The Great Displacement
Climate Change and the Next American Migration
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4.8 • 9 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the 2024 Carnegie Medal for Excellence
“The Great Displacement is closely observed, compassionate, and far-sighted.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Under a White Sky
The untold story of climate migration in the United States—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future.
Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming gets worse over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible, right here in the United States. In communities across the country, climate disasters are pushing thousands of people away from their homes.
A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is “a vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth). From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas.
Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country’s history. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Bittle debuts with a captivating exploration of how climate change will "reshape the demographic geography of the United States." Drawing on interviews, Bittle vividly documents the experiences of people impacted by hurricanes, wildfires, soil erosion, flooding, and other disasters. In Big Pine Key, Fla., Patrick Garvey recounts how his tropical fruit grove and nursery were decimated by Hurricane Irma, while residents of Kinston, N.C., which suffered two catastrophic floods in the span of four years in the 1990s, shed light on the "sense of mourning" that comes with abandoning neighborhoods in a process known as "managed retreat." Elsewhere, Bittle spotlights the experiences of white Cajuns and Indigenous tribespeople in the Louisiana bayou to show "how much culture and history stands to be lost when movement becomes a necessity." Throughout, Bittle analyzes how economic disparity, institutional racism, and other factors contribute to the uneven impact of climate disasters, from which some can easily rebound while others find themselves in "a churning vortex of displacement and instability." The foregrounding of individual voices adds to the book's power and sense of urgency, and Bittle is an expert explainer of policy matters. This is a captivating look at a pressing issue.
