(2021-11-29) Steffen Ruggedize Your Life

Alex Steffen: Ruggedize Your Life. How do we get smarter about making that choice?

We must begin by understanding the nature of the crisis we’re in now.

The most obvious danger we face in out lives is of sudden disaster: storm, flood, fire.

But you don’t have to be in the wiped out to have your life overturned. That’s because each of us is dependent on a vast web of systems and services that make our lives work

WHAT IS “SAFE” IN A PLANETARY CRISIS?

If you had asked me 10 years ago what places would likely be relatively safe bets for climate durability, I’d have definitely included the American Pacific Northwest and Western Canada on my list. (climate change)

Yet, as I write this, Vancouver and British Columbia are living discontinuity

Vancouver is probably still a pretty good bet, compared to many places in the world.

British Columbians have the power and resources to respond to their changing circumstances.

Mostly this is a process of elimination: discard from consideration the places with severe risks, or multiple overlapping risks, and take a closer look at what’s left. It’s pretty hard to say with any confidence that place X is safer than place Y. It is, though, increasingly easy to identify places that are simply unsafe

A WIDER LANDSCAPE OF LOSS

The consequence of choosing poorly (or being unable to choose) is to find yourself facing the future in a brittle place.

Places that are exposed to regular exceedance of built tolerances — and thus that are at risk of failing catastrophically — are brittle places

understanding where the money likely won’t get spent could be the difference between building a plan to thrive and struggling to survive.

exposed regions are not just less safe for you, personally, they’re also at an increasing economic disadvantage

Where meeting that risk is more expensive than decision-makers think a place is worth, it simply won’t be defended. It will be unofficially abandoned

This also helps explain why so much work on prepping and living off the grid is less effective than we’d like it to be. You can improve your immediate surroundings, but if you’re surrounded by a landscape of loss and broken systems, you’re still in for a bunch of tough years.

WHAT IS RUGGEDIZATION?

term I borrowed from the military. I use it describe the process of turning the need to make systems durable (in the face of unprecedented and often unforeseeable threats) into a force for transformation

WHAT IS PERSONAL RUGGEDIZATION?

Like so many things in our world, access to climate safety is increasingly allocated by wealth.

The richer you are, the more redundant private systems you can afford to layer over the public civilizational support systems around you. If you’re very rich — say you have a net worth of $25 million or more — ruggedization is simply another investment criterion

PLACE IS THE KEY TO PREPAREDNESS

When it comes to the planetary crisis, the most important question you can ask yourself is “Where?”

Wealthy nations could act. They could combine huge investments to rebuild and ruggedize as many places as possible

No one’s doing it, but many countries and regions could.

The idea that increased concern for community “resilience” will make things better in truly brittle places, even in the short run, is wishful thinking

That would take money, though, real money, certainly more money than this country has ever spent on anything but war.

Triangulation strategies exist not to change corporate priorities but to protect them from change. So, too, with triangualted resilience

THE PLACES THAT ARE ALREADY IN THE BEST SHAPE ARE EXPENSIVE

You can, today, go on the real estate site Redfin and get a rough assessment of the climate risks facing a given property.

trying to figure out what places offer good futures today.

Three attributes tend to define these places.

The first is simply a relative degree of safety

The second is good bones. When it comes to ruggedization, urbanism is an advantage

The more compact, walkable, and well-provided with working infrastructure and institutions a place is, the more protection it offers.

Concentrated value also makes upgrades to infrastructure more cost-effective

The third is rich neighbors

a concentration of experts and executives means more ability to draw outside public funds, talent, and capital investment — and networks that can secure large-scale advantages and forge disproportionately powerful booster networks.

it can help to think of the bottleneck as an invisible housing shortage

the ability to be secure in your home in most places takes not just the legal right to remain (citizenship or permanent residency) but property ownership

the bottleneck is real. In fact, it’s about to get much worse.

THE SQUEEZE IS ON

There’s still a window in which individuals can act. Getting settled in a good place before cash tsunami comes rolling through is now, I believe, a key personal ruggedization strategy for anyone who’s not rich.

How long will that window stay open? I’ll explore this question in more depth next time, but my current guess is that in the U.S., we’re talking more than three years, but fewer than ten.