The Great Displacement with Jake Bittle

580 Coombs St.,Napa CA 94559

27 February, 2023

Description

Join us Monday, February 27, 2023 at 6:00pm at the Napa County Library for an evening with Jake Bittle in conversation with Naveena Sadasivam about his book The Great Displacement. ABOUT THE BOOK The untold story of climate migration—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future. When the subject of migration that will be caused by global climate change comes up in the media or in conversation, we often think of international refugees—those from foreign countries who will emigrate to the United States to escape disasters like rising shorelines and famine. What many people don’t realize though, is that climate migration is happening now—and within the borders of the United States. A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is the first book to report on climate migration in the US. 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 decade alone, the federal government has sponsored the relocation of 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, pushing more people away from their homes. Rising seas have already begun to sink eastern coastal cities, while extreme heat, unprecedented drought, and unstoppable wildfires plague the west. Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement created by climate change, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest national migration we’ve yet to experience. 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—forcing us out of the country’s hardest-hit areas, uprooting countless communities, and prompting a massive migration that will fundamentally reshape the United States. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jake Bittle is a staff writer for Grist, where he covers climate change. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, and a number of other publications. EARLY PRAISE "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 ABOUT NAVEENA SADASIVAM Naveena Sadasivam is a staff writer covering the environment, energy, and climate change at Grist. She previously covered environmental issues for The Texas Observer, Inside Climate News, and ProPublica. At ProPublica, she was part of a team that reported on the water woes of the West, a project that was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting. She is also a Livingston Award finalist and has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of Environmental Journalists for her work. Sadasivam has a degree in chemical engineering and a master’s in environmental and science reporting from New York University.