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 of Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering

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. If History is the Teacher of Life, Slade is right on the mark!

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

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, Slade’s 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

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 Slade’s 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

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Banyen Books November 14th
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