On the Move
The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award
“On the Move explains how we got here and where we’re headed. It’s crucial guide to the world we are creating.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction
A vivid, journalistic account of how climate change will make American life as we know it unfeasible.
Humanity is on the precipice of a great climate migration, and Americans will not be spared. Tens of millions of people are likely to be driven from the places they call home. Poorer communities will be left behind, while growth will surge in the cities and regions most attractive to climate refugees. America will be changed utterly.
Abrahm Lustgarten’s On the Move is the definitive account of what this massive population shift might look like. As he shows, the United States will be rendered unrecognizable by four unstoppable forces: wildfires in the West; frequent flooding in coastal regions; extreme heat and humidity in the South; and droughts that will make farming all but impossible across much of the nation.
Reporting from the front lines of climate migration, Lustgarten explains how a pattern of shortsighted policies encouraged millions to settle in vulnerable parts of the country, and introduces us to homeowners in California, insurance customers in Florida, and ranchers in Colorado who are being forced to make the agonizing choice of when, not whether, to leave. Employing the most current climate data and predictive models, he shows how America’s population will be squeezed northward into a shrinking triangle of land stretching from Tennessee to Maine to the Great Lakes. The places many of us now call home are at risk, and On the Move reveals how we’ll deal with the consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
ProPublica environmental reporter Lustgarten (Run to Failure) delivers an urgent examination of how the U.S. will be affected by migrations driven by global warming. As the "best living conditions on the North American continent... jump dramatically northward," Lustgarten expects to see an influx of climate refugees from Central and South America, as well as the mass movement of people within the U.S. as parts of Arizona, Texas, and Florida become increasingly inhospitable. Not everyone will be able to afford to move, Lustgarten warns, pointing to reports that found FEMA rejects Black applicants' requests for aid at higher rates than white applicants' and awards them fewer dollars per incident even when requests are approved. Lustgarten provides a nuanced account of how myriad factors intertwine to fuel migration, as when he details how drought and disease exacerbated by climate change have devastated Guatemala's crop yields in recent years, worsening poverty and driving residents to seek opportunities in the U.S. The author also provides poignant portraits of such affected individuals as Chris Bunet, a Choctaw man whose family had lived in Louisiana's Isle de Jean Charles Indigenous community for five generations until Hurricane Ida caused devastating erosion in 2021, forcing him to relocate to a less idyllic plot 40 miles north. Readers will be unnerved.
