Matt Godfrey is an exceptionally good narrator for this audiobook outlining the existing and looming changes that climate change will bring to the U.S. His rough-edged, somewhat reedy, voice is expressive enough to keep the listener's attention. Along with subtle and effective variations, he makes emphasis clear. The audiobook covers significant climate-induced impacts ranging from droughts to floods and fires that will drive a great migration to more livable areas of the country. It also covers what will happen to those livable areas and who will be able to afford to live there. This is an excellent, necessary audiobook. Godfrey's performance makes it a riveting one--appropriately alarming without being alarmist. G.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
Narrated by Matt Godfrey
Jake BittleUnabridged — 10 hours, 26 minutes
The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
Narrated by Matt Godfrey
Jake BittleUnabridged — 10 hours, 26 minutes
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Overview
The “closely observed, compassionate, and far-sighted” (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Under a White Sky) story of climate migration in the United States-the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities 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 worsens 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. Jake Bittle is “an empathetic writer” (NPR) who 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.
Editorial Reviews
★ 12/12/2022
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. Agent: Sarah Fuentes, Fletcher and Co. (Feb.)
We know what climate change will do, now, if not precisely its scale. But we don't yet see clearly just what it will do to us—our families and communities and homesteads, not mention our politics and culture. Jake Bittle's The Great Displacement is a bracing, vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view and warning us of what's to come.”
—David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
"Jake Bittle travels from Florida to California to see how climate change is already altering people's lives. The Great Displacement is closely observed, compassionate, and far-sighted."
—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Under a White Sky
"It's hard to imagine a more timely book—as climate chaos gathers momentum, more and more people are forced to make the hardest of human decisions: to leave home and make a new life elsewhere. This deeply-reported account brings those stories to life, and with them a host of policy choices that could make this new era a little less disastrous."
—Bill McKibben, author Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
“Jake Bittle draws close to those communities that are being fundamentally reshaped by climate change and he sticks around, long after the disaster declarations are over, to ask one of our era's most pressing questions: when we are forced to leave the places that have long defined us, what will we encounter on the other side?”
—Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
"Until now, the word 'displaced,' has never been strong enough to accurately conjure up what it really means: people driven from their homes, but not out of their countries, by the disruptive forces of climate-driven disasters. America already has millions of such people. We can't call them 'refugees' because they're still here in America. Jake Bittle has found a way to bring us their individual accounts to tell the larger story of a failing system—extreme weather, government error and inaction, and corporate and individual greed have come together to drive an unfolding catastrophe, which already impacts us all."
—Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Amity and Prosperity
“[Bittle is] 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.”
—NPR
"Roving across the United States, this survey explores the precarious environments in which many Americans now live, places irreversibly altered by floods, fires, hurricanes, and drought...Bittle argues that the approaches of both government and the insurance industry are totally inadequate for today’s dilemmas: Where should we build? What should we protect? And what do we owe those who lose everything?"
—The New Yorker
“The foregrounding of individual voices adds to the book’s power and sense of urgency, and Bittle is an expert explainer of policy matters...A captivating look at a pressing issue.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Urgent, perceptive...a simultaneously fascinating and unnerving report brilliantly delivered.”
—Kirkus Weekly, starred review
“Bittle provides vivid descriptions and accessible technical explanations, but the most powerful parts of his narrative detail the lives of the individuals...He poses disturbing questions: where are all these uprooted people supposed to go?...Powerful and moving.”
—Booklist, starred review
“A superb storyteller, Bittle is at his finest as a chronicler of the loss of place and the sense of belonging, and the frustration that financial constraints pose for the victims of natural disasters.”
—The American Prospect
"Bittle's narratives treat the retelling of his characters' losses with careful compassion and meticulous documentation. He gets to know the families evicted from their homes and derailed from their goals by increasingly regular unnatural disasters. He is privy to their agonizing debates over when to stay, when to go and whether to declare bankruptcy when flood insurance premiums shoot through their soggy roofs. In between these heart-wrenching tales, his book's backbone charts the long course of underlying injustices, negligent zoning, shortsighted policies and climate inaction that have engineered these housing dilemmas more Americans will soon face."
—Arizona Republic
"Through deeply reported pieces, Bittle deftly balances attention to each displaced family’s story with larger structural analyses. To read about people from different states and socioeconomic backgrounds is to be reminded that, on a fast-overheating planet, we are all caught up in the same ecological web. Sooner or later, it will be our turn to move."
—High Country News
"Bittle has overcome the great difficulty in writing about environmental crises: in many cases, the story becomes so depressing that readers turn away in despair. In this valuable, well-written book, which breaks new ground, he seamlessly blends an expert, policy-level treatment of the causes and consequences of the displacement of Americans being driven by climate change with a narrative of the often heart-rending impacts on particular individuals."
—Foreign Affairs
"In the stories Bittle has collected, we are able to see human nature unveiled to a raw and essential state...One can’t read The Great Displacement and deny the insecurity and misery climate change has already wrought on American families and communities."
—Undark Magazine
03/01/2022
With climate change prompting displacement worldwide, journalist Bittle pulls in his focus, warning us that millions in the United States will be forced to migrate internally in the next 50 years. They will be burned out of California, flooded out of Louisiana and North Carolina, compelled to flee the desiccated cotton fields of Arizona, and more. Indeed, the federal government has already sponsored the relocation of tens of thousands of families from flood zones, with tens of thousands more relocating on their own owing to natural disaster. The migration has begun; with a 50,000-copy first printing.
Matt Godfrey is an exceptionally good narrator for this audiobook outlining the existing and looming changes that climate change will bring to the U.S. His rough-edged, somewhat reedy, voice is expressive enough to keep the listener's attention. Along with subtle and effective variations, he makes emphasis clear. The audiobook covers significant climate-induced impacts ranging from droughts to floods and fires that will drive a great migration to more livable areas of the country. It also covers what will happen to those livable areas and who will be able to afford to live there. This is an excellent, necessary audiobook. Godfrey's performance makes it a riveting one--appropriately alarming without being alarmist. G.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
★ 2022-12-08
An urgent, perceptive analysis of how climate change is already changing where Americans live.
Though most readers worry about climate change, many assume that it will arrive in full force later in the century and wreak greatest havoc elsewhere in the world. They will quickly learn their error as journalist Bittle delivers expert accounts of seven humanitarian disasters, all within the U.S. and currently in progress. Only a few feet above sea level, “the thousand-odd islands that make up the Florida Keys are the first flock of canaries in the coal mine of climate change.” Illustrating with vivid stories of individuals who love the region despite its frequent hurricanes and floods, Bittle identifies Hurricane Irma (2017) as the tipping point. Its massive destruction of housing and infrastructure overwhelmed relief efforts, many of which are still in progress. Oceans are also eating away the Louisiana coastline, which affects not just New Orleans and other cities, but also many of the “self-sufficient communities” that used to live in the now-vanishing bayous. Bittle mentions New York City’s encounter with Hurricane Sandy in passing, but he devotes an eye-opening chapter to Norfolk, Virginia, a coastal city whose streets flood at high tide. “The gradual blurring of the line between land and water, a process that was supposed to take centuries or even millennia, was happening fast enough that you could watch it with your naked eyes,” writes the author. There is cold comfort in the obligatory how-to-fix-it chapter. Even though “more than six million people in the United States lost their homes to climate disasters between 2016 and 2020,” people continue to move to climate-endangered regions. Most experts agree on a plan of action, but it requires decisive government action and spending money today to save it in future decades. Given the current political climate, this action may not be swift or expansive enough.
A simultaneously fascinating and unnerving report brilliantly delivered.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940174851436 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2023 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,012,267 |
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