Pro: Living in edge territories begets a certain amount of robustness. You're already adapted. You're ahead of the curve. Your moat is based on the incompetence of the vast hoi-polloi. The Good Life Lab (our kind of people) are/were located in New Mexico. Forsooth, the name of the town was "Truth or Consequences". I can't think of any better name for this particular strategy. Contrast this to people dying for the simplest reasons in a Texas snow storm or an Oregon heatwave.AxelHeyst wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2024 10:50 amAn interesting *possible* future scenario for drylands areas is that everything goes to hell there because all the cities depend on the Colorado, leading to massive area depopulation... leaving behind just the scrappy little communities of cooperatively self-sufficient Renaissance permaculturalists getting along just fine with their loosely-coupled FEW (food energy water) systems, shaking their heads at the news reports of all the violence going on in more Northern areas where all the climate refugees jammed themselves into. One could argue that the SW is a uniquely ideal place for a web of EREers to settle...
Con: The whole water and food issue. Resilience breaks insofar the system is utterly dependent on one thing. This is where I worry about "rural". They may or may not grow good ... but they depend on cities, etc. for everything else including the tools they need to grow those foods. Being self-sufficient in the desert is nearly impossible.