómo enfrentarse al cataclismo climático (geoPlaneta Ciencia)

“We created this problem because we are humans with all the capabilities, flaws and marvels that entails; we will solve it only as humans.”
― Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

“The concept shares elements with the Seasteading movement, a libertarian group of mega-rich preppers intent on building independent floating cities on the high seas. The Seasteading Institute was founded in San Francisco in 2008 by anarcho-capitalist (and Google software engineer) Patri Friedman, with funding from PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, to ‘establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems’. Some of the ideas they plan to use include harvesting calcium carbonate from seawater to create 3D-printed ‘artificial coral’ cities of upside-down skyscrapers – ‘seascrapers’ – powered by oceanic geothermal energy. Some of this energy will be used to draw nutrients from deeper waters to the surface to grow seaweeds in farms worked on by ‘the poorest billion people on earth’, welcomed because ‘floating societies will require refugees to survive economically’. These floating utopias will ‘liberate humanity from politicians’ while solving the planet’s big problems, it is claimed. For the more sceptical among us, this smells dystopian, rather.”
― Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World