Americans’ Climate Migration Has Begun

The first generation of climate migrants tries to cling to the places they call home, but bureaucrats, wallets, and an overheating planet have the final say.

By Gabrielle Gurley

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration

By Jake Bittle Simon & Schuster

Patrick Garvey loved living in the Florida Keys. Famed as an oasis for quirky folks, the idyllic limestone island chain offered Garvey, who’d journeyed down from the Canadian Maritimes, the kind of off-the-beaten-track life he craved. On isolated Big Pine Key, he found his passion project, cultivating a rare tropical fruit grove. He had a wife, twin daughters, and a pet pooch. Life was good— until September of 2017, when Hurricane Irma made a turn for the Keys. With his family already out of harm’s way, he stayed put and spent harrowing hours in a nearby school shelter with hundreds of other evacuees. Emerging hours later, Garvey picked his way across the pulverized island. He found his grove with only one solitary tree.

Hurricanes expose the perils of living on the front porch of the climate crisis. In the coming decades, severe storms, floods, fires, heat waves, and drought will force millions of Americans to search for new

Books homes. In The Great Displacement, journalist Jake Bittle delivers powerful stories of seven scarred communities and their people, compelled to cope with loss, unresponsive bureaucracies, and the prospect of future threats. Journeying across the South to the Southwest and into California, he digs deep into the personal experiences of these first climate crisis migrants and delivers a potent appraisal of the myriad forces already uprooting and complicating life for Americans as they scatter across the country.

Given the sweep of the continental United States, migration is a portal to some of the most fraught chapters in the country’s