We can't ignore climate change — and the displacement it causes — any longer.
 | By Cornelia Channing Editorial Assistant, Sunday Opinion |
By now, most of us are familiar — perhaps a little too familiar — with the news cycle that follows a natural disaster. There are the harrowing stories of evacuations and the requisite drone footage surveying the damage. There are the somber-voiced climate scientists explaining the increase in extreme weather events. There is talk of insurance claims and relief money. But what happens after the emergency workers and camera crews leave? How long does it take to rebuild what was destroyed? And do these communities — and the lives of their residents — ever really return to the way they were before? |
In this past weekend's Sunday Opinion section, the journalist Jake Bittle dug into some of these questions in a deeply reported and emotionally gripping essay, exploring how climate change is transforming the American landscape and reshaping where and how we live. |
The essay — which is adapted from Bittle's forthcoming book, "The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration" — follows Becca and Sergio Fuentes, a Houston couple who lost their home to Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Their story is heartbreaking and seems to sit at the intersection of a whole slew of issues that feel defining of this moment in American life: climate change, of course, but also the housing crisis, economic inflation, the shifting demographics of American cities and the increasing elusiveness of homeownership. The essay shows how these factors combine to make the process of rebuilding after disaster incredibly arduous for many families and utterly impossible for some. |
Perhaps most compelling, Bittle's reporting reveals how willful naïveté about the scope and seriousness of climate change is visible in the infrastructure of American cities. Floodplains are not wide enough. Dams are not built well enough. Entire neighborhoods (entire cities, even) are built on vulnerable ground. And when they are flooded or burned or ripped apart in a storm — as they now are with increasing frequency — we simply rebuild, perpetuating a cycle of damage and repair. We know better, yet we keep putting ourselves in the same position. |
This may sound bleak, and in some ways it is. But Bittle offers a vision of a different way forward. Let's hope we can learn from our mistakes and adapt.
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