"This Is Our Place!" Climate Migration and the Gangs of the Rust Belt

We are the battered, bloodied tip of climate migration. Ten years ago we moved up from Florida to a cute old Rust Belt village in Upstate New York. We’d done our homework. We knew the Rust Belt was a temperate Goldilocks zone that would become America’s climate survival zone.
We didn’t know that others had long ago made these decaying, half-dead places their own. Their malignant roots run deep. Coming here, clueless and trusting, we were easy prey for these depraved ambush predators.
There’s nothing to warn of what lurks beneath the façade of the Rust Belt’s quaint old towns and villages, with their gangs of twisted people. “Go back to Florida!” they shout. “This is our place!”
Our bridges were burned. With nowhere else to go, we fought. And won. It was a long war.
It happened in America. In New York State. We videoed and blogged about it. You wouldn’t believe us if we hadn’t. Neither would we. It’s all here.