Food for thought: When You Should Not Adapt in Place

[seafan]

Sharon Astyk writes a thought-provokingly practical piece to digest and tuck away for not-so-distant future reference.



When You Should Not Adapt in Place


June 2, 2010

Most of the people who take Adapting-In-Place, reasonably enough, are doing so because they intend to stay where they are or fairly nearby in the coming decades. They know that they may not be in the perfect place, but for a host of reasons - inability to sell a house, job or family commitments, love of place...you name it, they are going to stay. Or maybe it is the best possible place for them. But I do think it is important to begin the class with the assumption that everything is on the table. Because as little as each of us likes to admit it, it is. There will be many migrations in the coming decades, many of them unwilling and unwanted. And it is always easier (not easy) to consciously choose to step away before you are forced to leave than it is to abandon in pain and storm and disaster your home and never be fully able to return. So it is important to ask - who should not stay in place?

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Our homes are our homes, and our right to stay and choose them sometimes seems inviolable - but it isn't. In the next decades there are going to be a lot of migrants - and you may be one of them. Migrating and settling in a reasonably liveable place might be better - or it might not, and you might want to wait and see. But don't do it in ignorance - find out all you can. The reality is that many people do more research on what movie to see than we do about our future, and the risks and benefits of the locations we choose.

So here's my list of when to think seriously about getting out. There will be exceptions in every case - my claim is not "you definitely must go" but "think hard about what you are choosing."

1. If you have an ARM and can't reset it, are already facing foreclosure or have no reason to believe you'll be able to pay for your house. Or, if your current house was bought near the market peak and you require two (full) incomes to pay for it and have little equity.

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2. If you have young children or are elderly and have close ties somewhere but are living far away from them in a community that you are not invested in.

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3. If you have children or parents you need to care for far away.

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4. If you live in an extreme climate, likely to become more extreme with climate change, but you are not particularly and unusually well adapted to it. That is, unless we check climate change, which at this point seems unlikely, (if highly desirable) at some point, many places are going to be uninhabitable for many of the people who presently live there.

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5. If you live among people with lousy values. I'm on the record saying that most of us can probably get along in most places with at least some people. I don't think everyone in your town has to be like you, or that ecovillages are the only (or even the best) way to find community. That said, however, there are exceptions. And even if you can find some small community in a larger culture of rotten values, you may find that it wears you down.

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6. If you don't think your children (and by your children, I mean the children in your family, even if they aren't your own) have a future where you are.

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7. If you plan to move anyway.

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8. If you aren't prepared to live in the place you live as its culture demands. That is, as we get poorer and travel and transit become bigger issues, living in the country is going to be a lot different than it is now - instead of living essentially a suburban life, commuting to activities not available and relying on trucked in supplies, you may have to shop occasionally and mostly stay home in the country, making your own entertainment. Are you prepared to do that? Once upon a time the country mouse and the city mouse lived very different lives, but cheap energy changed that. It may well change back.

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9. If you live in a outer suburban housing development, particularly a fairly new one.

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10. If you are native to another place. By native, I mean that many of us have a strong sense of place, and a strong sense of belonging to a place.

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I know people who have never fully adapted to their place, in the sense of being truly native to it - desert born people who could never breathe comfortably in the humid air of the southeast, warm climate people who found the cold of northern winters unbearable, city folk who find the country abnormally empty and silent, water folk who can't imagine life away from a boat, country people who can't tolerate the city. Most of us can endure these things if we have to - but why not be happier if it is possible?

Not everyone is tied to a place - some people can live anywhere, others in a wide range of places. Some people can take their sense of place to wherever they go, and find a new home. But some people can't. And it is simply the case that your body, and parts of your soul are shaped by your experience - a college friend of mine once spoke of people who grew up by the sea has sharing "water thinking" and noted that she who lived in Hawaii and I who lived in Coastal Massachusetts had that in common in our way of viewing the world. More mundanely, people who grow up in hot climates develop more sweat glands, and a better ability to cool themselves than people who grow up in cold ones - our physiology is shaped by our place.

And our native knowledge of our place is valuable - in fact, it may be the most powerful tool we have. Now some of us will have to leave our native places, to journey again as people so often have. But if we can stay where we are, knowing our flora and fauna, knowing what grows where and how things smell when the seasons change and how to heal or feed or tend with what is native here is absolutely valuable - as is the ability to adapt that knowledge as our places change. So if there is a place where you feel at home, and no other constraints bind you, perhaps you will want to go there, and be there, and help other people be there.

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The search for habitable climate; ability to produce food; clean water access; energy access; ability to work with neighbors and a return to extended "family" units are inevitably in our future.


And it can mean our survival.

[Dems to Win]

1. Gulf Coast residents need to move away, hard as it is to do so

There has already been one suicide of a fisherman whose world is being destroyed before his eyes. In Alaska, many of the fishermen and tourist boat owners, etc. became very angry and embittered after watching their pristine environment be ruined and their livelihoods destroyed, forever. The 20-year fight against Exxon, with Exxon winning in the end, was just too much for a human being to deal with and remain emotionally whole.

The Gulf Coast as people knew it is gone, never to be seen again in their lifetimes. *Especially* for people with children, they should get away soon, because of the heavy pollution in the air and water.

People on the Gulf Coast should demand that BP buy their homes and businesses at pre-spill values, and give them enough money to move away and start over elsewhere. Sad and hard as it is, it would be the best for the people of the Gulf.