When I review books, typically the books are climate fiction. Here, though, is a non-fiction climate change book review.

I’ll confess this right up front in these thoughts on Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, published by Simon & Schuster, in 2023: I couldn’t get through the book.

First, it may be that I was consuming The Great Displacement as an audio book, a format I find often annoying in that I read quickly and find the page format a well-known and useful medium for checking back of what’s written, such as on arguments and reports, data, and references made in a book. Second, this is a big book, with the audio equivalent to the 368 pages coming in at 10 hours, 26 minutes, which made the book that much more difficult, given that audio is slow. And, oh, this was a 1.2x speed, and I would have gone faster, but the audio book artist’s voice didn’t sound good at higher speeds.

But my biggest complaint is that the content is maddeningly repetitive and fundamentally missing the target on the topic of the book.

I slogged through the Introduction and the first chapter, and both of those were mainly recounting various disaster sites experienced by a selection of people, and then I fast-forwarded—well, skipped—through a number of other chapters and basically found more of the same old same old, and then I decided to skip ahead to the concluding chapter. As I transversed the work (while doing my elliptical exercises over several days), I found myself yelling at the book and mainly in terms of wanting the text to get to the point or in reaction to the overbearingly drawn-out explanations and assumptions. I’m claiming, by the way, such shouting as an aerobic add-on in my daily workouts.

Feeling guilty about my negative view of the value of the book, I went back and listened to Chapter 7, “Bailout,” in full.

No change of opinion.

Basically, this book should have made a nice long-form essay or magazine article. Basically, using extreme weather-related disasters as examples of what we can increasingly expect as climate change continues is fine and dandy, but if I want a recount of disasters and people’s personal aftermath reactions, I need only to read the daily news. What I had hoped to get from the book was a thoughtful analysis of the consequences of climate migration in the United States (the book focuses on the states) and I would have settled for that, although, frankly, the biggest numbers of climate migrators are going to be from Global South countries heading our way and towards Europe. Regardless of geographic limitations, this focus should include political considerations, but the book is entirely light on such. Don’t take my word for it; here’s a quote from Dante LaRiccia, of the Cleveland Review of Books, published on May 12, 2023:

Yet this approach [“…an exercise in narrative exposition, this approach is both highly adept and remarkably engaging. Bittle’s book is an exemplary representative of a specific genre of climate non-fiction, one in which the author (usually a journalist) acts as a meandering tour guide through the brave new world of climatic instability and environmental change…”], while narratively engaging, is also one that strikes the reader as noticeably apolitical. Attuned as most of us are to the political valences of the climate change debate, one might expect Bittle to inveigh at length on the partisan nature of disaster relief, for example, or the Republican commitment to austerity during a moment when robust public spending seems necessary not just for post-disaster relief and recovery, but proactive, anticipatory measures to minimize damage and costs before disaster strikes. These partisan divisions that inhibit climate policies on a federal level are all but absent from The Great Displacement.  

And, yes, that is why I was yelling, and yes, I did keep my difficulty level at my modest “8” on the elliptical’s manual setting, perhaps to have the breath. If I may quote myself, “Get to the point,” and “Yes, you’ve covered this already,” and “You’re a moron,” were among my shouts.

To be clear, Bittle is not a moron. He’s a competent journalist and a good writer. But I don’t need the provided extensive catalog of disasters and people’s reactions to them. What I’m more interested in is the policy and political consequences and who may be saying what about response and mitigation—the “displacement” of the title—but there’s not much more than discussion of insurance (a spot-on topic, yes).  I’m more interested in what might be done policy-wise or macro-consequence-wise, given the well-established fact of greenhouse gas runaway and global warming affecting the world’s climate with disastrous conditions that would, as the book’s title suggests, case a whole lot of people to figure out where they’d go. I’d even go along with a bit of a discussion of our inability to differentiate between extreme weather known within our records, since this counter-argument will inevitably be raised by policy consultants like Dr. Roger Pilke Jr., who make a career noting what we don’t know, and it would have been nice for Bittle to agree that causation of disastrous weather event by climate change for any particular weather event is indeed indiscernible to date, but that the trends are undeniable. Better yet, I would have liked to see how different segments of our economy are prepared—or not!—to address increasing disaster weather incidents, since things such as insurance coverage and managed retreat are central to the subject.

So, what do should we do about the prospect for overwhelmingly large-scale climate migrations? Here, unfortunately, Bittle largely punts, and all his journalistic talents in capturing peoples’ voices about suffering disasters is missing when it comes to capturing other voices addressing potential policies and possible economic consequences from climate migration and amelioration. Even when Bittle reports on such ideas, these are largely straw men examples of the personal challenges ahead, and not of societal-scale challenges. I guess that Bittle thinks the reader is smart enough to extrapolate on his or her or xer own, and readers are indeed smart enough. But failing to report on a developing plethora of proposed policies and economic consequences is not an effective use of a journalist’s practice.

Look, anyone paying attention in the second decade of the twenty-first century knows about climate change-related disastrous weather events. But what do we do about the prospect for widespread ruin? What is the significance of such huge movements of people to the world? The Great Displacement largely fails to go there.