As many people have pointed out, The recent fires in Canada; smoke in the Northeast US and Canada — as well as floods and droughts here there and everywhere — are a wakeup call. Moving north, or inland, isn’t necessarily an escape from climate effects.
And of course this whole privileged “elsewhere” mentality is a big part of what got us in trouble in the first place. It’s that whole “get ahead of the curve, race to the bottom; move to a place that is already someone else’s home” -think. Ick.
My take: The more we can adapt in place, the better off we will be, not only for ourselves but for the communities we live in. Also, my thinking tends to be how can I make my home and community better adapted, more able to welcome people who are FORCED to be climate refugees — as opposed to myself choosing to abandon my place and community even though there is no emergency.
At some point over the past couple of years, I really started to notice that if I only asked what I needed to do for my own safety, it never helped to ease my fear. No amount of planning, no amount of having, was ever enough.
But whenever I turn the question around, to how can I help and support other people; how can I help provide safety, food resilience, stable housing, clean water etc. for my community as a whole — it ends up making me feel super expansive, creative, and excited.
Of course like everyone else here, I mourn the destruction we Western industrial humans have wrought. But it just makes me want to stack and pack more beneficial relationships; get more creative with the permaculture design principles.
My favorite part of permaculture design class was always where we heard about some group of people, usually economically and socially disadvantaged, who had literally the worst piece of land ever, often really tiny and filled with trash or pollutants, and they made it into paradise. This is what gets me out of bed in the morning. I want to empower everyone everywhere to do this, so we stop trashing ecosystems, gentrifying other people’s places, etc. And it starts with what I do in my own home and city.
My first permaculture teachers, Scott Pittman and Larry Santoyo, really inspired us greatly with the stories they told.