Book #23: The Great Displacement
Re-drawing the map of the U.S. (and no, that's not a "Civil War" movie reference)
Hi friends! This is Book Club for the Planet, an online community for us to read about the climate crisis in community. Looking for even more to read? Check out my other, no-longer-so-new Substack where I write about writing, climate collapse and adaptation, sci-fi, speculative fiction, life on other worlds, and more.
I didn’t expect 25-odd folks to show up for conversations about degrowth communism, but WOW am I glad you did! Thank you to everyone who participated in our book club talks for Slow Down. I loved learning from you all and imagining what a degrowth future could look like.
Our next book is The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle. Of all of the books for 2024, this one feels the most urgent. Estimates warn that we could have 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050, a number that’s too staggering to really comprehend. We’re already seeing communities displaced by climate crises, whether from rising seas, hurricanes, wildfires, erosion, heat, and more. What will the future map of the United States look like as climate and migration reshape us?
I share this post with you on the heels of news about AMOC being amuck, and a particularly alarming podcast episode today about just that from NYT’s The Daily. I keep reading news about this summer projected to be especially warm, particularly stormy, pretty political-y. (A Stormy summer? Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Wishing you all cool weather and cool heads as we head into summer!
Book club dates: July 21 (virtual) and July 22 (in-person in Baltimore).
For continued reading, please check out Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush; Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant; The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells; and Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Don’t live in Baltimore? Join us virtually via Google Meets!
If you live in or near Baltimore, join us at Greedy Reads' Remington location for an in-person meet-up!. Please register in advance so we know how many folks to expect.
Happy reading and see you in July! ✨