ORE than twenty years ago Edward Ullman suggested that much of the interregional migration in the United States could be explained by individual preferences for a pleasant climate and for other aspects of a desirable natural environment.' Although the general thesis was not new,2 this was the first comprehensive discussion of the subject. Ullman's pioneering article was greeted with considerable interest, but aside from brief references or perfunctory footnotes, the topic has not been well developed in the cognate literature, with a few notable exceptions that merely highlight the lack of research. Whatever the basis for the prevailing inattention to environmental preference migration, a thorough review is long overdue. This survey encompasses work in areas most immediate to the topic and offers suggestions for future research. The superficial appearance of the review as a pastiche of research findings is only too accurate a reflection of the piecemeal work to date. From the many disparate insights, I hope to construct the beginnings of a coherent understanding of the role of environmental preferences in interregional migration. It is important to recognize at the outset that workers in this area have made contributions based on widely divergent approaches usually stemming from distinct disciplinary focuses in which subject matter and relevant data, methodologies of investigation, permissible theory, and scale of analysis combine to produce characteristic kinds of results. Although there is a considerable degree of overlap, three general types of research can be discerned: behavioral (or survey) work, regional economic theory, and empirical tests of aggregate migration patterns. I deal first with behavioral approaches that primarily employ survey research to elucidate the reasons behind individual migration decisions. These behavioral approaches have been the most instrumental in helping to expand our knowledge of environmental preference migration. The challenge that this kind of migration poses for traditional regional economic theory is then explored with special attention to the incorporation of behavioral research findings. Finally, aggregate tests of the preference migration hypothesis, in the form of empirical studies of observed migration patterns, reveal consistent support despite probable underestimation owing to methodological bias.
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Feb 1, 2003
John Wagstaff 
Open Access