OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #132,
JUNE 19, 2023
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.
[Our governments on all levels, all relevant nonprofits, our educational and medical institutions, and we as individuals should be preparing to help victims of forced displacement. --D]