Living in Ruins: On Jake Bittle’s “The Great Displacement”
Jake Bittle | The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration | Simon & Schuster | 2023 | 368 Pages
Some fifteen years ago, I first encountered Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as an overambitious grade-school student. In a book published as a companion to the documentary film, maps displayed the expanding American littorals that were projected to inundate some of the country’s most densely settled coastal regions. These maps were meant to act as a call to action, one of the many inconvenient truths Gore thought might stir a collective awakening to future dangers; this is what will happen if we fail to act, what awaits us if the political will to action is found lacking. They were, like many of the climate projections of the early 2000s, a warning of things to come.
In Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement, the moment of prognostication has long since passed, and the speculative remaking of American geography by a changing climate is no longer so speculative. Rather, what Bittle hopes to capture through a series of chapter-length vignettes is a process of socio-spatial reorganization that is already well underway. In eight chapters that dance between place-based reporting and historical contextualization, spanning the country from North Carolina to California, Bittle aims to examine the array of climatic forces that are eroding our vulnerable communities and the assumptions of climatic stability they were built on.
The magnitude of events in The Great Displacement feels biblical—generational storms and rising floodwaters; the devastating flames of California fires; the wringing thirst of drought; columns of dispossessed refugees cast into an indeterminate exodus. This is how we encounter Bittle’s many protagonists, who range from exotic fruit growers in the Florida Keys, to the descendants of eighteenth and nineteenth-century French-Native American intermarriage in Louisiana, to cattle ranchers in central Arizona. They are all sympathetic figures, thrown into the churn of events beyond their power, yet holding out hope that they might find some way to endure. We meet Patrick, for example, the exotic fruit grower, just as Hurricane Irma wipes his verdant growing sanctuary off the map. By the end of the chapter, we leave him and his grove in what Bittle describes as “limbo”—cautiously repairing his property while thinking daily about the next storm that might again reverse all his efforts. Or there are Mary and Alton Verdin, embattled and storm-battered residents of the Louisiana bayou who, despite encroaching corporate giants and rising waters, endeavor to remain where others have ceded their ancestral homes. Bittle paints intimate and deeply moving portraits of these and other subjects, all people on the front line of early-stage climate displacement. In each of his chapters, we encounter a new ensemble of characters battling a different convergence of social and environmental forces, all while contending with the implicit suggestion that similar circumstances might await more than a few of us readers in the not-so-distant future.
Bittle, like so many other authors of modern climate crisis books, acts as the Virgil to our wandering Dante, guiding us through the many circles of the terrestrial hell wrought by climatic disaster, pausing but momentarily to comment on or converse with some poor soul whom we happen upon. As 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. Bittle takes us through the flood-inundated streets of Houston and the parched cotton fields of Arizona, while offering commentary and contextualization that is, in turn, both fast-paced and incisive. It is similar to Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, or Jeff Goodell’s The Water Will Come, both wandering accounts of our shifting, uncanny world of climatic destabilization and the people on the forefront of improvised adaptation. To repurpose the words of Susan Sontag, incisive chroniclers like Kolbert and Bittle read as “precocious archaeologists of these ruins-in-the-making”—documentarians of a slow-motion collapse.
Yet this approach, 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.
Other authors, writing in what they see as the potential dawn of a new environmental-political era, have resisted this narrative depoliticization by positing the human and environmental costs of climate change as negative externalities of a nameable (and opposable) system of political economy. They more pointedly describe the contradictions between environmental declension and the ill-equipped state meant to deal with it as a sign of liberalism’s moral and functional bankruptcy—its untimely mutation into a neoliberal variant that has disaggregated risk to the individual as it divested from more robust visions of collectivized economic, social, and now, environmental security. By embedding the climate crisis within a nameable socio-economic and ideological apparatus, more politically motivated authors can map out a terrain of resistance and countervailing struggle. In short, rather than act as documentarians, they may embody the role of diagnostician and provocateur, someone who looks to turn climate anxieties into mobilizable political energy aimed at systemic institutional and policy reform. Bittle’s book lacks such political verve. Where it absolutely excels in narrative exposition, it comes up short in constructing a more coherent theory of the case from the numerous studies that it deploys.
This is no condemnation; The Great Displacement is an impressively panoramic snapshot of a shared moment in time, the eerie interregnum of early-stage ecological breakdown and social reorganization that Stephanie Wakefield has called the Anthropocene’s “back loop.” However, in a national context where the mere acknowledgment of climate change, not to mention our responses to it, are conditioned by political fealty, the lack of a political bent or of a sustained discussion of politics at all, strikes the reader as a conspicuous absence. How we interpret the climatic catastrophes that Bittle recounts, and the responses we think they demand, are generally questions of political affiliation above all else (think of Trump’s claims that California’s wildfires were caused by poor forest management, rather than climate change). To speak of localized manifestations of climate change without addressing the national politics involved elides an entire dimension of the problem.
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Political dimensions aside, one of the most incisive elements of The Great Displacement is Bittle’s ability to demonstrate just how much of the modern world—market logics and insurance policies, socio-spatial formations, industrial agriculture—is predicated on the relative climatic stability of the Holocene, and therefore increasingly imperiled by the volatility of the Anthropocene, the geological era of man. Confronted with a changing environment, many foundational institutions lapse into an absurd inefficacy, thereby layering administrative burdens on top of environmental ones. The result is a parallel ecological and bureaucratic breakdown that fails to serve anyone. In some instances, for example, federal regulations and procedural formalities have barred people from receiving FEMA aid after disasters. Those who could not provide a deed to their property or did not know that they needed to buy flood insurance had their relief applications denied. In other instances, FEMA footed the bill for residential reconstruction efforts four or five times after repeated flooding inundated the same floodplains again and again.
As the flipside to protracted breakdown, Bittle also guides us through many of the seemingly Sisyphean attempts to counteract, or at least mitigate, the worst effects of climate change. Some, like raising roadways to keep them navigable during floods, seem hopelessly inadequate. Others, like the planned relocation of entire communities, feel unfortunate yet more attuned to the magnitude of the infrastructural challenges of remaining in place.
In Bittle’s chapter on the rising sea around Norfolk, Virginia, we see how the utilitarian calculus of climate risk mitigation has birthed a fledgling “resilience” industry—the moniker for a new actuarial discipline that casts a calculating eye toward climate-battered communities and assesses what might be salvaged, how, and at what cost. At their most developed, industries dealing in resiliency solutions might propose billion-dollar infrastructure projects intended to allow communities to weather massive storms or rising seas. In their most futile instantiation, resilience projects look more like attempts to forestall the inevitable, to keep the music playing so the party can continue just a moment longer.
Yet resilience acts as the conceptual counterpoint to another process that The Great Displacement explores in fact, if not in name: ruination. For the environmental scholars who deploy the term—predominantly in the humanities and social sciences—ruination represents the realist’s view of life in the Anthropocene, versus what they describe as the delusions of the techno-utopians (those who believe in the silver bullet solutions of geoengineering or carbon capture) or the status-quo optimism of the resilience crowd. Ruination presumes a certain amount of inevitable breakdown and decay in our collective ecological and economic life. For its proponents, our task is charting new strategies for what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “living in ruins” in her enchanting book, The Mushroom at the End of the World. It is this task that most of Bittle’s central figures are occupied with—trying to chart a path for personal and familial survival as their worlds seem to collapse on all sides.
By the end of The Great Displacement, we are left with a disquieting sense of inevitability. That we will feel the painful effects of climate change is a point authors like Bittle now fully concede; there is no if, only when, where, and how much. The still-outstanding question—the one The Great Displacement’s many protagonists are navigating in real-time, and that Bittle attempts a response to as the book’s closing punctuation—is how we will manage collective life as this process of ruination accelerates. For many, living in ruins is simply a matter of stubbornness and ill-fated commitment. They are anchored in place by the personal histories and social bonds that comprise our dense social geographies—determined to remain come hell or high water.