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brandonpytel 's review for:
This book is a great complementary book to other climate commentaries, specifically adding a slew of first hand stories of those people who have already experienced the impacts of climate change — and forecasting similar stories that will play out this century.
As droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods break communities down to their core, they also “brittles social and economic order, widening cracks that have been there the whole time,” until eventually the pressure builds enough where climate change physically pushes people around, causing displacement: movements that are “unpredictable, chaotic, and life-changing.”
“This book tries to illuminate the climatological forces that push climate migrants our of their homes and the political and economic structures that determine where they end up, but it also tries to memorialize the many places that climate change will force us to abandon.”
It does this by traveling across the country, telling stories of people on the edges of disaster — from farms and homes destroyed in Key West to insurance rates skyrocketing after wildfires in California to the disappearance of entire tribes from eroded land in Louisiana to homes benign designed improperly like in Houston and built in the wrong place to begin with like in Norfolk, Virginia — and the frustrating, time-sucking, and expensive reality of being stuck without a home after climate change pushes people out.
Bittle also tells the story of inequality, housing crises, and the tough decisions that governments and communities face when determining whether to leave or stay or how to adapt.
“The world is already being remade, but its future is far from set in stone. The next century may usher us into a brutal and unpredictable world, a world in which only the wealthiest and most privileges can protect themselves from dispossession, or it may usher un into a fairer world — a world where one’s home may not be impregnable, but where one's right to shelter is guaranteed.”
As droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods break communities down to their core, they also “brittles social and economic order, widening cracks that have been there the whole time,” until eventually the pressure builds enough where climate change physically pushes people around, causing displacement: movements that are “unpredictable, chaotic, and life-changing.”
“This book tries to illuminate the climatological forces that push climate migrants our of their homes and the political and economic structures that determine where they end up, but it also tries to memorialize the many places that climate change will force us to abandon.”
It does this by traveling across the country, telling stories of people on the edges of disaster — from farms and homes destroyed in Key West to insurance rates skyrocketing after wildfires in California to the disappearance of entire tribes from eroded land in Louisiana to homes benign designed improperly like in Houston and built in the wrong place to begin with like in Norfolk, Virginia — and the frustrating, time-sucking, and expensive reality of being stuck without a home after climate change pushes people out.
Bittle also tells the story of inequality, housing crises, and the tough decisions that governments and communities face when determining whether to leave or stay or how to adapt.
“The world is already being remade, but its future is far from set in stone. The next century may usher us into a brutal and unpredictable world, a world in which only the wealthiest and most privileges can protect themselves from dispossession, or it may usher un into a fairer world — a world where one’s home may not be impregnable, but where one's right to shelter is guaranteed.”