Here's a shocker. I heard this today at my Interfaith Alliance meeting, came home and found the story on my newsfeed:

"Some Hispanics With Jewish Roots Pursue an Exit Strategy: Emigrate to Spain"

"ALBUQUERQUE — Ana Maria Gallegos’s family has called this part of the West home for centuries. But after growing horrified by the resurgent racism she has seen across the United States, she reviewed her options and decided on a plan: emigrate to Spain.

"Ms. Gallegos joined a growing number of Hispanics from the United States benefiting from a 2015 Spanish law seeking to atone for one of the grimmest chapters in Spain’s history: the expulsion of thousands of Sephardic Jews in 1492. The law offers citizenship to descendants of those Jews, many of whom converted to Catholicism but secretly adhered to Jewish traditions as they settled in New Mexico and other frontiers of the Spanish Empire."

How the West Was Lost

In America’s first climate war, John Wesley Powell tried to prevent the overdevelopment that led to environmental devastation.

"In April 1877, when John Wesley Powell stood in front of the National Academy of Sciences’ annual meeting in Washington, D.C., everyone in the room knew the details of his daring passage on a tiny rowboat down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon eight years before. No mere tough guy, Powell was a formidable surveyor who would soon head the U.S. Geological Survey. He had climbed, walked, and boated through more of the American West than any white man, and had something to say about William Gilpin’s astounding claims.

"He unrolled a document carefully with his left hand—he’d lost his right arm during the Civil War—to reveal a map of the continental United States. On it, he had drawn a vertical line, technically an isohyet, beginning in central Texas and rising up through Kansas, east of Nebraska, and through Minnesota and the Dakotas, approximating the 100th meridian. This startlingly simple line forced its American nation not in terms of political boundaries, but by its climate: It delineated the arid West from the forested East, land that received 20 or more inches of rain from that which received less. He chose 20 inches as his dividing point because that was the minimum necessary to conduct conventional agriculture without irrigation. The map illustrated forcefully how much of the American West, with some notable exceptions in the Pacific Northwest, was unfarmable."

This article was very interesting. I just finished Wallace Stegner's 1971 Pulitzer Prize winning Angle of Repose. (Still working on a GW Canon) The last section of the book deals with engineers digging The Big Ditch to irrigate Idaho. I was thinking as I read it, This isn't going to end well.

In 1893, in John Wesley Powell's last attempt to save us from ourselves, he told the Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles:

“When all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the reservoirs along the streams are used, when all the canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug in this arid region there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all the land....I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands.”

This article points out how prophetic he was. --And, of course, we have allowed fossil fuel companies to endanger the limited water we do have. I may have an opportunity in November to meet some of the Water Keepers from Standing Rock.

Looming Florence heaps despair on rural U.S. towns ravaged by 2016 storm

"Meteorologists warn the menacing storm could stall out over the Carolinas, dumping enormous amounts of rainfall and creating massive flooding.

"That was the case with Matthew, a less powerful hurricane that did most of its damage inland, producing catastrophic levels of flooding throughout low-lying eastern North Carolina and causing billions of dollars in damages.

"Rural, low-income communities like Fair Bluff - already beset by economic difficulties - were hardest hit and remain most at risk this week."

Florence's rains: Coal ash landfill collapses in Carolinas

The coal-fired Sutton plant was retired in 2013 and the company has been excavating millions of tons of ash from old waste pits and removing it to safer, lined landfills.

"Heavy rains from Florence caused a slope to collapse at a coal ash landfill at a closed power station near the North Carolina coast, Duke Energy says.
"Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said late Saturday about 2,000 cubic yards of ash were displaced at the L. V. Sutton Power Station outside Wilmington and that contaminated runoff likely flowed into the plant's cooling pond...

"The coal-fired Sutton plant was retired in 2013 and the company has been excavating millions of tons of ash from old waste pits and removing it to safer, lined landfills constructed on the property. The gray ash left behind when coal is burned contains toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, lead and mercury.

"Duke has been under intense scrutiny for the handling of its coal ash since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles of the Dan River in gray sludge."

This is a huge problem across the U.S. We have two obsolescent coal-fired power plants near Peoria, and the companies will writhe like eels to close down those plants and leave the ash pits for local communities and government superfund agencies to clean up. Fish like to hang out around power plants because the waters are warm; people fish around power plants because that's were the fish hang out. Duh! But because of the presence of toxic heavy metals, fishermen are adviced to eat no more than 1.5 lbs of river fish per week.

Newscasters talk about 100 year storms (as in, a storm this bad only comes along once in a hundred years). Now they are talking about 500 year storms and even a 1000 year storm. But Florence is the second 100 year storm to hit the Carolinas in the last TWENTY YEARS! And even though it was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm, the fallout from rain and wind was staggering--and hugely expensive. Right now, it's estimated that cleanup in North Carolina and South Carolina will cost $17bn. And I'm thinking that's a low estimate. A week after the storm, 13 rivers are still at flood stage, and 31 factory pig farms have been unindated, contaminating the flood waters with excrement and dead pigs that could lead to a massive salmonella outbreak. Every storm like this sucks up money and oil that won't cushion our Long Descent.

https://www.reuters.tv/v/PvBd/2018/09/20/floods-could-worsen-in-florence...

When it's all said and done, I expect the optimal migration strategy will be relocation where there are other GWs.

Anyone else looking at possible relocation options? If so, what are your parameters and guidelines? Any tips for searching?

We are making plans to prepare our current space the best we can (insulation, getting the gardens going, alternative heating sources, etc.), but I finally convinced my brother to read "The Long Descent" and he is interested in purchasing property as an extended family for a backup site, if necessary. I'm, of course, arguing against the extremely remote bug-out site. I'm thinking along the lines of walkable, small-to-medium towns, away from impacts of sea-level rise, with good farming land, a strong agricultural tradition (smaller, family farms rather than huge conglomerates), and not more than a day's drive from my current East Coast location. My mom thinks we need at least five acres (she and my dad farm but their current location is not ideal long-term) - and while I don't necessarily agree - maybe that's doable within walking distance from a town?

Right now I'm looking around York and Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania (bonus: resilient Amish and Mennonite communities) and also places north of there. But maybe I need to go further north - upstate New York or Vermont - to deal with the heat impacts? What about you?