Robert Suits, author of The Hobo: A History of America’s First Climate Migrants answers some questions
- Who are you – where did you grow up, what contact did you have with ‘nature’? (There’s good evidence to suggest that the main determinant of people getting properly switched on to environmental issues is unstructured play with minimal supervision in nature before age 11).
I grew up in the North Woods of North America—the band of mixed forest that stretches across Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—and within biking or driving distance of Lake Superior. It’s a stunningly beautiful place, but the landscape wears many scars that are just under the surface—in the neighborhood I grew up in, all the trees are the same age, and some of them take root in a kind of slate gray soil made of crushed mine rock. It is a landscape rich with nonhuman life, but it is extraordinarily anthropogenic.
I remembering writing something back when I was 15 or so that mused on all of these things, on the many walks and hikes and drives that I had taken through the continent—saying that these were the reasons I had become an environmentalist. I still think that’s probably true. Doubtless, they are a big part of why I became an environmental historian, too.
2) Tell us a little about your academic background – undergrad what where why, ditto for masters and PhD.
I grew up in an academic family—both my parents were scientists. And I went to a small college for my undergraduate degree (Amherst College, in New England), and loved it. There were a lot of draws for me at the time (and I was extremely lucky to have a family who encouraged me to do essentially whatever I wanted for my undergraduate)—the size, the setting, an open curriculum, and so on. Though I’ve always loved reading history books, I went in as a music major, wrote my senior thesis in it, and only picked up history as a double major.
While graduate school had certainly been a possibility, it took me several years to apply. I was disappointed with non-academic work, and though I figured there wouldn’t be a job at the other end of a history PhD, it would be a nice way to spend six years writing a book. In the end, I ended up with a book and a wonderful job.
It was a rocky path. I ended up switching my supervisor quite early on, and both my new advisors and my fellow PhD students radically changed my approach to history in a number of ways (a much bigger focus on labor and capitalism). I also think I probably came out the other end a better person—or at least a more thoughtful one. A couple of postdocs later, I’ve ended up at UCL.
3) In a nutshell (sorry!) what does your book – The Hobo: A History of America’s First Climate Migrants (Princeton University Press, 2026) – argue, and where did it “come from” – what gaps in the previous understandings was it filling, what ‘myths’ is it overthrowing, or at the least complicating?
Hobos were migrant workers because of an unpredictable climate and a steam-powered energy regime.
When we say “hobos,” we mean a group of long-distance migrant workers in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S., who moved seasonally between cities and the countryside. They existed in quasi-legal—really, mostly-illegal—spaces in the American West, dodging railroad police and working handshake contracts for bad bosses and rare but substantial payment.
And they existed for two reasons: First, the extraction industries hobos worked in had enormous year-to-year variability because of the climatic unpredictability of the American West. Employers never knew how many laborers they would need in a given season, so they hired migrants to plug the gaps. Second, no one managed to automate these industries, in large part because steam engines were big, bulky, and slow, unable to help much with harvesting wheat, cutting lumber, or construction. You needed human muscle power.
In the end, with new energy forms that could support much more miniaturized power, employers needed far fewer workers, and the mass migrant class vanished within basically a single decade.
I suppose relatively few people have thought about migrants environmentally. But this argument is less about gaps, and more about connecting disparate histories and asking what it means to consider them all together. Hobos are wonderful subjects in part because they travel so widely and work in so many different sectors—if you look through their eyes, you can see basically every industry of the American West at the same time.
4) Some readers will be thinking “but if you’re ‘rootless’ and have no love of/incentive of a particular place, then surely your attitude is going to be ‘use it up, move on’ – hardly an ecological example” – how would you respond?
There’s quite a number of ways I might respond to that. For one, some hobos often did love the environments they passed through—that was one big reason to go on frankly impractical cross-country trips in the first place. (Still is, as my own photo rolls can testify.) And their work absolutely orbited extraction and exhaustion, but this wasn’t really because they were rootless—it’s the other way around. Their work, and hobos themselves, moved rapidly to follow new and unexploited resources. In the end, pretty much everyone in the American West participated in this economy of relentless extraction—including farmers and ranchers whose families put down roots (ha, pun) for generations.
5) What were your favourite and least favourite bits of the process?
I love writing. Putting together everything into a narrative is a delight—from the outlining to the drafting to the chucking it in a bin and starting over. Writing a book is hard work; writing one that you like is nearly impossible. But I enjoy the challenge.
6) Who should read it (well, obviously, everyone should) and why? How would it help us make sense of our current and near future dilemmas/trilemmas/quadlemmas/n-lemmas?
You nailed it—it’s a book for absolutely everyone.
I really did try to write a book that basically anyone can pick up and read. That said, outside of people who want to read about hobos for their own sake, I think it’s for those interested in histories of the environment (obviously), capitalism, and specifically climate and energy. I think it’s also startlingly relevant to people who want to think about our own climate crisis.
Hobos faced an unstable climate and an energy transition, all while dealing with extremely precarious employment and threats of automation. In some industries, hobos were spectacularly unsuccessful in facing these challenges, and essentially disappeared from the workforce. In other industries, they successfully mobilized to defend labor and reduce precarity for everyone. Overall, their best moments came out of solidarity, and their worst out of prejudice and infighting.
As I write in the book, the situation hobos found themselves in doesn’t precisely map onto the one we face in the present day. Their climate disasters weren’t anthropogenic; the world was still being connected; the energy systems were different. But if you want to read a book showing how climate change and energy transitions changed life for the most destitute people in a society, read this one.
7) What next for you? What’s the next project?
It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that, although I’m a very fast writer on the day-to-day, projects seem to take a while. Writing is by far the fastest and most fun part of a book project for me; research is where I really tend to sweat it out and tinker with things for years. All of which is to say—there are a few different things that are brewing, including a probable second monograph on energy and American settler colonialism, but that and the others will all take a while to see the light of day.
8) Anything else you’d like to say.
Buy my book, of course! It’s quite affordable! Bookshop.org (US), (UK), or from the PUP website! (And the usual exhortations that requesting it at libraries, buying it from brick-and-mortar stores, and leaving reviews, are all great ways to help it out.)
