How to Move an Entire Town (The Internal Migration Transforming Human Geography in the United States)

America is in the middle of the next Great Migration, driven by climate change, and we don't even realize it.

There is a phenomenon unfolding in every corner of America that has gone largely unrecognized, although pieces of the saga have received a great deal of attention. Entire Staten Island neighborhoods, devastated by Hurricane Sandy, took home buyouts and moved elsewhere. Midwestern farm towns dispersed after one too many biblical floods, and Westerners besieged by drought and wildfire have sought new places to live. It doesn’t end there. Public housing residents have been flooded out in North Carolina, tourist towns along both coasts have wrestled with moving gradually inland, and indigenous communities from Louisiana to Alaska have fought for self-determination while grappling with losing the lands of their people forever.

These disasters are often understood as tragic examples of climate change coming home to roost, but they are rarely identified as part of a larger trend, one that is well-understood by social scientists and local leaders, yet virtually invisible to most of us: America’s sweeping, internal, climate-driven migration. Most migration related to climate change occurs within borders, not across them. While news coverage focuses on the gripping stories of people crossing national borders to flee deadly droughts and floods, climate migration is already happening right here in the United States, and it will transform the landscape, politics and culture of our nation.

How To Move An Entire Town tells the heartbreaking and often inspiring story of this crisis. Veteran climate writer Alexandra Tempus has spent the last decade travelling across the country, chronicling the stories of places that have been ravaged by climate migration firsthand, from whispered conversations at insider conferences about the taboo subject of managed retreat, to basement meetings among community members facing forced relocation. Full of never-before-seen glimpses of migration happening across the country, this book will reframe everything you thought you knew about climate change.