Slade - American Exodus

Praise for American Exodus

Holding this book should feel like the touch of a cattle prod. But most of us have hides too thick to feel the shock and we will need several more, of ever-higher voltage, before we heed its message. For those with thinner skins, read it and be prepared.

Clive Hamilton, author, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering

Standing apart from often-tedious tomes on climate change, Giles Slades fast-moving American Exodus shows how it could create huge population movements that would bring US and Mexican catastrophe, perhaps amid Canadian opportunity. He ranges compellingly over North America and the globe, time and space, migration and settlement, plus history, science and art. He opens out thought by offering imagination, wit, detail, compassion and style. This book looks to become an accessible classic that might persuade you to move north before the rush. Watch Canada. And maybe watch out, Canada, too.

Deborah Popper and Frank Popper, originators of the Buffalo Commons idea

American Exodus is the more polite title for a book that might have been called, as a chapter sub-head has it, The Awful Truth about how climate change will remake the settlement of a continent. Characteristically widely and deeply researched, Slades new book argues persuasively that over the coming century much of the southern half and coastal zones of North America will become uninhabitable. The exodus of the title will then come to Canada relatively green, wet, and mild. But as Slade points out, not all of Canada will be hospitable under climate change either. An engagingly eclectic meditation on the century to come, and the dramatic changes for which our countries and their leaders are woefully unprepared.

Chris Wood, journalist and author, Down the Drain: How We Are Failing To Protect Our Water Resources

Giles Slade has never shrunk from talking about the next big idea. Now he takes on climate change and its potentially disastrous consequences for the United States. These include economic collapse and the turning of millions of Americans into postmodern Okies trying to cross their northern border into an unwelcoming nation. Slade makes plain that although America may still be the most powerful country in the world, in the face of recent natural disasters associated with climate change urban heat waves, droughts and superstorms the nation has looked like a hundred-pound weakling. As he paints a picture of a nation dangerously unprepared to face the current crisis, even fans of Slades previous work may find American Exodus a very inconvenient truth.

Edward Kohn, author, Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896

American Exodus assumes, unlike some, that global warming and climate changes are real threats to human survival. Instead of offering the usual standard response to this global issue, Giles Slade goes beyond this, and suggests provocative actions we need for the reproduction of life in North America. Slade shows that migration has always been an outcome of climate changes since the early 20th century, and projects that future American migration to Canada for survival is a likely scenario based on his rich analysis of the human migratory history of North America.

Sing C. Chew, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research UFZ and editor, Nature + Culture

AMERICAN

EXODUS

For Betty Slade...

still watching the world change after 94 years.

Enjoy this, Mom. Love and thanks.

AMERICAN

EXODUS

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE

COMING FLIGHT FOR SURVIVAL

GILES SLADE

Copyright 2013 by Giles Slade. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Diane McIntosh. Cover image: iStock

First printing September 2013.

New Society Publishers acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-86571-749-7 eISBN: 978-1-55092-548-7

Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of American Exodus should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below.

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Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:

New Society Publishers

P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada

(250) 247-9737

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Slade, Giles, author

American exodus : climate change and the coming flight for survival / Giles Slade.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-86571-749-7 (pbk.)

1. Climatic changes United States. 2. Climatic changes Social aspects United States. 3. Environmental refugees United States Forecasting. 4. Migration, Internal Environmental aspects United States. 5. Emigration and immigration Environmental aspects United States. 6. United States Environmental conditions. I. Title.

QC903.2.U6S53 2013 304.80973 C2013-904546-5

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Contents

We are vanishing from the earth, yet I cannot think we are useless or else Usen [the Great Giver] would not have created us. He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each.

GERONIMO (1906)

Hey gringo, gringa! Wake up.

Climate change has already made a desert of northern Mexico. And droughts in Baja California Sur, Chihuahua, and Coahuila are expected to lengthen and intensify. Twenty million Mexicans currently live in conditions of acute food insecurity. The hardships in these border regions have launched massive migration into the United States since 1982. Things in Mexico can only get worse. A recent Whitehall security report made this prediction about the future of the region: