Forcing “off the grid” people to meet ridiculous building codes in places nobody should build in the first place is paving the wrong cowpaths. Move the damn cows to safer places.
Conversation
In general, this is an early case study in what climate change related politics and displacement will look like. And I’m well aware that LA is nearly as ridiculous a place to live, cf water scarcity, etc.
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But given a global population pushing 8 billion, some high-risk areas are going to have to be occupied. The American southwest in unfortunately one of them.
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I have no real skin in this CA fire situation since I’m a renter and will likely not live in CA long term (doing some hard and unsuccessful thinking about where to move to next and hopefully for the last time — “retire there” intent move), but drawing some real lessons here.
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Climate resiliency is now in my top 5 factors to consider, making “where to live” an even more insanely hard problem. It wasn’t even on the list a decade ago. And it’s compounded by the fact that my horizons have lengthened. Tired of moving around.
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Nomadism has lost its appeal. I’d like to settle down somewhere, which pushes my horizon 20-40y out instead of 2-4. This post I wrote almost exactly 10 years ago feels like from another planet 🤔
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Ironically these fire-risk people live in RVs and move around a lot, orbiting their burned properties, waiting for an OPM-funded rebuild. But they’re not nomads, they’re extreme settlers. They don’t even want to move from counties. “Fire nomads” is a poetic but misleading label.
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I grok but dislike their autochtonic location-attached lifestyle sensibilities. Most of my family is that way too. Though I’ve never lived out of an RV, I’m probably more of a real nomad (22 apartments, 8 cities/7 states/t cultural regions in 24 years as an indie adult in the US)
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But ironically, now that I’m finally attracted to “settling” somehow, the state of the world may turn us all into “fire nomads”
On a long enough time scale, most parts of the world are like fire-trap-California 🤣
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Top 5 factors I hope I’ll be able to hit within the next few moves/years (hitting this in 1 move seems unlikely)
1. Local culture we can tolerate
2. Quality healthcare
2. Affordable
3. Climate resilience
4. Decent density and proximity to airports/roads
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But looking at this list, I feel a bit more sympathy for the fire nomads. If I can’t seem to figure out this equation with all my experience of moving, privileges and free variables (no kids, more income/wealth/marketable skills than these people)… I suspect most can’t.
