THIS IS NOT A DRILL
With each paradigm-shifting season, the manifestations of climate change are more unambiguous. No longer is it necessary to parse some journal study tracking measurement changes on a distant glacier or comparing the contents of ancient core samples. All you have to do is pay attention. Last month, before Baby New Year had shaken off their celebratory cobwebs, scientists reported that “the last eight years have been the hottest recorded in human history,” with 2022 coming in at fifth all-time. Massachusetts had its sixth-hottest year in 2022, while featuring one of its hottest and driest summers on record. And the millstones, I mean milestones, aren’t only historic. Between the solstice and MLK Day, Europeans saw an aberrant winter heat wave, Buffalo got buried under more than four feet of snow, and California faced persistent flooding, which incidentally still won’t alleviate the state’s years-long drought.
Yet we keep hitting snooze on these persistent alarm bells, acting as if we have plenty of time before any permanent damage is done. As Jake Bittle makes clear in his urgent and unsettling new book “The Great Displacement,” our time is up. Climate change is already permanently altering our society by forcing people out of their homes and out of their neighborhoods. In both substance and setting, Bittle’s well-researched and vividly conveyed account distinguishes itself in the crowded field of climate change reporting by relying on catastrophic events that have already taken place, and that happened right here in the United States — events that caused loss of life, loss of community, loss of culture, and loss of innocence.
He focuses on seven illustrative communities, on the Mid-Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, in the Arizona desert, and in the California mountains, relating the irreparable damage done by hurricane, drought, erosion, wildfire, and flooding. He renders the disasters themselves in detail, but their impacts are largely communicated through the personal stories of those who lost their homes, their livelihoods, or both, like the owner of a fruit orchard in the Florida Keys whose island was wiped clean in 2017 by Hurricane Irma, or a cotton farmer in the Sonoran Desert whose water sources are drying up as the West en
Climate change is upon us. What does it look like on the ground?
THE GREAT DISPLACEMENT: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
By Jake Bittle Simon and Schuster, 368 pp., $28.99
ters the “twenty-first year of an interminable drought, an event that scientists believe has no real precedent in the last twelve hundred years.” Uniquely illuminating are the stories of those with lifelong connections to these devastated areas, like Wallace Verdin, a fifth-generation descendant of the founders of Pointe-au-Chien, La., who saw his career as a shrimper and his family’s ancestral land forever changed by the disappearance of the bayou.
Unlike much contemporaneous disaster reporting, Bittle keeps the proverbial cameras rolling long after the winds have died down and the waters have receded. “It may seem counterintuitive,” he writes, “but disasters tend to make people more attached to their homes, not less.” And even when people aren’t displaced directly by a fire or a flood, they might be forced to leave their home, neighborhood, or state after the fact because of accounting determinations by governments and insurance companies, or logistical realities imposed by the housing market.
For most of the 20th century, Bittle notes, the federal government sought to preserve the status quo after a disaster, with groups like the Federal Emergency Management Agency helping rebuild communities. But the math and market forces are changing. Fire insurance in California is becoming as risky a proposition as flood insurance has long been in some coastal communities, where today premiums have skyrocketed past $10,000 per month. State and federal governmental agencies now have to make the tough decision between encouraging rebuilding or preventing damaged structures from being rebuilt at all. In some instances, FEMA has offered to buy out entire communities, as it did, after Hurricane Floyd in 1999, for the historically Black neighborhood of Lincoln City in Kinston, N.C., where Bittle talks to 75-year-old lifetime resident William Lawson.
These market changes are being catalyzed by the increasing severity of storms, but the history of each region provides ample evidence that humanity’s actions have exacerbated the environmental impact as well. Again and again, Bittle highlights decisions that favor short-term development over long-term solutions. Sometimes these choices are seemingly practical at the time, like the ill-advised expansion of Houston after the 1973 oil embargo attracted hundreds of thousands of new workers to the area. And sometimes they are due to hubris, as when American settlers, arriving in California in the 1800s, imposed their own firefighting practices on the regions’ ancient forests instead of learning from the Indigenous peoples they were displacing.
While “The Great Displacement” doesn’t pretend to have the answers for stabilizing our shaky future, the common sense solutions Bittle highlights sadly feel like nonstarters. Of the three forces responsible for relocation — environmental events, governmental action, and the housing market, we can realistically hope to influence only two of them. Bittle emphasizes the importance of providing abundant affordable housing and flexible federal relief. But the United States has an endemic housing crisis and an anemic federal government. The former might be magically eased by technology, but the latter is closer to flatlining every day, and the most culpable actor — the Republican party — still sees fossil fuels and deregulation as the solution to climate change. Regardless, the planet is well past caring whether pandering politicians want to play ball. The alarm bells are ringing. We need to wake up.