Climate adaptation is often framed as a challenge of the future. In Who Gets to Adapt? Environmental Elites, Blue-Collar Communities, and the Climate Divide, Robert W. Collin demonstrates that its outcomes are rooted in history.
This book offers a rigorous historical analysis of how protection, risk, and inequality have been structured over time in the United States. Drawing on environmental law, land-use planning, and public policy, Collin traces how decades of decisions-regarding housing, infrastructure, labor, and investment-have shaped a persistent "climate divide." What appears today as uneven vulnerability to flooding, extreme heat, and displacement is revealed as the cumulative result of long-standing institutional patterns.
Praised by Kirkus Reviews as "a well-argued analysis of climate adaptation in contemporary America," the book reframes adaptation as a historical process, not simply a technical response to climate change. It shows how systems designed to protect populations often reproduce unequal outcomes, privileging some communities while leaving others exposed.
With particular attention to blue-collar and marginalized communities, Collin highlights how adaptation is shaped by both past and present structures of power. The work advances a framework of "flourishing," emphasizing measurable outcomes such as harm reduction, community stability, and equitable protection.
Combining historical depth with interdisciplinary analysis, Who Gets to Adapt? contributes to scholarship in environmental justice, climate governance, and socio-legal studies. It offers a critical account of how the past continues to shape climate futures-and why equitable adaptation depends on understanding that history.
