Current:Home > Contact-us'The Great Displacement' looks at communities forever altered by climate change-DB Wealth Institute B2 Expert Reviews
'The Great Displacement' looks at communities forever altered by climate change
View Date:2025-01-13 03:18:30
"The climate crisis doesn't care if your state is red or blue," President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address earlier this month. "It is an existential threat. We have an obligation to our children and grandchildren to confront it."
Scientists have been saying the same for decades, although that hasn't stopped the issue of climate change from becoming a political football, with self-styled skeptics waving away the data that show rising temperatures and sea levels, melting glaciers, and increasingly severe droughts.
Climate change is reshaping the U.S. in another way, as journalist Jake Bittle explains in his new book, The Great Displacement: "Each passing year brings disasters that disfigure new parts of the United States, and these disasters alter the course of human lives, pushing people from one place to another, destroying old communities and forcing new ones to emerge."
Bittle's book takes a look at several communities that have been affected by climate change, and how the lives of their residents — the ones who have survived — have been altered by extreme weather. The first section of the book focuses on the Florida Keys, "the first flock of canaries in the coal mine of climate change." Bittle profiles Patrick Garvey, who bought a neglected grove on Big Pine Key, and fixed it up into "a bona fide community resource" that grew fruits rare in the continental U.S.: longans, jackfruits, soursops.
Then came Hurricane Irma. Patrick and some friends decided to stay on the island during the 2017 storm, and ended up sheltering at a nearby school. They survived — a dozen people in the Keys didn't — but the grove wasn't as lucky. When Patrick returned after the storm passed, he found "tree stumps scattered across the grass at random intervals, wood and metal strewn around like bird feed."
Patrick's story is a harrowing one, and although he was fortunate to survive Irma alive, Bittle strikes a pessimistic note about the future of the Keys' ability to sustain human life. "Many of the islands in the archipelago, perhaps all of them, could go underwater altogether by the end of this century," he writes. "More so than almost any other place in the United States, they are doomed." Some Keys residents decided to stay after Irma; others, unable to bear the thought of going through that kind of trauma again, left.
Hurricanes aren't the only weather phenomena that climate change has made more frequent. In another section of the book, Bittle turns his eye to California's wine country. Just about a month after Irma ravaged the Caribbean and Florida, a fire broke out in the town of Calistoga; a combination of high winds and drought caused the fire to turn into a conflagration that quickly reached the city of Santa Rosa.
Vicki and Mark Carrino were among the Santa Rosa residents whose lives were thrown into disarray by the Tubbs Fire, named after a street near where it started. The couple was asleep when their daughter called them, urgently warning them to evacuate; they did, and less than ten minutes later, the firestorm engulfed their home, destroying it. They were able and willing to rebuild their home in the wake of the fire, but many of their neighbors weren't, leaving their subdivision feeling "downright lonely, even almost abandoned."
Bittle takes a deep dive into the factors that go into people's decisions to stay or to leave once their neighborhoods have been affected by climate change. In California, it's the affordable housing crisis plus the increased fire risk that has led to many residents moving to Nampa, Idaho; in other parts of the country, rising insurance premiums and weather risks have forced people to relocate elsewhere, including cities like Buffalo, New York, and Dallas, Texas. "In the United States alone," Bittle writes, "at least twenty million people may move as a result of climate change, more than twice as many as moved during the entire span of the Great Migration."
Bittle covers the people whose lives have been altered by climate change — from drought in Arizona to coastal erosion in the bayous of south Louisiana — with real compassion, explaining why economic inequality makes many people unable to relocate, even if it were easy for them to simply pack up and leave the places where they've spent their whole lives behind.
He's an empathetic writer, but also one with a real gift for explaining the fraught issues — economic, scientific, political — that make the climate crisis and its effect on the population so complex. It sometimes feels too pat to call a book "necessary," but this one really is.
The Great Displacement is a fascinating look at how America has changed, and will continue to change, as climate change wreaks havoc on the nation and the people who live there. Bittle ends the book on a hopeful note, but still recognizes the extent of the damage already done: "When a community disappears, so does a map that orients us in the world."
veryGood! (87)
Related
- Cleveland Browns’ Hakeem Adeniji Shares Stillbirth of Baby Boy Days Before Due Date
- Tots on errands, phone mystery, stinky sweat benefits: Our top non-virus global posts
- Revolve's 65% Off Sale Has $212 Dresses for $34, $15 Tops & More Trendy Summer Looks
- Joining Trend, NY Suspends Review of Oil Train Terminal Permit
- TikToker Campbell “Pookie” Puckett Gives Birth, Welcomes First Baby With Jett Puckett
- Perceiving without seeing: How light resets your internal clock
- Transcript: Robert Costa on Face the Nation, June 11, 2023
- Tots on errands, phone mystery, stinky sweat benefits: Our top non-virus global posts
- Man who stole and laundered roughly $1B in bitcoin is sentenced to 5 years in prison
- Treat Yourself to a Spa Day With a $100 Deal on $600 Worth of Products From Elemis, 111SKIN, Nest & More
Ranking
- 'Wanted' posters plastered around University of Rochester target Jewish faculty members
- Why Maria Menounos Credits Her Late Mom With Helping to Save Her Life
- A Record Number of Scientists Are Running for Congress, and They Get Climate Change
- Why Alexis Ohanian Is Convinced He and Pregnant Serena Williams Are Having a Baby Girl
- Auburn surges, while Kansas remains No. 1 in the USA TODAY Sports men's basketball poll
- Sen. Marco Rubio: Trump's indictment is political in nature, will bring more harm to the country
- What’s Causing Antarctica’s Ocean to Heat Up? New Study Points to 2 Human Sources
- Solar Energy Surging in Italy, Outpacing U.S.
Recommendation
-
Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul VIP fight package costs a whopping $2M. Here's who bought it.
-
Man charged with murder after 3 shot dead, 3 wounded in Annapolis
-
The Dakota Access Pipeline Fight: Where Does the Standoff Stand?
-
I usually wake up just ahead of my alarm. What's up with that?
-
What is ‘Doge’? Explaining the meme and cryptocurrency after Elon Musk's appointment to D.O.G.E.
-
Climate Costs Rise as Amazon, Retailers Compete on Fast Delivery
-
Supreme Court won't review North Carolina's decision to reject license plates with Confederate flag
-
Native American Pipeline Protest Halts Construction in N. Dakota