Where's Your Doomsday Sanctuary?
I don't want to get all Chicken Little here, but Rod Dreher does. Dreher is worried about peak oil and climate change and the D word - Depression. In The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, he asks, "At what point do we decide to leave north Texas -- and where do we go?"
The Great Depression (the first one) led to a vast migration from the Great Plains to California and from the South to the North. Our current recession doesn't look like it will lead to similar shifts in population because the employment outlook looks similarly bleak everywhere. If that changes, if some region of the country emerges from the recession while others linger, maybe we'll see migration pick up. But it's too soon to tell.
As for the longer-term issues, making a move today out of fear of global warming is needlessly apocalyptic. Granted, Hurricane Ike may teach us not to build a house on the beach in Galveston, but escaping global warming entirely is easier said than done. Where do you run to? It's impossible to say for sure how climate change is going to affect different regions of the country or the world. Yes, Texas is likely to see longer droughts and higher average temperatures. But Texas has always suffered from drought and heat. If you wanted a nice climate, you never would have settled in Texas in the first place. In 1866, General Philip Sheridan said, "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell."
An amusing part of Dreher's idle speculation is his own survival plan.
"If the situation were that bad, we'd most likely go live with my parents down in south Louisiana. They live out in the country. The land is rich. You can grow things there, and fish and hunt on it. It's a small, close-knit community, and everybody is armed."That doesn't sound like Rod Dreher's Mad Max survival plan. It sounds like his dream life. This could be the most valuable thing I've read all week. My new plan, if worse comes to worst? Move in with Rod Dreher's parents in south Louisiana. Thanks for the warning that they'll be armed.
4 comments:
Just when I think Rod-Boy couldn't get any sillier, he does.
Dreher's worst-case scenario speculation reminded me of the kinds of "deep" conversations college kids get into after midnight (and after partaking in some mind-altering substances). As long as you keep in mind that worst-case scenarios are just that, worst-case, it can be fun to engage in that kind of speculation once in a while.
You know, Ed, I've been a dead-ender about my DMN subscription. But continuing to subsidize this ninny is getting to be a bit much. He may be the thing that drives me off for good.
I dropped my own DMN subscription a couple years ago and haven't looked back. I'm getting more news and opinion than ever online, including Rod Dreher, who I barely noticed in the print edition.
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