Clip
You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.
Jordan
When you think about planning for a worst-case scenario, what do you picture? If I told you right now that extreme weather, massive storms, unlivable heat, all the rest, and all the social disruption that goes with that were not just possible wherever you live, but inevitable, what would you do? You’d probably try to move, right? But where? We already know that some parts of the world, maybe even some parts of this country, will become extremely inhospitable over the next few decades. And there are already people, the ones with money naturally, moving around the country and the world to get ahead of it. So if you could, where would you move now? Here’s why I asked you to picture this, because when I did that, my mind instantly went to the countryside, living off the land. My family has some land out there far, far away. We could stockpile supplies by some generators, grow our own food, hopefully, and there you go. Safe, right? Well, not so much. See, it turns out that what many of us think of when we’re told to plan for the worst or prepare for a coming collapse is actually the opposite of what’s practical. So today our guest will tell us how to ruggedize your life in advance of what comes next and where you should do that. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Alex Steffen is an environmental writer and a climate futurist. He writes a newsletter that you can find on substack called The Snap Forward: New Thinking on a Fast-Changing Planet. Hi, Alex.
Alex Steffen
Hey. Glad to be here.
Jordan
I want to ask you first before we talk about how to apply it and what personal ruggedization means. From what does ruggedization itself mean? This is a term you got from somewhere else.
Alex Steffen
Ruggedization is a term that comes out of the military, actually, and it means a system or a tool that is built for extreme circumstances. Right? So ruggedized laptop is one that can take a bullet and still let you check TikTok. I adopted that term and applied it to how we are readying our lives and our places and our systems and our economies for the kinds of massive impacts that the planetary crisis is bringing our way. How do we ruggedize ourselves to be better prepared for what we know is coming?
Jordan
Is there a lot of ruggedization going on around the world right now? Could you give us a couple of examples of what that looks like?
Alex Steffen
A recent set of studies looked at how well we’re doing. And the fact of the matter is we’re not doing nearly as much as we need to be doing anything. No, but there are, of course, whole nations like the Netherlands that have undertaken long-term systemic preparation for more extreme weather, rising seas and so forth. And there are a whole lot of different cities that have undertaken various efforts, for example, planting trees to keep the streets cooler, preparing flood defences. You know in Louisiana, there’s been the beginnings of an effort to withdraw strategically from the most vulnerable coastlines what they call managed retreat. So there are lots of piecemeal efforts being done everywhere or at least in a lot of places, but we don’t have any specific place that’s doing everything right yet.
Jordan
How much would it take on a global scale? I’m not asking for a dollar figure, a timeline or anything, but how far away are we from confronting not the climate crisis necessarily, but confronting the need to change where and how we live?
Alex Steffen
Well, we’re there now. There are communities that right now are being severely impacted, in some cases even wiped out by disasters and ongoing longer-term degradations that simply make the place untenable. I mean, whether that’s a wildfire burning a town to the ground or a hurricane battering an island or just long-term erosion of topsoil and drought and so forth, these things are already impacting the viability of places where we live. And it’s certain that no matter what we do now because we’ve put so much pollution into the atmosphere and we’ve degraded so many ecosystems and we’re still doing both of those, there’s going to be a large part of the Earth that’s less habitable than it was historically. And part of what we’re fighting hard on in terms of climate action and ecological responsibility and sustainability and so forth, part of the reason why we need to push hard on those things is to limit the extent of that loss of habitability, the extent to which places become brittle and endangered.
Jordan
How much of that is still within our control? And here, I don’t necessarily mean we get our act together and get emissions to zero tomorrow, but I mean, how possible is it to ruggedize some of those areas of the world to the point where they would still be habitable even given what’s coming?
Alex Steffen
Yeah. So there are two parts of this that are not entirely in our control or at least we can’t accurately predict them. One of those parts is just how bad are we going to let things get? We don’t know yet. We’re taking steps, they’re not big enough steps, they’re not happening fast enough. And so we don’t know what the range of disaster that we’re facing is because that’s still largely dependent on what we do. There’s another part of this is that we don’t actually know with real predictability how bad and in what forms disasters are coming for us. Because one of the things that we’re seeing is unprecedented conditions happening at the same time. We’re seeing a massive wildfire followed by an atmospheric river of rain that washes huge whole mountainsides away and inundates farmlands and roads and cuts places off and so forth. Things are happening now that hasn’t happened before and they’re happening while other things that haven’t happened before are happening. So one of the real problems we have is a loss of predictability. Now, that said, there are definitely places that are, if not safe, safer than other places. They’re at less risk of having certain things happen. They are better prepared to meet those things. And that’s where we have to ask what can be done. And a lot can be done if we were willing to put the societal resources into it. I’m not sure that at this point we could save every place, but we could at least retreat from the places we can’t save in some sort of orderly manner and ruggedize all the rest of our society to be much better prepared for the storm that’s coming. The problem is we’re not doing that. And so more and more places are winding up in situations where it is just a matter of time before they take hits that will permanently undermine their prosperity, possibly kill a lot of people, and certainly darken the future of that place.
Jordan
We’re going to talk about personal ruggedization in just 1 second. That is why we wanted to speak to you today, but because you kind of obliquely referred to massive forest fires followed by an atmospheric river. Our show is Canadian. Everybody knows that you’re talking about B.C last year. I thought it was really interesting when you touched on predictability in your piece about what you might have said about B.C before that happened. Can you get a sense of sort of how your perspective on the province has changed recently and why it’s such a good example of what we’re dealing with?
Alex Steffen
Yeah, so I’m a real fan of B.C and Vancouver in particular, and I think it’s a fantastic city. And if you had asked me, say, five years ago, pick a city that, at least for the foreseeable future, is looking like it has some good odds, that it has a lot going for it, I definitely would have put Vancouver on the top of that list or if not the top, certainly up there. But the thing is that we face a situation where you don’t get to say this is safe and this isn’t. You only get to say about any particular place, this appears to have better odds than that. Right. And the thing about odds is that when you roll the dice, sometimes they come up with snake eyes, right? That no place is totally safe. And we can have these combinations of extremely unlikely events made more likely by the planetary crisis happening altogether or in rapid conjunction, right? So to have a zoom out of a pandemic that is connected to the planetary crisis and to have massive drought, huge mega-fires smoke problems I mean, the pollution on the West Coast has been terrible in some of these incidents, followed by an atmospheric river, followed by mudslides and flooding and everything else in just a short period of time, that’s not a very likely outcome. That wasn’t a highly probable outcome. But it does show that we aren’t making bets that are totally safe bets everywhere we go, we’re having to wrestle with odds that have changed. We’re having to wrestle with a discontinuity. What we thought we knew from the past isn’t the best guide to what we now know is coming or what we can see is coming at least and so we’re needing to anticipate rather than predict. And that’s a really difficult place to be in, especially when it comes down to our own personal decisions about how we live our lives and take care of the people we love.
Jordan
So let’s talk about trying to do that, anticipate what’s coming and prepare for it. How do you define ruggedization as it pertains to you and me and everyone else?
Alex Steffen
Yeah. So personal ruggedization is the process of looking at our lives and trying to figure out how we improve the odds of not becoming the victim of a disaster, of being in a place that has better prospects, of coming out, better prepared for what’s coming. And for most of us, that is a factor largely of where we live and how we live in that place. Some people are wealthy enough that they can afford not to care, but that’s not most of us. Most of us actually really do have to care. We have to try and pick a place where the odds seem good that we’re going to be able to prosper and be safe and secure over the decades to come as things really intensify. Because remember, everything we’ve seen so far is just a taste of what we know is coming in terms of the scale of problems.
Jordan
This is not a sarcastic question, but can you explain the difference between regularization and what people would call prepping?
Alex Steffen
So one of the basic conditions of ruggedization is that we’re looking for systems. Right? We’re all dependent on systems, whether that’s somebody who comes and helps you fight a fire if one breaks out at your house or that somebody is growing food and somebody else is delivering it to the supermarket where you go to buy it, so on and so forth. To a large extent. Personal ruggedization is trying to make choices about places where the systems will remain intact or better yet, can be improved to be more rugged across a wider range of futures through smart action and building and policy and planning, right? Prepping is there’s a part of it that’s totally real and good? We should all have water and food and emergency supplies and it’s not a bad thing to weather eyes your house, to maybe a little bit more of an extreme level than you might have and to grow a home garden and to harvest rainwater. These are not bad things. Where the concept breaks down is the belief that one can provide all of the things that you want for a good life in the absence of those other systems, right? And that’s where it converts into a fantasy where I would say if you’re in a situation where you are needing to use a large weapons cash to defend your dwindling food supplies, you’ve already messed up. You’ve already made a catastrophically bad choice somewhere. And that is not a certain outcome and it’s not even a likely outcome in many wealthy parts of the world, even in the worst-case scenarios, right? The total breakdown of society is a pretty rare event in history if you actually study it. So prepping can easily become a fantasy of self-contained power, the power to be self-contained. And we just aren’t, right? No man is an island, right? We are connected to other people all over the place in all sorts of ways. And the better we are at identifying the systems that we really do depend on and making good choices about which systems we’re connected to and what places and how we’re going to help make those systems better, the better off we’re going to be.
Jordan
So the difference between a first aid kit and a real ambulance. How do we choose, how do we assess what places will be safer, more likely to have systems intact, can be further ruggedized with our help? Like what should somebody who’s listening to this, realizing they live in a place that they don’t necessarily feel will be too safe in the coming years? What should they be looking for?
Alex Steffen
Right, so I write about this a lot in the Snap Forward and I teach classes about it and stuff. So it’s a complex topic, but let me try and boil it down to a few things. So the first thing that we’re looking for is someplace that’s safer, right? Not safe, because no place is perfectly safe. But we know there are risks that we’re already aware exist and there are risks we’re pretty confident we’ll get worse, right? So we’re going to have more heavy rainfalls and more hot days. So if you’re in a place that’s already on a floodplain or already gets dangerously hot in the summer, then you’re probably in a place that you might want to consider relocating from because those are just going to get more brittle as time goes on. So the first thing is avoiding the known risks and trying to anticipate places that look to be a little better off. So mainly that’s moving away from big hazards. The second part is good bones. And one of the realities is that places that have a lot of concentrated infrastructure and a lot of concentrated capacity, like cities, are generally actually better off during disasters and in resisting the effects of disasters, supply lines are shorter, there’s more ability to get things done, more people share a smaller amount of infrastructure so you can build more things more quickly. You’re not dependent on long highways and long train lines and so forth as much. So in general, you’re looking for a place that already has a functioning capacity to reduce its need, reduce its demands for energy and water and long supply lines. So good bones are the second one. The third one is honestly wealth. And this is a tough one because what do you do about wealth if you’re not wealthy? But we know that places that are wealthy, first of all, tend to have more resources to act, but they also tend to secure larger portions of public resources, right? It’s not a surprise, I bet, to anyone listening that wealthy places tend to get more than their share of the public resources that are available to do things like ruggedize and prepare for what’s coming. They tend to get responded to more quickly in disasters, et cetera. So honestly, one of the criteria is you probably want to put yourself, if you can, in a situation where your neighbours are able to be effective advocates for your self-interest. But again, a lot of people can’t. A fourth thing is what I think of as context. So one of the big problems that we have here in America is that there are great many places where the ability to govern is breaking down because people won’t admit to what reality is, right? So there are places that are actually passing laws to prevent local governments from considering climate change in their planning, for instance, or demanding that insurance companies insure everyone, even though some places are now uninsurable, meaning that insurance rates go up, fewer people end up getting it, everyone becomes more vulnerable, right? There are these kinds of things already happening. So you want a context where good governance is possible and that extends into a lot of different realms that I go into elsewhere. But the basic idea is you want a place that’s able to manage itself democratically with some amount of effectiveness. And then the last one is really about the heart. It’s about where’s your home. Because while there are some people who are young or whose families are engaged with these things and ready to move as well, or who have an adventure, some spirit, and are ready to move across the country or across the world if that seems like a good idea. A lot of us have deep ties to the communities we live in and have extended families or big circles of friends or whatever. And we’re not ready necessarily to pick up and move northwards or whatever. And so for us, we all have to, I think, try and figure out how we balance the desire to ruggedize our lives with the necessity of being true to who we are. And so in some cases, that means trying to figure out how best to live within a context rather than to change the context altogether. Right? So rather than how do you move, how do you maybe move within your region or within your city, but also how to start thinking about how your community and your home are built and lived in and serviced and make better choices about how to be prepared for a wider range of circumstances. So those are the five things that I look at and obviously each one of these we could do a whole podcast about. But I think that gives you a sense of what we need to start thinking about as individuals.
Jordan
I want to talk about the city’s point for a moment because first of all, all, those five things are incredibly logical when you think about them. Why do you think there is an assumption among so many of us that when the crisis finally hits home or when things get really bad or if we’re going to prepare for it, you go and you get a little place out in the country, you get away from the cities and you stock up. Like that is, you know, not to dwell on the prepping thing. We put that behind us. But like, that is the myth, right? If you want to be safe and be on your own and survive.
Alex Steffen
Yeah, that’s the dream. First of all, a lot of people, I think a lot of people just have a dream, wouldn’t it be great to have a little piece of the forest somewhere? But also that is the paranoid myth is that you’re going to need that. You’re going to need your bug-out cabin. And on top of that, I think we have this newest layer of cities that are very expensive and so a lot of people are trying to figure out, well, what if I could live in a small town or something and just do for myself, go off-grid, we can live our own lives. So there’s that component as well. And I understand all three of those. The thing to think about in terms of ruggedization is that we have needs and those needs are provided for by systems and many of those systems are invisible to us or poorly or we don’t understand them very well. Right. I bet you most people on Earth had no idea that there is an international network of public health agencies constantly working to keep them from dying from disease until just a couple of years ago. Right. Most people have no idea how many treaty organizations there are, what kinds of infrastructure exist in cities. There are people who are protecting you right now from, say, mosquitoes and malaria. There are people who are making sure that you’re drinking water is safe, that when you turn on the tap, there’s something there.
Jordan
A guy just came by to look at a tree in my front yard and make sure it wouldn’t crush my house in the next few months today.
Alex Steffen
There you go. And so when we dream of retreat, what we’re doing is often not thinking through how do you replace all of those functions of society, but rather how do I just ignore that all those functions exist and take care of the really obvious ones like grow your own food, build your own home, provide your own energy with maybe some solar or something. It’s the surface level detached from those larger systems. But the thing is, in that situation, the minute those larger systems go down you are not better prepared, you’re worse. Because the places where that concentrate value and capacity are the places where those systems will be down the shortest. That’s just history tells us that the lights get turned on first in the places that are best prepared to turn the lights on. There are still people in disasters years later in sort of more remote areas around them who are waiting for everything to come back to normal. So being surrounded by effective systems, infrastructure, people who know how to advocate for themselves and lots of value that’s just the value of people living together. That is a better move for most people than retreating to the woods and hoarding guns.
Jordan
What if you can’t afford to move? What if the communities and I think you’ve mentioned this in your piece and it’s pretty obvious? I mean, look at Vancouver. A lot of the places that you would consider safe or safer are already very expensive, are already very crowded. If you can’t afford to take that obvious step, what can you do to ruggedize yourself?
Alex Steffen
There are some steps. So the first thing is to recognize that we face what I call a bottleneck, which is that many more people are in need of a place that is rugged or can be ruggedized than places exist that are like that. Right? That part of the failure that we’ve had over the last 30 years as we failed to do anything about climate and ecological crises is that we’ve simply missed the window to save a lot of places. And so one of the consequences of that failure of leadership is a lot of people are going to get stuck in places that don’t have great futures. That makes me very angry, but let’s just leave that there. How do you avoid becoming one of those people? I think the question that we need to ask ourselves, especially if we don’t have money? The first thing that we can do is just be honest about ourselves in terms of our current situation. If we own do we own a house on a floodplain? Do we own a house that’s like in a wildfire zone? Do we have a beach house? Right. Are we at the places where things are likely to be destroyed? Because there’s less and less likelihood that things that are destroyed are going to be built back and there’s more and more danger of them being destroyed. So the first thing is get out of harm’s way. And that means that we’re going to see we are already seeing the value of some places that really are very at risk, dropping property values, dropping people not being able to sell their homes for what they paid for them because nobody wants to live in a house that’s about to be destroyed any year now, right? That can’t be insured and so forth. So the first thing is to get away from the danger to the extent you can. If you are in a place that you can’t move from, especially because of hearts connections, right, because it’s your home and it’s where all your people are, then the next thing you can do is try and pick a location for your actual for where you live. That’s a decent one. And you can start trying to think about how you make the place you have better prepared for the kinds of extremes we know are coming. The next thing that you can do is you can look at the place you live and you can start to think about how you make some intelligent steps to ruggedize your personal situation, right? So in terms of heat waves, you can think about planting trees, putting shading over your windows, removing asphalt, maybe even painting your house a lighter colour, these kinds of steps. And there are guides to these sorts of things. You can prepare your house to be in better shape if there’s local flooding or heavy rainfall. There are these kinds of things you can do and there are guides to doing them and they’re worth doing. You can also make your life a little less dependent on extended supply chains, right? So one of the things that people get wrong about, for example, electric vehicles, is there’s this idea of, well, what are you going to do with an electric vehicle if the power goes down? And the reality is you’re actually probably in better shape than most people because you’ve got a massive battery in the car and often a massive battery in your garage that is charged up and you’re able to have power while things break down around you for a little while. And so there are these kinds of steps, but the real thing is avoiding risk, doing what you can to minimize the risk you still have. And then the third thing is talking with people because that’s where we’re still breaking down. I know so many people who are trying to do their best to change their circumstances in this regard and just everybody has that uncle who doesn’t believe it, or the relative who just doesn’t want to talk about it or even sometimes a spouse who just gets overwhelmed when it comes up. And so trying to figure out ways to have good conversations with your friends and your family and your colleagues about the kinds of things we know are coming and the kinds of steps we could start to take now to be less unprepared, that’s a good move.
Jordan
Okay, I have to ask you one last question now and it’s about those conversations. Is there ever going to come a time when the planetary climate crisis will be so real and the effects of it so in everybody’s face that there won’t be people who don’t want to talk about it? I used to think that that point was inevitable. Now I feel like we should have hit it already and we haven’t, so I wonder if we ever will.
Alex Steffen
I think we are on the cusp of it. I think it is an impending thing. The whole point of talking about the snap forward is the snap forward is what happens when people recognize that the way they’ve been looking at the world is outdated and wrong and the world is now very different from than they were told and they now need to think in new ways and take new actions in order to secure the future that they want for themselves. Right. There’s a personal discontinuity that comes with that. The world that I was expecting to happen, where I built my dreams and hopes and ambitions, is no longer there, what do I do now? And a lot of what people describe as climate anxiety and climate grief, I think is directly connected to that feeling of I thought the world was this way, but it changed and now it’s this way. And that’s pretty scary. We’re having that same kind of process at a societal level. We have interests who have devoted themselves to avoiding that kind of conversation, using tactics of predatory delay and climate denialism and other things to keep us from discussing what’s real. But it is so real that it is not just inevitable, it is already changing very fast. What I worry about is that I think most of us are unprepared for the scale of our unreadiness. We’re unprepared to discover that, wow, some of the biggest changes that have ever happened since humans have existed are unfolding now and my city, my state or province, my nation has no plan. Right? We’re not getting ourselves prepared for what’s already happened, and we’re totally unready for what’s coming. And I think that is a major potential source of societal strife and conflict. And that actually does scare me because I think when people are terrified, they do bad things. And I would like people to be not as terrified, but rather to really understand what’s happening and come together to take the kinds of actions we need to take to avoid the worst because we still can. It is still entirely within our power to avoid the worst-case scenarios of impacts and avoid the worst-case scenarios of vulnerability. We can do a lot better than we’re doing. And a lot of that starts with us making the decision in our own lives to be the kind of people who are making things better.
Jordan
I hope we can have you back after we’ve all snapped forward and nobody will have done anything stupid, but I doubt it. Thank you so much, Alex.
Alex Steffen
Thank you. It’s very nice to be here.
Jordan
Alex Steffen is a climate futurist. You can find his newsletter on Substack. It’s called The Snap Forward. That was The Big Story. For more from us. Head to the thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can find a previous conversation with Alex there. If you’re interested after this one, you can also talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can email us [click here!], and you can give us a call 416-935-5935. You can find the big story wherever you get podcasts. Joseph Fish is the lead producer of The Big Story. Ebyan Abdigir and Braden Alexander are our producers. And Rajpreet Sahota is our research assistant. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Have a safe weekend. We’ll talk Monday.
Back to top of page