The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration

"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.

Author: Jake Bittle
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 02/21/2023
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.83d
ISBN: 9781982178253


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 03/01/2022 pg. 19
Publishers Weekly 12/12/2022
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2023
Booklist 02/01/2023 pg. 3

About the Author
Bittle, Jake: - Jake Bittle is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written for The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, The New Republic, VICE, The Nation, Slate, Vox, and Popular Science. He's reported deeply on climate change and disaster policy for The Baffler and The Atlantic, among other publications.