The Great Churn

I'm writing a book.

I’m devoting this month’s newsletter to a very exciting and very scary piece of news: I’m writing a book.

The working title for the book is The Great Churn. It will be published by Simon & Schuster some time in the next few years—I don’t know exactly when, but I’m working as fast as I can.

The book is going to be about climate migration in the United States. It will follow the lives of Americans who have been displaced in the past decade by hurricanes, wildfires, rising sea levels, and extreme heat, from the hills of Northern California to the swamps of North Carolina and from the beaches of New Jersey to the deserts of Arizona. In telling the stories of the nation’s first climate refugees, the book will show how the climate crisis is poised to divide vulnerable communities along lines of race and class. It will also trace the contours of a new national geography, showing how climate change will cause huge shifts in where people live over the coming century.

That might sound a bit too ambitious for a 24-year-old freelancer who’s never had a full-time job, but at the core this is really a story about something I’ve been writing about for almost seven years now: housing. The single most important factors that determine if someone can weather the effects of the climate crisis are whether that person owns property and how much that property is worth. Can you afford to elevate your house above rising waters? Can you afford to rent inside the fire line? Does the government think your house is valuable enough to justify building a seawall around it? What about valuable enough to divert scarce water away from struggling farmland? These are the questions that will drive the next century of climate migration—it’s less about ice caps and El Niño than it is about property markets, the people who control them, and the people they screw over.

Focusing on close to a dozen communities across the country, the book will chart a progression from denial to acceptance to retreat, showing how the pressure caused by a warming world will gradually pull vulnerable communities apart at the seams. In the first phase, the rich batten down the hatches while the poor get forced out; in the second, the rich scramble for safety while the poor get left in the lurch; and in the third, retreat, the community either transforms itself for a post-climate world or dissolves altogether, its inhabitants rebuilding wherever they can. We’re already seeing this progression take shape in coastal and inland communities alike, and by the end of the century millions of people could meet the status of “climate migrants.”

The title of the book, The Great Churn, came from a researcher I spoke to in June when I was researching the book proposal, and that researcher himself had picked it out of an academic paper. This researcher used the phrase “churn” to describe what has happened in Houston, where the county government has bought out and demolished more than 10,000 houses in the past twenty years to prevent future flooding. All the occupants of these houses received checks for the value of their homes, but what happened next is a lot more messy: the older white families in the flooded neighborhoods took their assets and leveraged the checks to buy homes in the suburbs, while the Hispanic families in the same neighborhoods stayed close by, in the flood zone, largely because they had kids in the nearby school district or couldn’t afford to live elsewhere. A simple and well-intentioned policy—buy out the houses so the people don’t drown—had created a bizarre kind of white flight, severing integrated neighborhoods and inadvertently causing many people to move into homes that were even more vulnerable than the ones they’d left behind.

The churn is what happens when the chaos of climate change intersects with a system that privileges property over people: decisions about migration, relocation, and human dignity are made according to a calculus of insurance risk and investment value. Safe shelter itself becomes a scarce commodity, one that is doled out according to the decisions of local governments or snatched up by whoever can afford it. The end result is that a lot of people get displaced, just as they do in tough housing markets or in cities that have blown up public housing projects. The only difference is that in the case of climate change, the displacement is not a local phenomenon: over the next hundred years it will begin to shift the demographic balance of the country, pushing people out of the uninhabitable south and toward the increasingly hospitable north.

The story of climate migration, then, is not a linear movement from seashore to higher ground but a roiling, turbulent process, one that picks people up and spits them out in places they never thought they’d land. The more I learn about these growing trends of displacement, the more shocked I am that they haven’t gotten more attention, and the more determined I am to tell the story the right way.

The process for this book began last November, when I went to Houston to report a story about flood buyouts for The Baffler. In early April, during the depths of quarantine, I received a cold email from a literary agent who asked me if I’d ever thought about writing a book before. With little freelance work on my platter, I dove headlong into researching the issue of climate migration, moving outward from the Houston story. I was lucky enough to be able to devote a few uninterrupted months to putting together an outline and a detailed proposal, and once that was done, things moved very quickly.

Needless to say, writing this book will be a Herculean task, and I’m going to need all the help I can get. If you have thoughts, tips, rants, or questions about sea-level rise, hurricanes, wildfires, extreme heat, disaster insurance, flood walls, FEMA, the water table, or really anything else that has to do with the issue, please get in touch. I couldn’t be more excited to get started and I can’t wait to keep you all posted on how it’s going. I owe a lot of people a lot of gratitude for helping me get to this point, and I remain very humbled by the challenge ahead.