The Flurry Query

The first notable snowfall of the season always makes me question why I live in New Jersey. Yesterday’s snowfall was a fairly modest one in my location (parts of the state were affected much more) but it still evoked the question. I’m hardly alone in asking the question and many residents answer it with their feet – or rather with U-Haul trailers. Of interstate moves across NJ’s border, 69% are outbound and only 31% inbound according to Bloomberg. NJ leads the nation in interstate emigres in percentage terms; the percentage is higher even than that of New York where people presently are fleeing New York City in droves during the current Covid regimen. There are many reasons for the exodus including NJ’s property taxes (the nation’s highest) and the least friendly business climate of the 50 states according to the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council. These and other (completely self-inflicted) detriments increasingly outweigh a number of very real geographical attractions and advantages to living in NJ. One negative that is natural, however, is the weather. It is wet in the spring, humid in summer, windy in autumn, and bone-chilling in winter – the winter weather being the most off-putting of the four.

A...um...few years ago

Yesterday: still shoveling

Homo sapiens is not by design a cold-weather animal. When our ancestors spread out of Africa some 70,000 years ago they wisely hugged the southern shoreline of Eurasia as they spread east, infiltrating northward only after occupying southern lands. They occupied Australia before they occupied Europe. Of course, Europe and northern central Asia already were occupied at the time by Neanderthals and their cousins the Denisovans who were, in fact, adapted to the cold. Sapiens previously had little trouble brushing them aside in the southern areas however. Interbreeding appears to have occurred primarily at the early stage of expansion, especially in the Middle East, when intruding modern humans were heavily outnumbered rather than later when they were better established; about 2% of the DNA of present-day humans outside of sub-Saharan Africa is Neanderthal and/or Denisovan. (It is surprising the percentage isn’t higher.) It wasn’t enough to change their body types to better handle a chill. Modern humans turned north, it seems, only reluctantly. They delayed not so much because of the existing inhabitants as because it was…well…cold.

Why did they go north at all? People it seems, don’t like each other very much, especially the ones we know best – hence the special ferocity of civil wars (and Twitter). So, as their numbers rose they spread out, split (in groups of 30 to 150), and spread out some more in order to get away from those awful others with their irksome quirks and offensive ideas. Since maintaining sufficient calories as hunter-gathers requires 1000 acres or more per person in non-ideal climes, even a small rate of population growth meant humans quite quickly spread into vast new regions. The north may have been cold, but at least it was away from those other people. Besides, it turned out the north was rich. This is why a large percentage of the world’s remaining hunter-gathers are in subarctic regions such as the Tozhus and Nenets in north Asian Russia. It isn’t a great way of life for a vegan, but reindeer, elk, and fish are plentiful. Calories are not much of a problem and mobile skin-covered yurts are surprisingly cozy.

This still has relevance in NJ – not that I hunt and gather except in a distantly analogous sense. The northern states (and northern countries generally) are rich in resources and opportunities – pre-tax anyway. The benefits initially were worth seasonally numb fingers and icy winds. That explains why people moved here in the first place, but not why we stay. In my case the reason primarily is inertia, which probably plays a bigger role in human life than any other single factor. It plays a large role in my life certainly. What remain of my friends and family are mostly here, my personal history is mostly here (I live 10 miles from where I was born), my house (which had been my parents’) is here, and my other physical belongings are here. It would be troublesome in the extreme to pull up stakes now. It would have been easy in my 20s when I didn’t have anything that couldn’t fit in the trunk of a car, but not now. The day may come when remaining here becomes so unaffordable as to overcome inertia (as it already has for so many others) but the time isn’t yet. However much it might prompt the question, the deciding factor in the end won’t be a snowfall: not even the next full-blown blizzard.

Sirenia – A Blizzard is Storming