Climate chaos is here. It’s time to talk through our options, choices, decisions, and plans, and share if we’ve got anything we think can help with survival.
Each week let’s look at a problem for the Kos community to explore, something that every one of us is going to have to solve. A week should give us a little time to think about a topic, dig up some resources, ask questions, list a solution, and more. So let’s get started, and the first question is:
Are you staying or are you going?
- If you’re staying, why? What is there that makes you think it’ll be better to stay?
- If you’re going, why? Are you going away or going to?
- If you’re going to, what makes you think the place you’ve chosen is better?
- If you’re going away, what makes you think the place you are has to be left now?
- Or are you planning to be nomadic? How?
I’m going
Why? Because:
1. I live in San Francisco. Base level survival requires water and energy. In SF, both the majority of our water and our energy depend on the Hetch Hetchy dam; it is 167 miles away, and its pipes and aqueducts cross 7 counties and 2 major faults. When all your eggs are in one basket, and that basket is 167 miles away, disasters make it very easy for something major to go wrong and not be fixable.
2. All the science from multiple indicators concludes that the west is shifting to very very dry with periodic flooding.
3. SF is getting and will get more climate refugees. SF already has grotesque income inequality, a habit of punishing the poor and homeless, and a homeless death rate that has more than doubled in the last few years. So we’re looking at more refugees, more income inequality, more mistreatment, more deaths, and fewer resources.
4. Refugees go to cities, because that’s where the resources go, but SF has few resources of its own. It’s on a peninsula with great views and lots of shoreline, but almost everything — including water and energy — is imported from outside the city. Cut us off and we will have major problems. Food, medical supplies, parts and materials: this is another area where it will be very easy for something major to go wrong.
5. And large swaths of the city will flood, including areas that are being filled with housing right now, that include major parts of the transportation infrastructure, the sewage treatment plants, the electrical grid, and more. A city doesn’t survive the destruction of its infrastructure.
The search for a place to go to — a brief synopsis
NOMAD
We considered being nomadic, but for us the problems with permanent nomadic life outweighed the advantages, even in the most apocalyptic scenarios.
CALIFORNIA
We looked up and down the CA coast, but sea level rise, water, energy, and food and other resource issues were mostly the same as SF’s. And I refused to look at anything north of Cape Mendacino as that tectonic danger is much more than I can live with.
For the rest of CA, the Central Valley is hot and getting hotter, the Sierras and southern Cascades and Trinity Alps are drying and stressed and burning, and there’s too little water in the desert. So we started looking outside CA and the U.S.
THE REST OF THE WORLD
All the Mediterranean climates are drying and burning just like CA. The far north is heating faster than the mid latitudes, causing rapid destabilization of ecosystem health and resilience. The equitorial countries are frying and there’s fighting happening in and around most of them. In the far south, Argentina has major political issues, South Africa is prone to extreme drought, Namibia is too far away from the rest of our family for my partner, and New Zealand is — besides being expensive and very earthquake-prone — not interested in us. We didn’t look at any islands smaller than New Zealand because of sea level rise. We didn’t look at countries with obvious high natural disaster risks, such as Japan.
NORTH AMERICA
Mexico is drying out and Canada is burning. Looking for both energy and water, plus the ability to grow a significant amount of our food, took us to the Great Lakes region, which is getting hotter but not drying out so far. And that’s where we are going to go.
How About You?
That was our thought process over a number of years and a lot of research. What are you thinking?
