History & humility: crucial to adaptation

Having seen a hell of a lot of global events – good and bad – Myrie has a particular perspective on how environments develop, how populations function and grow and what that means for communities left behind as well as those that people are moving to.

“Of course, climate change is affecting the world’s response to population shifts, too – not just the effects of constructing dams in Namibia or draining lakes in Chad, but the way authorities in Germany and Italy, for instance, have had to adapt to deal with an influx of newcomers.

“The migrant crisis is still raging, with push factors also including lack of employment. If you’re a farmer and you can’t grow your crops anymore, you’re going to want to go somewhere else. A hungry mouth will always want to find food – that has been the case since the beginning of time. If you’re dealing with an influx of migrants and want to be humane in your response, you’ve got to build environments to cater for these travellers.”

Myrie cites Italian opposition to boats coming across from Libya. “What people need to remember is that North America is full of immigrants from 100 years earlier. Mass emigration there was the result of poor Irish people and poor Italians trying to better their lives, in the same way as some guy travelling from Eritrea, and ending up in the refugee camp in Greece or Italy, is trying to find better opportunities today. Too often we forget Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty welcoming Italian migrants who now make up a large part of the population of the big East Coast cities.”

We need more understanding of history, he says. “You will hear freshly minted immigrants from Mexico – who crossed into California illegally 20 years ago and have been there so long that they are now citizens – say: ‘pull up the drawbridge’.

“It’s unfortunate that people have not only have short memories, but don’t understand the legacy. Many more people are feeling the pressure of immigration, but they need humility when thinking about the future, finding ways of absorbing these people, making that transition palatable. These shifts are inevitable as climate change gets more marked. You cannot be King Canute and try to hold back the waves.”

Elsewhere, Myrie is encouraged by promising examples of climate change response and adaptation. “We’ve seen such transformation where I live in London – on regulations concerning where cars can go, more emphasis on walking and green spaces, the proliferation of cycling – as a result of this mental change we’ve all gone through post-Covid.

“As a resident, you get more exercise and there’s less traffic and noise pollution, but at the same time we have to understand that people make their living using their car: getting to work, driving taxis, moving pallets to building sites, delivering bread to the local bakery. That’s an interesting debate that we’re having now and there will be a recalibration. After a while you find the middle ground.

“We’re working out how we negotiate this new world – people demanding better, because of the state of the globe. We relied far too much on the idea of four wheels and it overtook everything else. LA, for example, was an environment built around the motor car, with wide streets, cheap petrol and parking, and a focus on getting from A to B in as timely a fashion as possible. Only poor people rode the buses. There was a metro system but it was a tenth of the Central Line in London; it didn’t go anywhere.

“When I arrived in 1994, I remember seeing the heat haze of dirt and smog sitting over the city. That is not there now, because local people and campaigners such as Arnold Schwarzenegger fought to clean things up.

“Public transport links are better. If you’ve got buses travelling on cleaner fuel that can cut the idling through bus lanes, you’ve got a mode of transport for a majority of people that is cheaper, and you’re keeping them out of their cars. You can’t just reduce the spaces in which cars can travel without increasing those in which public transport can go.”

Myrie agrees that multidisciplinary approaches, drawing on both specialist and generalist thinking, must be utilised in order to solve society’s challenges. “It’s clearly better for us to work with the forces transforming our lives, than try to fight them, and there has to be an overarching approach to these huge changes. The job of a journalist is to lay out the objective facts; it’s down to societies, population experts, all of us, to work out how we live better together.”

He suggests city planners and designers should be in lockstep with those who deal with immigration as well as law and order. “Certain sectors cannot operate on their own – it can lead to inbuilt problems further down the line.”

A classic example, as he recalls it, is the huge post-war construction of tower blocks, focused on the need to provide people with a roof over their heads but not necessarily allowing for nature to be part of that environment. “You had estates built with very little green space, people piled on top of each other and no real coordination with other sectors of society.

“If you’re a policeman and you have to go into a built-up estate, what safety precautions are there for you? How much more dangerous is it to go into a closed environment where you could be attacked from any quarter? There was no discussion about that when planners were looking at these tower blocks in the ’50s and ’60s.

“Now, where I live, we have line of sight. The Victorians built the square in the 1840s, with trees flanking the whole thing, so, going through the gate, you couldn’t see what was going on inside because the view was obscured. Now, if a tree falls or has to be removed, the replacement will be a much smaller tree or foliage that allows you to see past it. You don’t have to risk going into a potentially dangerous environment to keep the law and it also acts as a deterrent for certain types of activity – drug dealing and whatever. But this discussion has only taken place in the last 10, 15 years between law enforcement and urban planners.”