My goals over the next ten years are to:
1. Have and begin to raise two children
2. Hoard enough money from working to hit traditional FIRE
3. Start the journey of increasing our family's climate change resiliency
It is for my third goal that I start this journal. My husband and I are your traditional city dwellers. We rely heavily the convenience and cultural offerings of density and have little in the way of useful physical skills. I worry about gardening here where the soil is inundated with lead city-wide, a relic of our former-industrial past. Even patio gardening, I wonder whether the lead paint gently curling off the buildings might flake into my tomatoes. These are irrational thoughts, I know, but they are mine.
I wonder whether someday we will need to leave the city to protect our children, though I don't know what place would be any safer than here. I am from a family of migrants. Each parent, it seems, has moved thousands of miles to carve out space and stability for their family, only for the next generation to uproot it all and try again.
At this point, I am mostly at a loss. I see this future with high certainty of risk, but have little personal understanding on how it might manifest and the best means to take precaution, and by when. I think of what strategies we might employ, and nothing seems the clearer. Should we:
- invest in land ownership in as many cities with higher likelihoods of climate resiliency that we would be able to migrate to as possible?
- work toward a homestead in the rural area nearest us, getting a better understanding of the local clime and agro?
- identify trade skills that would still be of relevance in a post-peak oil economy and slowly accumulate knowledge in those areas for future labor-bartering?
- hunker down where we are, building emergency stashes of food and bug out supplies, but generally lean into the knowledge worker status for the long haul and hope the world economy doesn't entirely collapse?
My husband, to his credit, is not nearly as motivated by this crippling anxiety as I am, so any initial work will be driven by me, a tiny old person in a young person's body with weak wrists and bad knees.