It all started when journalist Jake Bittle visited Houston to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. He was sent to report on a FEMA program designed to move people away from flood-prone areas.
In conjunction with other stories involving displacement due to wildfires, Bittle began to realize he had a book idea slowly forming.
“I spent the last few years traveling around the United States speaking to people who’ve had to leave their homes, or who’ve been sort of forced out of their communities by various climate disasters from hurricanes to wildfires," Bittle said.
"And the book, which comes out in February, sort of compiles a few places around the country where those movements are most acute or where they’ve progressed the farthest thus far.”
Bittle said he’s discovered some recurring themes among people who’ve experienced such disasters. For people whose homes were destroyed, he said most don’t move very far away, potentially setting themselves up for more harm.
“A lot of incentives in the way that the federal government handles disaster recovery for people to build back basically exactly where they were," he said.
"Most insurance payouts, for instance like in Florida if your house gets destroyed, you basically have to build back where it was if you want to receive the insurance money.”
After the Paradise fire in California in 2018, Bittle said many residents moved to nearby Chico, exacerbating a housing shortage there.
Looking long-term, he said the upper Midwest is largely regarded as the area of the country most resilient to climate change. Bittle specifically pointed out Minnesota, Michigan, and Cincinnati, Ohio as potential climate havens.
After analyzing so many similar incidents around the country, he began to come up with a thesis.
“Basically, what I argue, is that the government should plow a lot more money into building what are called resilience projects,” he said.
“So flood walls, water supply projects, conservation stuff, or hardening homes to wildfires. This is something that the federal government has experimented with over the past few years, but really these are mostly demonstration projects or tests.”
He said the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act were a good start, but the federal government needs a more comprehensive strategy to move people to areas less prone to disaster.
Touching on a Utah-centric issue, Bittle called the current crisis in the Great Salt Lake “bleak.” He said local leaders should do more, as low water levels could lead to wind storms that could blow poisonous arsenic dust into the Salt Lake Valley.
“A lot of the city and state leaders haven’t exactly gone for the most aggressive conservation approaches like a city like Las Vegas has done for instance," he said.
"So until you go that route, it’s hard to imagine finding a permanent solution. And some of the biggest impacts for migratory birds and air pollution are really right there in front of us.”
His book, titled“The Great Displacement,” is set to be released by Simon & Schuster in February.
A link to Bittle’s work in the environmental publication Grist can be found here.
