Moving north to climate safety? Lovely county up here, but it’s not all apple blossoms and 4H. Please read this book before you make any firm plans: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D7SW861Y
Wife Linda and I relocated from Sarasota to Central New York in 2013. We’d done our homework. We knew Florida was doomed and that the Rust Belt was a sweet spot climate safety zone. And so far that’s proven true.
We did our homework, checked out Realtor, identified possible relocation spots, pulled the crime stats for those places we could afford, and bought a very nice old house for very little money–very little being what we had. Herkimer, a historic New York village near Utica, became our home.
We moved in on March 13, 2013. Soon after that, the long years of warfare began with the trafficking gangs that controlled Herkimer, their presence hidden from research–the police didn’t register complaints—statistically, Herkimer’s crime rate was similar to Nantucket’s. Herkimer had gotten rid of many unwelcomed newcomers before. Two more “old, weak people” didn’t seem much of a challenge. They had no understanding of the power of social media. But we did.
We videoed it all blogged about it and fielded a YouTube channel through all those long years. And now that it’s over and we won–with a lot of help from the Feds–I put it all in the book, which relies heavily on our blog and the videos. You wouldn’t believe me otherwise. “What county is that?” we sometimes asked each other.
It’s all in the book: the in-your-face corruption, the wholesale drug and child trafficking, the protected, gang-run neighborhoods, the menacing, the poison gas attacks, the blogger beatings, the cop-proof thugs.
I’m a science fiction writer. This is my first and last work of nonfiction. I didn’t enjoy writing it. But we all have a duty to warn. Pass it on. There are a lot of Herkimers and ambush predators up here in the Rust Belt.
From Gork’s summary of the related X post:
- The post promotes Stephen Ames Berry’s memoir “This Is Our Place!”, detailing a Florida family’s decade-long struggle against a Rust Belt trafficking gang, tying into climate migration—a concept supported by a 2021 study in Nature Climate Change predicting 200 million climate migrants by 2050 due to rising sea levels and economic shifts.
- The Rust Belt’s transformation from industrial decline to a potential climate migration hub is underscored by Danny Schleien’s 2021 Medium article, which notes its historical population loss reversed as people flee coastal climate risks, challenging the narrative of its permanent economic stagnation.
- Berry’s work aligns with emerging research, like a 2023 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, linking climate-driven displacement to increased crime rates, offering a gritty, firsthand perspective on gang activity amid environmental upheaval.