Jake Bittle has a different word for climate migration. He calls it climate displacement.
"Migration seems to imply a coordinated movement of people from one place to another. And it's usually voluntary, people want to get to a specific place. And what I was encountering was that people left for short amounts of time, they never really thought that they were going to leave permanently, but then they ended up leaving their home or they left multiple times. It was very chaotic."
Bittle explores the way that climate change will reshape America in his new book, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. He argues that not only is climate change already here, but that it's already affecting thousands of people in America. He traveled the country in the aftermath of natural disasters in 2017 and 2018, visiting the site of the Tubbs Fire in California, or Big Pine Key in Florida, which took the brunt of Hurricane Irma. He found that people are still recovering from these events years later. In some places, entire communities have simply disappeared. Places like Kingston, North Carolina.
"It was one of the oldest African American communities in the country. And it was the only place that most people in that community had ever lived, they were the first in the history of their families to own homes, and nobody ever really wanted to live in any other place. But after the hurricane, the federal government didn't really give them all that much of a choice."
The trauma of losing not only your home, but your entire community, isn't something most people understand.
"A lot of people viewed this as a form of a humanitarian disaster. Itt erased this history and culture. That was a tragedy for a lot of people."
We tend to think of natural disasters in terms of how much money the disaster will cost, and it’s hard for most of us to contextualize what 306 billion dollars looks like. (That, by the way, is the estimated cost of weather and climate disasters from 2017.)
With so many natural disasters damaging homes or making them temporarily unliveable, an already stressed housing market is pushed even further. The Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County, California alone destroyed more than 5000 homes in under an hour. Landlords across the state, anticipating big insurance payouts, responded by drastically increasing rental prices. This left people without insurance with very few options.
“I thought it was one of the most alarming things that I heard, where people get these insurance payouts, and sometimes they would get thousands of dollars a month for living expenses from their insurance company. And the landlords knew that. And so they can charge rents of six or seven thousand a month because they knew somebody out there had the insurance money to pay it. But [in Santa Rosa), there was almost no one who could afford that who wasn't getting these big insurance checks. There's almost nowhere you could go. And the state, to my knowledge, didn't do anything.”
This is the reality that many Americans are facing as climate change driven disasters increase. The people that Bittle interviewed for his book shared their stories because they want people to know what happened - and because they don’t want to be forgotten.
“I think that that's what made most of them willing to talk to me and relive these very, very difficult moments that they thought that, you know, after the initial coverage of whatever had happened to them, they were kind of ignored, and they really wanted people to know that, you know, it takes months years for things to go back to normal if they ever do.”
Ultimately, how we adapt to the era of climate displacement will come down to a couple of basic questions: What do we owe our fellow humans? And how do we put strategies in place now to deal with the inevitable storms on the horizon?
Jake Bittle may not have all the answers, but he's asking the right questions.
Listen to the full interview with Jake Bittle on Off the Page, available now on your favorite podcast app.
