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.
Conversation
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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