Has Climate Change Caused You to Rethink Where You Live?
A Saturday prompt
We live in an uncertain world. Nothing stays the same forever. One of life’s central challenges is learning when to keep things as they are and when to make change.
The catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires are confronting so many thousands of residents with life-and-death decisions: when to stand your ground and when to get the hell out.
It’s a choice that most hoped to never make. It’s a choice that many more may have thought they never would be required to make. These climate change-induced natural disasters are teaching terrible, often traumatic lessons.
On another day, I plan to dig into more of the scientific details and geographic facts about our changing planet. But for now, it should be increasingly clear that the possibility of a house burning down from wildfires, flooded by torrential rains and rising waters, or swept away by tornados or hurricanes has become real in many regions of our nation and the world. Rising temperatures have raised doubts about whether places that were habitable are still habitable—and for how long.
If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid any of these conditions, may it always be so. But you might be like so many residents of Los Angeles who made the calculation that the fragile natural ecosystem’s beauty made it worth the risk or the dangers were not their concern, allowing them to pursue the life they wanted. Tragically, at great human cost, that calculation will be different going forward for many people.
So for this Saturday: Has climate change caused you to rethink where you live? Have you seen more extreme conditions where you live that make you wonder if moving is or might be necessary? Have you thought about where you can or would go? In turn, have you made the calculation to stand your ground and stay in the place that you love, come what may? Or are you among the lucky ones who’ve seen change but very little rising risk?
As always, I look forward to reading your observations and the opportunity of this community to learn from each other. Please do be respectful in your remarks. Trolling will not be tolerated.
I’d also like to share here a story I wrote for The New Republic in 2020, which introduced a package of 32 stories I produced with the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University about survivors of extreme weather events. Nine of these were published by The New Republic.
My overview piece, called “Lessons from the Frontlines of Climate Change,” included these glimmers of hope emerging from the stories of disaster: “of neighbors helping neighbors, of communities thinking about how to live more sustainably, of growing numbers grasping that materialistic values and consumerism may be antithetical to living better. With change comes not just survival but sometimes even well-being.”
Lastly and most importantly, here’s a story from the Los Angeles Times with suggestions of where you can contribute to the fire victims and the ongoing effort. It includes links and information for—among others—the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the California Fire Foundation, Direct Relief and its Wildfire Response Fund, Canine Rescue Club, GoFundMe’s own Wildfire Relief Fund and a centralized hub of verified individual GoFundMe requests. If you know of other valuable organizations, please do share them in the comments.
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We evacuated four days ago. We live in Mandeville Canyon on a small side road
The fire seems , from an update fifteen minute s ago to have attacked the very north of Westridge rd which is in the western flank of Mandeville canyon
Six of my painters friends lostt their house in Pacific Palisades, and they are not billionaires, just normal families who have lived there for like forty or fifty years.
Firemen and aviators are incredible of courage
I think this is magnified by climate change but the fact is that south California was desertic and as such a very dry place
Thinking we can find a residency in a safe place is equivalent to how we used to say, "Just throw it away". There is no "AWAY" and there is no "safe from climate warming better place to live". We are all connected/ Mother Nature is fighting back,. life changes are here and now.