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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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I have more than 60 square meters of solar panels and 48 enormous batteries = electric independence for decades.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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I don't think anyone would choose to live in a congested crowded city if they had a choice. This may be your opinion however there are hundreds of millions of people worldwide who happily live in big cities.
It all depends on the city. San Francisco is struggling with the influx of newly rich techies who are taking over the housing market from lower income "traditional" workers. New apartment blocks are going up daily. And these new residents are not living in SF for lack of options. They can afford to live just about anywhere and there is a parade of private buses hauling thousands of workers to and from their daily grind in Silicon Valley.
They have the choice: Silicon Valley or the San Francisco peninsula or San Francisco itself. And it's San Francisco that tens of thousands are choosing.
I happily live in the Santa Cruz mountains between Silly Valley and the pacific ocean. I'd also happily live in San Francisco (been there and done that), London or Stockholm, or Amsterdam or Paris or.....
Well planned and maintained cities are excellent places to live. They are an efficient use of resources. There are just so few of them in the U.S.
Somewhat off track but less esoteric: With global warming there will of necessity be an enormous shift in resource allocations. Of all kinds of resources. Consider the historic California fires in the past three years. Tens of thousands of homes and apartments have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of acres of rangeland have been destroyed. From the Oregon border to San Diego. Even wealthy towns like the Oakland Hills, Montecito and Santa Barbara have to be rebuilt. Thousands of acres in the Sacramento River Valley are slowly being inundated due to sea level rise combined with over building.
Dozens of the world's most important and prosperous cities will be significantly altered as the tides and storm surges push inexorably inland. Not to mention the more frequent and powerful hurricanes. As an example of an altered wealthy enclave, Hurricane Sandy destroyed much of Fire Island (I was there to see it happen).
Parenthetically, a startup company in the Bay Area is close to commercializing synthetic meat. Creating meat that uses much less resources than beef on the hoof.
In 50 years the only remaining American ranches might just be Trophy Ranches.
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Batrock
Trad climber
Burbank
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I am not talking about living in a city, I am talking about true crowded congested living situations. Govt housing high rises and situations you find in China. Not living in a cool metro area like LA or Seattle, San Fran or almost any other large city in the US. Most living in the US even in poorer parts of large metro areas are living much better than those stacked on top of each other in developing countries. Hell I live in LA and enjoy the culture and amenities but I wouldn't want to be living 4 families to a room.
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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MMMMMMMM tasty, synthetic meat!
Climate change is going to radically change some building codes (not to mention insurance costs).
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
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I don’t know ,I had an Incredaburger the other day,it was good......lol.
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Are these trophy ranches a sign that we are/ have slipped back into the caste system.....
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
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True enough ,does that mean they are good?
I once spent over a year building one near Fraser Colorado,the house went quick,like 5 months ,the wood fence,nearly 4 miles of it ,not so much.
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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its great if the people are nice and let folks hunt, fish, hike and climb on their land but when the fence and posted signs go up are we right back in the middle ages?
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Kalimon
Social climber
Ridgway, CO
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I have more than 60 square meters of solar panels and 48 enormous batteries = electric independence for decades.
Way to go!
Every home in the SW US should have an installation.
Thank you for your positive example!
"Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside."
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Pete_N
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Ken Ilgunas has an interesting book: This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back. He describes the laws in both Britain and Sweden in considerable detail and argues that it'd actually be feasible--as well as beneficial--to re-introduce the "right" in the US (he also argues that the profusion of No Trespassing signs in our country is a relatively recent phenomenon). It's hard for me to imagine how we could inculcate our society here with what'd be necessary, but it sounds like it works really well in Europe and it'd be an amazing thing here in the western US. There's some filler in the book, but it's worth reading.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Thanks, Pete_N, that sounds a worthy read. It is amazingly liberating to just park, or get off the bus, and light out across the land in Britain and Scandinavia. I aver it does everyone good in the sense of shared stewardship as it were and responsibility. The vast majority of the time when you’re walking on private land there you are on a path and it would be most untoward to stray from the straight and narrow. If large land owners here had any sense they would welcome hikers and twitchers by marking trails and such.
I’ve not had any run-ins with angry cows but have encountered some scary sheep!
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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If I allowed people to "roam" on my ranch it would quickly get torn up by ORVs and covered in trash.
We live in a country of slobs.
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Social climber
Wilds of New Mexico
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There is some truth to that. Sometimes when I go fly fishing I get upset about private stretches of river, but then if you go to somewhere with easy public access it's trashed. So I hike into wilderness areas.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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The local forests are deemed multi-use which means who ever has the most destructive internal combustion toys can monopolize and discourage other users from recreating on national forest roads making them impassable...I'm talking about the moto bikers and razor wankers who , besides destroying national forests roads , continue to illegally drive off designated roads onto the forest under-story to hoe and disc more natural resources... what Toker villain says is sadly true about Americans'.... A River passes thru it...
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Yeah right; "income inequality"!!!
Boo fukking hoo.
So much easier to gripe about all the injustice than work your ass off and sacrifice to improve one's lot in the world.
I have a friend who came here from China on a student visa.
She is now an American citizen, a business manager, and well on her way to her first million in less than 10 years.
That said, some have it pretty hard. Karen Kor got laid off so McCall and I are helping out.
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couchmaster
climber
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I'm with Jim on this one.
Batrock noted: "I don't think anyone would choose to live in a congested crowded city if they had a choice."
Right here. We made that choice. Literally. We both came from/grew up in, rural areas. The choice was to live full on inner city or outside the burbs, country: like we had grown up with. (In the west anywhere, inner city isn't like living NY City or Baltimore inner city of course) We discussed it extensively a long time back and chose inner city. Heart of darkness. Living in the burbs was too wasteful to us. The interesting part for us was watching our neighborhood change in the 33 years we've lived in the 2nd inner city home we had. I will confess that I don't miss the colorful neighbors, shootings, the plentiful prostitutes I never availed nor walking out on the back deck early one morning and picking a .45 round off the deck or waking up reading about the drug deal that went bad and 3 Mexican fellas just down the street each getting blasted right in the head by someones 9mm at 2 am.
In fact, the gentrification and whitification of the neighborhood has been both funny and interesting. New neighbors are a differing breed: the ones 2 doors down just paid a million bucks for a home that was crammed full of poor folks during the depression but had been updated and is now de rigor "period" updated. They don't really work, he's a "poet", shes a "life coach". White folk's from the east coast. They're not shooting any guns off though, say, sitting on the front porch and trying to hit the metal fence post across the street, so there is that.
The huge benefit is that had we moved to the 'burbs, any house we would have purchased would have both cost much more and appreciated much much less.
"We all do what we can," We all do, and it all helps. I know folks that do much much more than us. Makes me feel lame at times.
Branching out, next subject:
"Taxes are too low when there are scads of rich SOB's able to buy up whole swaths of land out of their pocket change. We need more school, healthcare, and infrastructure spending, not tax breaks for the richest few."
Everyone in the US has shitload of Scratch. I support it too. We get folks from other country's often come visit and stay and they're shocked that even our poor live so well. Interesting that you don't mention the cost of our out of control overreaching military posture worldwide and massive government bureaucracy. Someone needs to pay for that unless the world goes up in smoke and ends, it ain't cheap. Just the rich should pay? We're borrowing to pay for it now, if the world survives the kids will have to pay for it, and regardless, no one believes that kind of expenditure and debt is sustainable for multiple reasons so maybe not worth discussing.
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Yeti
Trad climber
Ketchum, Idaho
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Nov 10, 2018 - 07:26am PT
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A column I wrote for The Weekly Sun in Hailey, Idaho a couple of years ago:
THE HARRIMAN LEGACY TO IDAHO
It is much larger than Sun Valley
by
Dick Dorworth
Most people reading this are aware that today’s Wood River Valley and its nearby communities would be very different, socially, culturally and economically, if Averell Harriman’s attention had not been directed to the area in the 1930s. Though Harriman was a successful businessman, politician and diplomat—he served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Governor of New York, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, U.S. Ambassador to Britain and was twice a candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination (losing both times to Adlai Stevenson, whose son John lives on a ranch near Bellevue)—he is best known in Idaho as the man who in 1935 gave Austrian Count Felix Schaffgotsch the job of finding a site for a world class ski resort in western America that could be reached by Harriman’s Union Pacific Railroad tracks.
The Count found Ketchum and Harriman found the Brass Ranch a couple of miles to the east and the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Sun Valley history. In a seven month frenzy of construction in 1936 the Sun Valley Lodge was built on the Brass Ranch and the world’s first chairlifts were installed on Proctor and Dollar Mountains. Eighty years after Schaffgotsch began his search Harriman’s legacy to the Wood River Valley continues to flourish, nourish and inspire local citizens, part-time residents and tourists alike. Sun Valley has shaped, touched and enhanced the lives of countless people living in Idaho and throughout the world in ways that can never be measured but which are acknowledged every day, all of it a legacy to Idaho from W. Averell Harriman.
And it is only part of Harriman’s legacy to the Gem State.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Idaho State Park System, which would not have been born without Averell Harriman and his brother Roland, and would not have survived and thrived this long without their foresight and stipulations in transferring the 11,000 acre Harriman Ranch in eastern Idaho to the state They called it the The Railroad Ranch and the brothers were interested in preserving it in perpetuity “…..to keep it from being chopped up into subdivision or resort developments.” Roland had met Robert Smylie in the mid ‘50s shortly after Smylie had won the first of three successive elections as Governor of Idaho on a ticket of creating a state park system. Despite a great deal of opposition from the state land board and other state fountains of political patronage, Smylie and the Harrimans negotiated for several years (much of it secretly) until the state agreed in 1965 to establish a professional state park system free of political patronage.
All of the Idaho State Parks exist as such because of those negotiations and the Harriman 11,000 acre gift to the state.
In 2010 Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter attempted to disband the Idaho’s park agency in order to fill a budget hole in his administration. But to do so would mean returning those 11,000 acres to the Harriman estate, according to the stipulations agreed to in 1965. Fortunately, he could not do that. Today Harriman State Park continues to be part of a wildlife refuge for moose, deer, elk, bear, and sandhill cranes, among other wild creatures. Two thirds of the trumpeter swans that winter in the contiguous United States spend the season in Harriman State Park. All of them and the hundreds of thousands of people who annually visit the state parks throughout Idaho appreciate the legacy of Harriman, even if they aren’t conscious of it.
Thanks Averell. Thanks Roland.
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